Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Len Gougeon

Critical Essay by Len Gougeon

SOURCE: “Emerson and the Woman Question: The Evolution of His Thought,” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 4, December, 1998, pp. 570-92.

In the following essay, Gougeon summarizes Emerson's views on the women's liberation movement.

In a newspaper article celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of Emerson's birth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson complained that those who knew Mr. Emerson in the light of a reformer, as he surely did, would find precious little information “given in that direction by his biographers.”¹ Noting the generally conservative character of the two most influential and popular biographies of Emerson, those by Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Elliot Cabot,² Higginson was particularly distressed over their “constitutional reticence” in discussing the philosopher's role in both the antislavery and women's movements. “It was a well-known fact,” Higginson observed, “that Mr. Emerson spoke several times at woman suffrage conventions, and this cordially and sympathetically. Yet,” he says, “this is...
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