The Second Generation: Ednah Dow Cheney Carries Margaret Fuller's Feminist Transcendentalism into the Early Progressive Era

In the nineteenth century, the Transcendentalist and women's movements combined to alter the discussion on the politics of womanhood, developing creative space for progressive individuals to actively make change in the expansion of human rights. Ednah Dow Cheney, a young widow and single mother in the mid­1850s, merged the spirit of Transcendentalism that she inherited from her family and friends and her burgeoning passion for social activism to become a dedicated public servant. An early attendee of the Conversations of Margaret Fuller, author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and a pioneer in the field of feminist Transcendentalism, Cheney borrowed Fuller's radical ideas and translated them into real action. Throughout the second half of the 1850s and into the early twentieth century, Cheney founded the New England School of Design and the New England Women's Club and managed the New England Hospital for Women and Children, the Boston Education Commission of the Freedmen's Aid Society, and lectured for the New England Suffrage Association and the Concord School of Philosophy. More significantly, she continued through the century to become a feminist intellectual in Fuller's vein.