{"id":8739,"date":"2025-02-07T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T19:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/?p=8739"},"modified":"2025-06-12T21:19:31","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T04:19:31","slug":"uu-and-the-womens-rights-movement-134","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/news\/blog\/uu-and-the-womens-rights-movement-134\/","title":{"rendered":"UU and the Women\u2019s Rights Movement (#133)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ideas propounded\u00a0in the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century\u00a0by Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and his student Henry David Thoreau\u00a0are considered a major source of modern Unitarian Universalism.<\/p>\n

These ideas, however, first emerged in a small women\u2019s conversation group that met in the 1840s at 13 West Street\u00a0in\u00a0Boston at\u00a0Eizabeth Peabody\u2019s Bookstore, according to Randall Fuller in his new book,\u00a0Bright Circle:\u00a0Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The group included Emerson\u2019s wife, Lydia, and a handful of other brilliant, strong-minded, self-educated New England women determined to \u201cmove the mountains of custom and convention\u201d and create a space where \u201cideas could disseminate and lives transform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emerson and Thoreau lauded individuality and \u201cSelf-Reliance.\u201d \u00a0Their preferred setting for spiritual insight was isolated rumination, ideally at Walden Pond.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the women\u2019s ideal was not solitude, but communality.\u00a0 They came together for stimulating conversation led by Margaret Fuller, who believed, that \u201cthe individual comes into radiant being” through interaction.<\/p>\n

These women, excluded from formal education at that time, pursued their own learning\u2014 plying ministers with questions, devising reading programs, initiating correspondences \u2014 which they explored in their conversations.<\/p>\n

Fuller encouraged them to fulfill their potential by asking the group, \u201cWhat were we born to do?\u201d and \u201cHow shall we do it?\u201d<\/p>\n

The group was \u201cdetermined to live beyond the restrictions of gender.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Fuller believes their conversations \u2014 which one participant called \u201ca vindication of woman\u2019s right to think\u201d \u2014 became the foundation of the American women\u2019s rights movement<\/p>\n

He summarizes their tenets as: \u201ca desire to connect with God through an intense encounter with the natural world; a commitment to the individual spirit; a resistance to conformity; and a sense that all people possessed the capacity to experience divine inspiration, if they nurture the imagination to perceive it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The community life now at the Sedona Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, resembles as much these women\u2019s beliefs and practices as it does what their more celebrated male contemporaries later proclaimed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ideas propounded\u00a0in the 19th\u00a0century\u00a0by Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and his student Henry David Thoreau\u00a0are considered a major source of modern Unitarian Universalism. These ideas, however, first emerged in a small women\u2019s conversation group that met in the 1840s at 13 West Street\u00a0in\u00a0Boston at\u00a0Eizabeth Peabody\u2019s Bookstore, according to Randall Fuller in his new book,\u00a0Bright Circle:\u00a0Five … Continue reading UU and the Women\u2019s Rights Movement (#133)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8739"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8942,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8739\/revisions\/8942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sedonauu.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}