Margaret Fuller was both a feminist and, in some of her efforts, an educator of women. A learned woman, she organized series of "conversations," for women. In the early 1840s, she held conversational classes at Elizabeth Peabody's West Street home and bookstore. Her major work Woman in the Nineteenth Century grew out of these classes. Like Bronson Alcott, she intended her conversations to stimulate the intuitive process more than to impart factual knowledge.
In addition to education, the Transcendentalists expressed their optimism in man's perfectibility in the antislavery movement. Most Transcendentalists were committed to abolition. Thoreau and (more hesitantly) Emerson were galvanizing speakers and writers on behalf of the movement. Theodore Parker spoke out against slavery from the pulpit and wrote on the subject. Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody were all involved in one way or another. Thoreau formed part of the Underground Railroad in Concord.
Other reform concerns that engaged the Transcendentalists included women's suffrage, Native American education and rights, and world peace. Some of these movements continued on into the late nineteenth century, and the enduring Elizabeth Peabody was involved with them until she died, in 1894.
The establishment of experimental living communities was an important expression of Transcendentalism. Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane set up Fruitlands at Harvard, Massachusetts. It lasted from June 1843 to January 1844. The Fruitlands regimen included a vegetarian diet and cold baths in the morning. Bronson Alcott's daughter, author Louisa May Alcott, who endured considerable privation with her family at Fruitlands, satirized the experiment in a piece titled "Transcendental Wild Oats."
