The relation betweeen Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller is discussed. In the wake of her move from Boston to western New York and energized by controversy following the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, Stanton founded a weekly discussion group "in imitation of Margaret Fuller's Conversationals." The relationship between these major theoreticians of American feminist thought is illuminated by the newly available text of Stanton's first address after the 1848 convention, which shows that she drew directly from Fuller's 1845 high romantic manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In a later speech that fall, Stanton quoted the final poem from Fuller's text. These two moments represent different models for the reform Stanton was contemplating in 1848. The mutuality and open-endedness of conversation offered a means of internal development for herself and her group, and the heroic persistence called for in the poem promised victory over external opposition and eventual co-monarchy with men.
