In 1843, these words of Margaret Fuller, published in an American transcendental literary quarterly, expressed something of a vision for the lives of women which is central to the appropriation of the naturalist paradigm within feminism. Recognising a situation of unequal privilege between women and men, she argues that what women most want is ‘for that which is the birthright of every being capable to receive it – the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe, to use its means, to learn its secret as far as nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and their judge’.