A variety of scholarly research and articles, as well as primary sources, will be used to trace the progression from Transcendentalists to the feminist movement and writers. In particular, for feminists, the works of Sarah Margaret Fuller and the Grimke sisters will be analysed. In addition to these feminist leaders, the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson will be analyzed in order to draw connections between previous thought processes, transcendental thought, and the feminist movement. The Transcendental movement took place exclusively in America, but was “stimulated by European and German Romanticism” (Goodman); furthermore, the “Transcendentalists were at the center of the American Renaissance” (Hampson). According to Richard Eldridge, the Romantics, who preceded the Transcendental movement, “represent[ed] 'the effort to imagine the human possibilities of value attainment' more forcefully and consciously than Enlightenment thought had done before, and offer a compelling vision. of the human as 'both a free and noumenal agent and an embodied natural being'” (Johnson 251). Romantics, on the other hand, had a more negative view of the world around them. The transcendental