Sophia Ripley

He asked his sister Marianne to inform them, assuring them that their relationship was not based on "any romantic or sudden passion" but on "intellectual power, moral worth, deep and true Christian piety, and refinement and dignity of character".

[5] Fuller explained to Ripley her goals: "It is to pass in review the departments of thought and knowledge, and endeavor to place them in due relation to one another in our mind.

To systemize thought and give precision and clearness in which our sex are so deficient, chiefly, I think, because they have so few inducements to test and classify what they receive.

[7] In the 1840s, she co-founded an experimental Utopian community called Brook Farm along with her husband and was one of the experiment's major supporters in its early years.

[8] Along with her sister-in-law Marianne Ripley, she oversaw Brook Farm's primary school using a progressive child-centered pedagogy that has been compared to the later reforms of John Dewey.