involved in William Henry Harrison's 1840 presidential campaign, which almost resulted in his appointment as a district attorney. He also promoted pseudoscience movements like phrenology, animal magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance. Feminism Neal was America's first women's rights lecturer and one of the first male advocates of women's rights and feminist causes in the US. At least as early as 1817 and late as 1873, he used journalism, fiction, lectures, political organizing, and personal relationships to advance feminist issues in the US and UK, reaching the height of his influence in this field around 1843. Neal supported female writers and organizers, affirmed intellectual equality between men and women, fought coverture laws against women's economic rights, and demanded suffrage, equal pay, and better education for women. Neal's early focus on female education was primarily influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as well as works by Catharine Macaulay and Judith Sargent Murray. His early feminist essays from the 1820s fill an intellectual gap between eighteenth-century feminists and their pre-Seneca Falls Convention successors Sarah Moore Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Fuller. As a male writer insulated from many forms of attack leveled against earlier female feminist thinkers, Neal's advocacy was crucial to bringing the field back into published discourse in the US and UK after a lull at the turn of the century. From the "feminist undertones" in his first novel (1817) through the illustrations of "patriarchal cruelty" in Errata (1823) and "Idiosyncrasies" (1843) to the vindication of independent, unmarried women in True Womanhood (1859), Neal broke with writers of his generation by consciously and consistently including women and women's issues throughout his career as a writer of fiction. "Idiosyncrasies" explored the male feminist perspective through the character Lee who said, "we men... imprison the soul of woman, and set a seal upon her faculties—... allowing her no share whatever in... governing ourselves: Having found the cause,... and believing in my heart... that where the evil was, there the remedy must be sought for, I went to work". "Men and Women" (1824), his first feminist essay, recalls the eighteenth-century priority of female education: "Wait until women are educated like men—treated like men—and permitted to talk freely, without being put to shame, because they are women". At that future time, he posited that the greatest of male writers "will be equalled by women". Going further than his predecessors on