Women in the nineteenth century had it hard. That's what Margaret Fuller's book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is all about. Ladies in the days of yore couldn't vote, they couldn't own property in the way that men could, and they were pretty much confined to being housewives for their entire lives. It's this very unsavory state of gender relations that Fuller criticizes in the above passage.
Fuller, of course, was an outspoken women's rights activist. Not only did she write about this stuff-she herself was a woman who managed to rebel against many of the conventions of her time. Her criticism of gender hierarchies and relationships in the above passage shows how important social reform was not only to her, but to other Transcendentalists, too. Like her peers, Fuller looked at her society critically, and she didn't like what she saw.