Social Action in the 19th Century: Margaret Fuller: May 23, 2010--Judy LaLonde, speaker
In 1884, the biography of a writer characterized as one “whose aims were high and whose services great; one whose intellect was uncommon, whose activity incessant, whose life varied, and whose death dramatic,” was published in the American Men of Letters series that its publishers touted as a history of American literature. Biographers of the twenty-five men of letters were qualified to render insightful critical estimates because they were familiar with the surroundings in which their subjects lived and understood the conditions under which American literature developed. Part of a typically Victorian effort to promote the national identity, the series featured the lives of James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example.
You may with good reason wonder why I begin a talk about Margaret Fuller by describing a series of biographies about American Men of Letters. The fact is that one of these 25 biographies was not of a man, but of a woman that the female “man of letters” was Margaret Fuller.
Fuller’s biography for this series was authored by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Higginson is most recognized, if at all by those not scholars of the 19th century, as Emily Dickinson’s first editor. Higginson was himself a prolific writer, a Unitarian minister and orator, historian, naturalist, translator, and an ardent leader in a variety of reform movements. Taking an active role in the growing suffrage movement at mid-century, he signed the call for the first national woman’s convention. Six years later, Higginson refused to sit on a committee formed to determine whether or not women delegates to a temperance meeting would be recognized, and when a negative decision was made, he left the hall, inviting those in favor of a “whole” worlds’ temperance convention to meet elsewhere. Higginson championed the social and political equality of women, encouraging them to develop their individual talents. But enough of Higginson.
This year is the 200th anniversary of Margaret Fuller’s birth. The UUA, which has encouraged congregations to take a journey of discovery to learn about Fuller, describes her as an author, conversationalist, journalist, friend, companion, mother, and wife.” She was also a feminist, a reformer and a political revolutionary.
We are familiar with many of our UU forbears of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Most, however, do not even recognize the name Margaret Fuller let alone know why she might be a topic for a Sunday talk. The Rev. Christine Hillman, who received the “Ministerial Sisterhood Unitarian Universalist Sermon Award in 2000 for a talk on Fuller, (which, by the way, you can read on the UUA website for worship resources) understood the problem of presenting a biography of Fuller (or any other UU forbear) as a sermon. She presented Fuller, not as an example of a one-dimensional heroine we should emulate, but as someone who had difficulties in her life. Fuller, as Hillman writes, “struggled and wrestled to meet the issues of the day head on and made mistakes, alienated people closer to her, alienated the nation for awhile, left the country to escape the mess.” Hillman goes on, Fuller “wasn’t an easy woman. She wouldn’t have been Margaret Fuller if she had been a simple person. She wouldn’t be a model if she had simply been a woman of her time.”
Margaret Fuller’s own desire for knowledge and action and the subsequent fulfillment of that desire became the keynote of her life as interpreted by Higginson. Establishing the theme in the introductory chapter of his biography, he claims that Fuller most desired “a career of mingled thought and action as she finally found. Higginson considers Fuller’s intellect subservient to her “vigorous executive side,” her literary life merely preliminary to a life of action by which, he claims, she would rather have been judged.
But to acquaint you with at least a rudimentary knowledge of Fuller, we go back to 1810, to Massachusetts where Fuller was born, the eldest daughter of eight. Her parents were Unitarians—her father was a prominent lawyer and later, Congressman. Under her father’s insistence, she learned to read at age 3 and was reading Latin at age 6; A taskmaster, her father “demanded accuracy and clearness in everything.” Fuller explained his rules: you must not speak unless you make your meaning perfectly intelligible to the person addressed; must not express a thought unless you can give a reason for it, must not make a statement unless sure of all particulars.” She described herself as being fed on “meat instead of milk"; she thought of herself as a living mind, not a child. As a result, she suffered nightmares, insomnia, and headaches most of her life.
The family moved to Connecticut where she attended a finishing school off and on. At age 15, after leaving school, she continued a self-imposed education: her daily schedule apparently began at 5 in the morning and ended at 11 at night, included reading literary and philosophical works in four languages, walking, singing and playing the piano. The family returned to Cambridge in early 1830s where she became acquainted with Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Theodore Parker and others central to the Transcendentalist movement.
At the age of 25, following the death of her father, she essentially took control of her family. They were not well off, and Fuller supported them by teaching, one of the few acceptable vocations available during her lifetime. One transcendentalist, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott and an influential educational reformer) had established a rather revolutionary and controversial school where learning was based on the Socratic method: Alcott believed that learning was the result of dialogue between pupil and teacher and is famous, or infamous for his Dialogues with children on the meaning of the Bible. Fuller taught there until after the admittance of a mulatto girl, the final straw, the school folded and she took a position of principal of a school in Providence R.I. During that entire period, she also taught classes of her own in French, German and Italian and translated German literary works into English.
By 1839, her brothers were self supporting.
Higginson describes Fuller’s next move as a response to her desire to contribute to society while continuing to support herself. She moved to Boston and from 1839 to 1844, she held a series of “Conversions,” seminars for women that were “designed to encourage women in self-expression and independent thinking.” Since there was a ban on public speaking by women for pay at that time, this was done in violation of the law.
The Conversations were held in the Boston bookstore owned by Elizabeth Peabody. The meetings started with 25 women willing to commit to 13 weeks, meeting once a week from noon to two, willing to discuss issues such as “what were we born to do? How shall we do it?” Charged $10 for the first week; the fee doubled as attendance grew. The first Conversation was about the advantage men have in terms of education over women. Here, again, she used the Socratic Method: each session was devoted to a philosophical question and she would engage the participants in discussion and dialogue before expounding her own view with clarity and expression that “dazzled” her listeners. That women could have their own opinions on matters outside their sphere proved an intoxicating proposition.
The Conversations were very popular--over the five-year period, more than 200 women participated and the Conversations became a strong base for feminism in New England, including wives of famous men like Emerson, Theodore Parker and Hawthorne, as well as other women who were developing their own work and careers, often as writers.
During that same time period, Fuller co-founded with Emerson and George Ripley the transcendentalist journal The Dial. The journal was an offshoot of the Transcendental Club whose meetings began the movement (Peobody and Fuller were the only female members of that loosely organized club). Transcendentalism dominated the thinking of the mid 19th century and influenced thought well into the 20th century by its expression of a national spirit, messages of confident self-identity, spiritual progress and social justice as well as a celebration of the grandeur of the American soul. For three years, Fuller coaxed articles and poetry from reluctant writers, rejected unsuitable material (even from Emerson) and wrote much of the content herself, including a landmark essay called “The Great Lawsuit: Man Vs. Men and Woman vs. Women.”
The essay was revised later into Fuller’s best known work, Women in the Nineteenth Century. In that, she attacks the hypocrisy of man that allowed him to champion freedom for blacks while maintaining legislation to restrict the rights of woman; a hypocrisy that saw man complain about woman’s physical and emotional unsuitability for positions of responsibility in public life, yet insist that she be a field hand, a nurse, the one to raise and socialize children. Fuller made arguments for full equality of opportunity for women and for abolishing stereotyped gender roles. Susan B. Anthony believed Fuller’s work had “more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time.”
The following is a dialogue from that book, which represents Fuller’s response in advance of criticism against women leaving their traditional sphere:
I would have woman lay aside all thought, such as being taught and led by men. I would have her, like the Indian girl, dedicate herself to the sun, the sun of truth, and go nowhere if his beams did not make clear the path. I would have her free from compromise, complaisance, from helplessness, because I would have her good enough and strong enough to love one and all beings, from the fullness, not the poverty of being.
Is it not enough . . . that you have done all you could to break up the national union, and thus destroy the prosperity of our country, but now you must be trying to break up family union, to take my wife away from the cradle and the kitchen-hearth to vote at polls, and preach from a pulpit? Of course, if she does such things, she cannot attend to those of her own sphere. She is happy enough as she is. She has more leisure than I have---every means of improvement, every indulgence."
"Have you asked her whether she was satisfied with these indulgences?"
"No, but I know she is. She is too amiable to desire what would make me unhappy, and too judicious to wish to step beyond the sphere of her sex. I will never consent to have our peace disturbed by any such discussions."
"'Consent-- you?' it is not consent from you that is in question - it is assent from your wife."
"Am not I the head of my house?"
"You are not the head of your wife. God has given a mind of her own."
"I am the head, and she the heart."
"God grant you play true to one another, then! I suppose I am to be grateful that you did not say she was only the hand. If the head represses no natural pulse of the heart, there can be no question as to your giving your consent. . . There is no need of precaution, of indulgence, nor consent. But our doubt is whether the heart does consent with the head, or only obeys its decrees with a passiveness that precludes the exercise of its natural powers, or a repugnance that turns sweet qualities to bitter, or a doubt that lays waste the fair occasions of life. It is to ascertain the truth that we propose some liberating measures."
After she turned the Dial over to Emerson, she toured the Great Lakes Territory and when she returned, authored the book Summer on the Lakes. Through the mediation of friends, Fuller was permitted to use the Houghton Library at Harvard to assist in her research, the first female scholar so honored. You will recall, women were not permitted to attend colleges at this time.
Summer on the Lakes is not a great work of literature, but as contemporary critic Joel Myerson writes, the value lies in Fuller’s emerging strain of social criticism. In it she sympathizes with the plight of Indians, their betrayal by white men and decries white man’s sense of superiority. She worried about attempts of women she met to imitate Eastern standards of culture at the expense of losing what was unique to the west. She wrote of how hard it was for women who had been taught only to be ornaments of society.
The book helped her gain attention as an author and attracted the attention of Horace Greeley, owner and editor of the New York Tribune, who offered her a position in New York as literary and cultural critic for the paper. The Tribune was only 3 years old at the time.
Her move to NY in 1844 marks a distinct change in her life and career. It was a career, according to Higginson, of mingled thoughts and action such as she always wanted. Working for Greeley, she became aware of urban poverty and strengthened her commitment to social justice and to the causes that concerned her: prison reform, women’s suffrage; and educational and political equality for minorities. She engaged in benevolent work, visited prisons and mental asylums, immigrant slums, city hospitals and charitable institutions; talked with inmates. She expressed strong support for the abolitionist movement. She visited and wrote of Quaker Isaac Hopper’s halfway house for recently released prisoners and Eliza Farnham’s revolutionary program of self improvement for female inmates of Sing-Sing. She focused her attention, as she had not before, on specific social issues of the day, like capital punishment, the abolitionist movement, the war on Mexico, the horrific conditions in hospitals and prisons, and the treatment of madness. Her writing shows a distinct awareness of concrete conditions; far away from the abstract intellectualism of the Transcendentalists. Greeley wrote of her: “For every effort to limit vice, ignorance and misery, she had a ready, eager ear and a willing hand.” If she had had the money, “she would have had a house of refuge for all female outcasts.”
In 1846, she left for Europe as the first female foreign correspondent. Her reports from the Continent concern urban poverty in Manchester and Glasgow; penal reform; sweat labor; educational reform; and female self-improvement. She was unambiguously socialist. Fuller wrote “The people of American may look on and learn in time for a preventative wisdom the real meaning of the words Fraternity, Equality. Learn the needs of true democracy. Learn in time to reverence, learn to guard, the true aristocracy of a nation, the only true nobles, the laboring classes.”
Fuller settled in Rome in 1847 and became involved in the Italian Unification Movement. Her dispatches to the Tribune urged American support for the republican cause, and she and her new husband played an active role in the siege of Rome in 1849. The revolt failed. She and her husband and son left Italy and spent time on the continent with literary figures such as Carlyle and the then notorious French woman novelist George Sand. She supposedly was writing a history of the Italian Revolution.
Fuller’s story has a tragic ending. Returning to the States in 1850, the ship carrying her and her family struck a sandbar off Fire Island on June 1, less than 100 yards from shore. She, her husband and son drowned. Only her young son’s body was found and any manuscript she might have had with her was lost.
Truly, Fuller can serve as example for us, encouraging us to be aware of the social ills of our time and and dedicating ourselves to expose them, to suggest ways to eliminate them, and to work towards justice for all.
You may with good reason wonder why I begin a talk about Margaret Fuller by describing a series of biographies about American Men of Letters. The fact is that one of these 25 biographies was not of a man, but of a woman that the female “man of letters” was Margaret Fuller.
Fuller’s biography for this series was authored by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Higginson is most recognized, if at all by those not scholars of the 19th century, as Emily Dickinson’s first editor. Higginson was himself a prolific writer, a Unitarian minister and orator, historian, naturalist, translator, and an ardent leader in a variety of reform movements. Taking an active role in the growing suffrage movement at mid-century, he signed the call for the first national woman’s convention. Six years later, Higginson refused to sit on a committee formed to determine whether or not women delegates to a temperance meeting would be recognized, and when a negative decision was made, he left the hall, inviting those in favor of a “whole” worlds’ temperance convention to meet elsewhere. Higginson championed the social and political equality of women, encouraging them to develop their individual talents. But enough of Higginson.
This year is the 200th anniversary of Margaret Fuller’s birth. The UUA, which has encouraged congregations to take a journey of discovery to learn about Fuller, describes her as an author, conversationalist, journalist, friend, companion, mother, and wife.” She was also a feminist, a reformer and a political revolutionary.
We are familiar with many of our UU forbears of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Most, however, do not even recognize the name Margaret Fuller let alone know why she might be a topic for a Sunday talk. The Rev. Christine Hillman, who received the “Ministerial Sisterhood Unitarian Universalist Sermon Award in 2000 for a talk on Fuller, (which, by the way, you can read on the UUA website for worship resources) understood the problem of presenting a biography of Fuller (or any other UU forbear) as a sermon. She presented Fuller, not as an example of a one-dimensional heroine we should emulate, but as someone who had difficulties in her life. Fuller, as Hillman writes, “struggled and wrestled to meet the issues of the day head on and made mistakes, alienated people closer to her, alienated the nation for awhile, left the country to escape the mess.” Hillman goes on, Fuller “wasn’t an easy woman. She wouldn’t have been Margaret Fuller if she had been a simple person. She wouldn’t be a model if she had simply been a woman of her time.”
Margaret Fuller’s own desire for knowledge and action and the subsequent fulfillment of that desire became the keynote of her life as interpreted by Higginson. Establishing the theme in the introductory chapter of his biography, he claims that Fuller most desired “a career of mingled thought and action as she finally found. Higginson considers Fuller’s intellect subservient to her “vigorous executive side,” her literary life merely preliminary to a life of action by which, he claims, she would rather have been judged.
But to acquaint you with at least a rudimentary knowledge of Fuller, we go back to 1810, to Massachusetts where Fuller was born, the eldest daughter of eight. Her parents were Unitarians—her father was a prominent lawyer and later, Congressman. Under her father’s insistence, she learned to read at age 3 and was reading Latin at age 6; A taskmaster, her father “demanded accuracy and clearness in everything.” Fuller explained his rules: you must not speak unless you make your meaning perfectly intelligible to the person addressed; must not express a thought unless you can give a reason for it, must not make a statement unless sure of all particulars.” She described herself as being fed on “meat instead of milk"; she thought of herself as a living mind, not a child. As a result, she suffered nightmares, insomnia, and headaches most of her life.
The family moved to Connecticut where she attended a finishing school off and on. At age 15, after leaving school, she continued a self-imposed education: her daily schedule apparently began at 5 in the morning and ended at 11 at night, included reading literary and philosophical works in four languages, walking, singing and playing the piano. The family returned to Cambridge in early 1830s where she became acquainted with Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, Theodore Parker and others central to the Transcendentalist movement.
At the age of 25, following the death of her father, she essentially took control of her family. They were not well off, and Fuller supported them by teaching, one of the few acceptable vocations available during her lifetime. One transcendentalist, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott and an influential educational reformer) had established a rather revolutionary and controversial school where learning was based on the Socratic method: Alcott believed that learning was the result of dialogue between pupil and teacher and is famous, or infamous for his Dialogues with children on the meaning of the Bible. Fuller taught there until after the admittance of a mulatto girl, the final straw, the school folded and she took a position of principal of a school in Providence R.I. During that entire period, she also taught classes of her own in French, German and Italian and translated German literary works into English.
By 1839, her brothers were self supporting.
Higginson describes Fuller’s next move as a response to her desire to contribute to society while continuing to support herself. She moved to Boston and from 1839 to 1844, she held a series of “Conversions,” seminars for women that were “designed to encourage women in self-expression and independent thinking.” Since there was a ban on public speaking by women for pay at that time, this was done in violation of the law.
The Conversations were held in the Boston bookstore owned by Elizabeth Peabody. The meetings started with 25 women willing to commit to 13 weeks, meeting once a week from noon to two, willing to discuss issues such as “what were we born to do? How shall we do it?” Charged $10 for the first week; the fee doubled as attendance grew. The first Conversation was about the advantage men have in terms of education over women. Here, again, she used the Socratic Method: each session was devoted to a philosophical question and she would engage the participants in discussion and dialogue before expounding her own view with clarity and expression that “dazzled” her listeners. That women could have their own opinions on matters outside their sphere proved an intoxicating proposition.
The Conversations were very popular--over the five-year period, more than 200 women participated and the Conversations became a strong base for feminism in New England, including wives of famous men like Emerson, Theodore Parker and Hawthorne, as well as other women who were developing their own work and careers, often as writers.
During that same time period, Fuller co-founded with Emerson and George Ripley the transcendentalist journal The Dial. The journal was an offshoot of the Transcendental Club whose meetings began the movement (Peobody and Fuller were the only female members of that loosely organized club). Transcendentalism dominated the thinking of the mid 19th century and influenced thought well into the 20th century by its expression of a national spirit, messages of confident self-identity, spiritual progress and social justice as well as a celebration of the grandeur of the American soul. For three years, Fuller coaxed articles and poetry from reluctant writers, rejected unsuitable material (even from Emerson) and wrote much of the content herself, including a landmark essay called “The Great Lawsuit: Man Vs. Men and Woman vs. Women.”
The essay was revised later into Fuller’s best known work, Women in the Nineteenth Century. In that, she attacks the hypocrisy of man that allowed him to champion freedom for blacks while maintaining legislation to restrict the rights of woman; a hypocrisy that saw man complain about woman’s physical and emotional unsuitability for positions of responsibility in public life, yet insist that she be a field hand, a nurse, the one to raise and socialize children. Fuller made arguments for full equality of opportunity for women and for abolishing stereotyped gender roles. Susan B. Anthony believed Fuller’s work had “more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time.”
The following is a dialogue from that book, which represents Fuller’s response in advance of criticism against women leaving their traditional sphere:
I would have woman lay aside all thought, such as being taught and led by men. I would have her, like the Indian girl, dedicate herself to the sun, the sun of truth, and go nowhere if his beams did not make clear the path. I would have her free from compromise, complaisance, from helplessness, because I would have her good enough and strong enough to love one and all beings, from the fullness, not the poverty of being.
Is it not enough . . . that you have done all you could to break up the national union, and thus destroy the prosperity of our country, but now you must be trying to break up family union, to take my wife away from the cradle and the kitchen-hearth to vote at polls, and preach from a pulpit? Of course, if she does such things, she cannot attend to those of her own sphere. She is happy enough as she is. She has more leisure than I have---every means of improvement, every indulgence."
"Have you asked her whether she was satisfied with these indulgences?"
"No, but I know she is. She is too amiable to desire what would make me unhappy, and too judicious to wish to step beyond the sphere of her sex. I will never consent to have our peace disturbed by any such discussions."
"'Consent-- you?' it is not consent from you that is in question - it is assent from your wife."
"Am not I the head of my house?"
"You are not the head of your wife. God has given a mind of her own."
"I am the head, and she the heart."
"God grant you play true to one another, then! I suppose I am to be grateful that you did not say she was only the hand. If the head represses no natural pulse of the heart, there can be no question as to your giving your consent. . . There is no need of precaution, of indulgence, nor consent. But our doubt is whether the heart does consent with the head, or only obeys its decrees with a passiveness that precludes the exercise of its natural powers, or a repugnance that turns sweet qualities to bitter, or a doubt that lays waste the fair occasions of life. It is to ascertain the truth that we propose some liberating measures."
After she turned the Dial over to Emerson, she toured the Great Lakes Territory and when she returned, authored the book Summer on the Lakes. Through the mediation of friends, Fuller was permitted to use the Houghton Library at Harvard to assist in her research, the first female scholar so honored. You will recall, women were not permitted to attend colleges at this time.
Summer on the Lakes is not a great work of literature, but as contemporary critic Joel Myerson writes, the value lies in Fuller’s emerging strain of social criticism. In it she sympathizes with the plight of Indians, their betrayal by white men and decries white man’s sense of superiority. She worried about attempts of women she met to imitate Eastern standards of culture at the expense of losing what was unique to the west. She wrote of how hard it was for women who had been taught only to be ornaments of society.
The book helped her gain attention as an author and attracted the attention of Horace Greeley, owner and editor of the New York Tribune, who offered her a position in New York as literary and cultural critic for the paper. The Tribune was only 3 years old at the time.
Her move to NY in 1844 marks a distinct change in her life and career. It was a career, according to Higginson, of mingled thoughts and action such as she always wanted. Working for Greeley, she became aware of urban poverty and strengthened her commitment to social justice and to the causes that concerned her: prison reform, women’s suffrage; and educational and political equality for minorities. She engaged in benevolent work, visited prisons and mental asylums, immigrant slums, city hospitals and charitable institutions; talked with inmates. She expressed strong support for the abolitionist movement. She visited and wrote of Quaker Isaac Hopper’s halfway house for recently released prisoners and Eliza Farnham’s revolutionary program of self improvement for female inmates of Sing-Sing. She focused her attention, as she had not before, on specific social issues of the day, like capital punishment, the abolitionist movement, the war on Mexico, the horrific conditions in hospitals and prisons, and the treatment of madness. Her writing shows a distinct awareness of concrete conditions; far away from the abstract intellectualism of the Transcendentalists. Greeley wrote of her: “For every effort to limit vice, ignorance and misery, she had a ready, eager ear and a willing hand.” If she had had the money, “she would have had a house of refuge for all female outcasts.”
In 1846, she left for Europe as the first female foreign correspondent. Her reports from the Continent concern urban poverty in Manchester and Glasgow; penal reform; sweat labor; educational reform; and female self-improvement. She was unambiguously socialist. Fuller wrote “The people of American may look on and learn in time for a preventative wisdom the real meaning of the words Fraternity, Equality. Learn the needs of true democracy. Learn in time to reverence, learn to guard, the true aristocracy of a nation, the only true nobles, the laboring classes.”
Fuller settled in Rome in 1847 and became involved in the Italian Unification Movement. Her dispatches to the Tribune urged American support for the republican cause, and she and her new husband played an active role in the siege of Rome in 1849. The revolt failed. She and her husband and son left Italy and spent time on the continent with literary figures such as Carlyle and the then notorious French woman novelist George Sand. She supposedly was writing a history of the Italian Revolution.
Fuller’s story has a tragic ending. Returning to the States in 1850, the ship carrying her and her family struck a sandbar off Fire Island on June 1, less than 100 yards from shore. She, her husband and son drowned. Only her young son’s body was found and any manuscript she might have had with her was lost.
Truly, Fuller can serve as example for us, encouraging us to be aware of the social ills of our time and and dedicating ourselves to expose them, to suggest ways to eliminate them, and to work towards justice for all.
Labels: Margaret Fuller; transcendentalists; social action; UUA
posted by UUCP Sermons at 4:32 PM
