Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was, by common consent of the people who knew her, the most learned person in the New England of her day, man or woman, the intellectual equal of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the first editor of the Transcendentalists' journal. She then wrote the book that founded American feminism. For a long time afterward the textbooks remembered her chiefly as Emerson's brilliant friend, a supporting character in someone else's story, which is precisely the reduction her philosophy was written to refuse. Fuller's whole argument is that a human being should never be defined by relation to another, and that the soul of a woman, exactly like the soul of a man, has the right and the need to grow into the full stature of itself.

Self-culture. Fuller began from the central Transcendentalist conviction that every soul carries a spark of the divine and is therefore charged with developing its own full nature, the work they called self-culture. She lived at the center of that circle, editing The Dial and trading ideas with Emerson as a peer rather than a pupil. But she pressed the doctrine where the men had not. If self-culture is the birthright of the soul, she reasoned, then it belongs to woman in exactly the measure it belongs to man, and every custom and law that stunts a woman's growth is a violation not merely of her rights but of the divine purpose in her.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Her central work, grown from a long essay into the 1845 book that founded feminist philosophy in America, makes the demand with great precision. It is not, she insists, that woman needs special permission to act or to rule; it is that every external barrier should fall so that woman may, in her words, grow as a nature, discern as an intellect, and live freely and unimpeded as a soul, unfolding such powers as were given her. The development of women is not a concession to be granted but a spiritual necessity to be honored. And no vocation should be closed to a woman on the ground of her sex: "let them be sea-captains," she writes, "if you will."

The androgyny of the soul. Beneath the political argument lies a striking metaphysical one. There is, Fuller holds, no purely masculine and no purely feminine nature; the masculine and feminine are energies that interpenetrate in every soul, so that, as she puts it, man is woman and woman is man. The rigid social roles of her age do violence to a reality in which each person already contains both poles and ought to develop both. It is a remarkably modern thought to find in 1845, and it grounds her feminism in something deeper than fairness: a claim about what a soul actually is.

The Conversations. Fuller did not only theorize the cultivation of women; she practiced it. For five years she led a celebrated series of Conversations for the women of Boston, Socratic discussions of mythology, art, and ethics designed to wake intellectual powers that formal education, closed to women, had left to sleep. They were philosophy as midwifery, the drawing-out of minds the age had neglected, and they made Fuller a teacher in the oldest and truest sense.

The critic in the world. She lived the independence she preached. She became the first professional literary critic in America, reviewing books with formidable judgment for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, and then the first woman to serve as a foreign correspondent, sending back dispatches from a Europe in revolution and reporting at first hand on the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849. Hers was a philosophy that refused to stay on the page: the same mind that argued for woman's free development carried that freedom into the most public and demanding work the age afforded a writer.

What this room reads. The corpus is Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), from Project Gutenberg, her central work of feminist and Transcendentalist philosophy. Citations run by the work. Her travel book Summer on the Lakes (1844), her literary criticism, and her European dispatches are further sources addressed from training knowledge, and the chat says when it reaches past the corpus.

For generations Fuller was kept as a footnote to the men around her; the recovery now well under way has restored her as the founder of American feminist thought and a major Transcendentalist in her own right, whose central demand, that a woman be allowed to grow into the full stature of a soul, is a measure the world has still not entirely met. She stands beside Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose self-culture she extended to half of humanity, and just ahead of Henry David Thoreau, whose individualism she helped to shape; she is the American inheritor of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication and the elder sister of the feminist philosophers who followed, from Emma Goldman's demand for a deeper emancipation to Jane Addams's social ethics. The sea-captain Fuller dared to imagine set sail long ago. The soul she demanded be left free and unimpeded is, even now, still casting off.