The Bicentenary of the Birth of Margaret Fuller
May 31st, 2010 by Bill
The Bicentenary of the Birth of Margaret Fuller
No doubt when you looked at the service titles in Oscailt, or glanced up at the notice board on your way in this morning, you asked yourself, ‘Who on earth was Margaret Fuller?’ If that was your reaction, then rest assured you are not alone. Few people on this side of the Atlantic know about this woman, and even in her native America she is not as well known as she deserves. She was, in fact, one of the most famous women in America in the 1840s, a true pioneer, a daring and original thinker, whose work provided inspiration for many other, better known, writers, and who laid the foundations of feminist thinking one hundred and fifty years before the likes of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. She overcame so many barriers and acquired so many ‘firsts’ that it is astonishing that most people don’t know who she is or what she accomplished
She was the first American to write a book about equality for women (the first was probably Mary Wollstonecraft, another Unitarian);
the first professional war correspondent;
the first woman journalist on a big city daily, the New York Daily Tribune;
the first woman foreign correspondent;
the first woman literary critic;
the first editor of The Dial magazine
the first woman permitted to use Harvard University library.
That’s not a bad list of accomplishments for a woman who is now almost totally forgotten.
Margaret was born on May 23rd 1810, in Cambridgeport Massachusetts, the oldest child of Timothy and Margaret Crane Fuller. Her father, who was a lawyer and a congressman, recognised her early intellectual promise and saw to it that she received as good an education as any boy who was destined for Harvard University. Her classmates saw her as something of an anomalous figure, a reputation which was to persist throughout her life. Edgar Allen Poe was to comment about her, ‘Humanity can be divided into three classes – Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller.’
Although Margaret was a brilliant student, she had little praise for the kind of conventional education she received at the boarding school for young ladies in Groton MA. Her early studies – under the direction of her father – had included Shakespeare and the great classical writers – Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plutarch, Homer – in the original Latin and Greek, and so she was dismayed by the pedestrian memorisation she had to perform in order to succeed in school. She wrote:
Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow, (but) I was now in the hands of teachers, who had not, since they came on the earth, put to themselves an intelligent question as to their business here. They believed that exercise of memory was study, and to know what others knew, was the object of study. But … … … I had known great living minds – I had seen how they took their food and did their exercise, and what their objects were.
She left school at fifteen, as was the custom for young girls, but when she returned home she set herself a rigid timetable of fifteen hours a day self-study. In her book she quotes freely from Latin, Greek, French, German and Italian authors, often without providing a translation, assuming, no doubt, that her readers were as well-read and she was.
As a young woman, Margaret became reader and translator for William Ellery Channing, one of the most celebrated Unitarian ministers of 19th century, and her lively wit and astonishing intelligence made her very popular with the young men attending Harvard, many of whom became her life-long friends. Perfection was her aim: ‘I have learned to believe that nothing, not even perfection is unattainable,’ she wrote. However, she was aware of her own faults; she just preferred not to dwell on them too much:
There is plenty of room in the universe for my faults, but I cannot spend time thinking about them, when so many other things interest me more.
When she was 23 her father died and Margaret was obliged to work as a teacher in order to help with the family finances. Through Ralph Waldo Emerson – another prominent Unitarian – she had been introduced to Bronson Alcott (the father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women), who employed her in the progressive school he ran in Boston. Later, she moved to the Greene School in Providence, Rhode Island, where she devised curricula to develop self-confidence and self-respect in adolescent girls. With her earnings she was able to help send her three younger brothers through Harvard.
Margaret was part of the intellectual circle around Ralph Waldo Emerson which became the Transcendentalist movement, a movement with its roots in Unitarianism, and which promoted independence of mind, self-reliance, social reform and the full development of the individual, regardless of gender. Although a Unitarian herself, she was never happy to be defined by any label. For her, religious truth transcended denominational boundaries: ‘It is a constellation not a phalanx to which I would belong,’ she wrote, meaning that she would not busy herself in the partisan defence of any sectarian position, but would seek inspiration wherever it may be found. She became the first editor of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, soliciting articles from prominent writers and providing articles and translations of her own. She was one of the first Americans to translate Goethe into English, and she did so at a time when Goethe was considered too scandalous even to be read by men. Her book Women in the Nineteenth Century, which first appeared as a series of essays in The Dial, advocates woman’s emancipation from the slavery of the kitchen and the bedroom in a way that proved shocking and controversial throughout the English speaking world. And no wonder: she equated the situation of married women with that of the prostitute, and she was prepared to discuss androgyny and same-sex relationships. ‘It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man,’ she wrote, in 1845!
In her book – which is readily available on the internet – Margaret anticipated the outcry that would be raised against any mention of female emancipation:
‘Is it not enough,’ cries the irritated trader, ‘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 these things, she cannot attend to those of her own spheres. 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 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 I not the head of my house?’
‘You are not the head of your wife. God has given her a mind of her own.’
‘God has given her a mind of her own.’ This reflects what she said earlier about education: the object of life is to grow to one’s full potential, not simply to play out a role assigned by one’s spouse or by society’s expectations. Later she writes that a woman must live for God, not for her husband; but ‘living for God’ does not carry the connotations of religious piety; it means living in such a way that one’s God-given talents are fully developed, and one’s unique individuality is realised.
In addition to these theoretical considerations, Margaret was also concerned about the practical issues surrounding marital relations, and sought to change the law which gave the husband more rights over the children than the wife:
I have seen the husband who has stained himself by a long course of low vice, till his wife was wearied from her heroic forgiveness, by finding that his treachery made it useless, and that if she would provide bread for herself and her children, she must be separate from his ill fame – I have know this man come to install himself in the chamber of the woman who loathed him, and say she should never take food without his company. I have known these men steal their children, whom they knew they had no means to maintain, take them into dissolute company, expose them to bodily danger, to frighten the poor woman, to whom, it seems, the fact that she alone had borne the pangs of their birth, and nourished their infancy, does not give an equal right to them. I do believe that this mode of kidnapping – and it is frequent enough in all classes of society – will be by the next age viewed as it is by Heaven now, and that the man who avails himself of the shelter of men’s laws to steal from a mother her own children, or arrogate any superior right in them, save that of superior virtue, will bear the stigma he deserves, in common with him who steals grown men from their mother-land, their hopes, and their homes.
What kind of work did Margaret see as fitting for a woman? This is her reply:
But if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply – any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will. I do not doubt there are women well fitted for such an office, and, if so, I should be glad to see them in it…..
If women are to ‘rouse their latent powers’ to ‘live for God’, then they must have access to a wider range of occupations than they currently have. No career should be forbidden to a woman simply on account of her gender:
In families that I know, some little girls like to saw wood, others to use carpenters’ tools. Where these tastes are indulged, cheerfulness and good-humour are promoted. Where they are forbidden, because ‘such things are not proper for girls’, they grow sullen and mischievous.
Margaret considered that one third of women were likely to have a taste for masculine pursuits, and one third of men for feminine pursuits.
Who does not observe the immediate glow and serenity that is diffused over the life of women, before restless or fretful, by engaging in gardening, building, or the lowest department of art? Here is something that is not routine, something that draws forth life towards the infinite.
I have no doubt, however, that a large proportion of women would give themselves to the same employments as now, because there are circumstances that must lead them. Mothers will delight to make the nest soft and warm. Nature would take care of that… … … The difference would be that all need not be constrained to employments for which some are unfit.
I have urged on Woman independence of Man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in Woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other…..
Now there is no woman, only an overgrown child.
Soon after the publication of her book, she took up a job as literary editor of the New York Daily Tribune and quickly established herself as a literary and social critic of stature. She frequently wrote articles which drew attention to the plight of the poor, and she called for a reform in sanitation, prisons, asylums and orphanages, and she proposed that half-way houses be established for women prisoners on their release from jail. By this time she had met most of the intelligentsia on America’s east coast and is reputed to have said,
Now I know all the people in America worth knowing and I can find no intellect comparable to my own! … God forbid that anyone should conceive more highly of me than I myself!
A year after her appointment she persuaded the editor to assign her to the position of foreign correspondent, and she travelled extensively throughout Europe, writing articles about the appalling gap between rich and poor. In Italy, where she felt she belonged, she met a nobleman, Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, who eventually became her lover, and the father of her child, Angelino. (She may even have married Giovanni, but scholars can find no evidence of a wedding). Margaret and Giovanni supported the Italian Risorgimento, the struggle to unify Italy led by Garibaldi and Mazzini, and she reported on the fighting, which she witnessed first-hand, thus making her the first professional war correspondent. In one of her last dispatches she made an impassioned plea to Americans to prize and guard their democracy and to extend their support to others:
Be on the alert! Rest not supine in your easier lives, but remember, Mankind is one, and beats with one great heart.
When the revolution was defeated, she fled from Rome and determined to return to America in order to write a history of the failed Italian revolution. In 1850 she wrote:
I am absurdly fearful and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling … It seems to me that my future upon earth will soon close … I have a vague expectation of some crisis—I know not what.
On May 17th she set sail across the Atlantic with her husband and son but, tragically, on July 19th the ship hit a sandbar just one hundred yards from Fire Island off New York State, and all three were drowned. Margaret was just 40 years old. Only Angelino’s body was recovered. A memorial to Margaret was erected on Fire Island. It reads:
By birth a child of New England
By adoption a citizen of Rome
By genius belonging to the world
Strangely, almost the final line of her book Women in the Nineteenth Century is a quotation from an unspecified source:
Though many have suffered shipwreck, still beat noble hearts.
Let us hope and pray that, one hundred years from now, when Unitarians are celebrating the tercentenary of her birth, the noble heart of Margaret Fuller, her genius and her contribution to feminist thought, will be more widely appreciated than they are today.
30th May 2010