fuller's influence on early feminism in the usa

8/13/2019 Fuller's Influence on early Feminism in the USA

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Margaret Fullers influence on early feminism

The West Street shop where we meet made conversation possible in two ways: literal talk took

place here, most famously among the women of Fullers circle, but in addition people discovered

each other and their mutual possibilities across time and space through the voices-in-print of

books. It seems to me the very walls echo with both kinds of voices. Certainly Margaret Fullergave herself deeply to the two kinds of conversation, and the feminist vision of Woman in the

Nineteenth Century grew directly from them. Imagine her in 1843 going from the conversations

she led here on West Street back home to Ellery Street in Cambridge, where she was reading

everything from current news to ancient world classics in search of insight about women, their

wrongs and their potential. All this as she composed The Great Lawsuit for the Dial, then a

year later began enlarging it into a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, even before leaving

Boston for New York.

Moving in that spirit, Id like to enlarge the conversation by asking how she engaged otherfeminists, both before her and after. Most of all, how does her work respond to that of her two

greatest feminist predecessors, Mary Wollstonecraft and the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke,

and in turn what did her work mean to the activists who organized a womens rights movement

in America just as she died prematurely in 1850? Ive been asking such questions for about a

dozen years and this coming year hope to bring the puzzle pieces together in a book. Ive

discovered that, amidst a great outpouring of well deserved attention to Fuller as a

transcendentalist and mystic, there has not been much written about her as a contributor to the

feminist tradition as a whole. Fullerites dont pay much attention to Wollstonecraft, the

Grimkes, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, while the history and political science types who study

these other women rarely give more than a passing nod to Fullers intellectually complex and

rhapsodic writing. One group thinks about the civil rights of women, the other, womens soul.

As Charles Capper, Fullers biographer, puts it, she is strangely missing from feminist

histories, as if her book floated somewhere above the movements turbulent waters. So lets

celebrate Fuller tonight by also celebrating Wollstonecraftthat British radical of the 1790s who

not only wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman but then joined the French Revolution

and, scandalously, had a child out of wedlockand Sarah and Angelina Grimk those

daughters of South Carolina slavery who reinvented themselves in turn as Quakers, public

lecturers against slavery, and feminist advocates. In a word, Fuller both learned enormously

from these older sisters and moved beyond them in ways that would prove crucial to the future offeminism.

All three writers really did speak of womens civil rights. After all, Fullers feminist essay

was first entitled The Great Lawsuit; and in both versions of this manifesto she declares that a

human inheritance has been lost, now urging its recovery in ever higher courts. Indeed, she

invokes the divine law that will undo injustice on earth. She herself is the lawgiver by

theocratic commission who argues the case. Of course all this is an elaborate metaphora


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wonderfully ironic one, since according to nineteenth century Common Law of womens

coverture, the very essence of a womans civil nonexistence was her incapacity to sue or be

sued. Thats why Fuller needs make her lawsuit a great one, directed to higher courts of the

universe than are ruled by Common Law. The mythic and philosophical Fuller offers solutions

to the active deprivations of women in the most concrete, this-worldly senses. And this aspect

and tone of voice brings her quite directly in touch with Wollstonecraft, with her vindication of

women, and Angelina Grimk with her appeal for them. All three are raising public voices

where the public has not granted voice, urging their persuasive cases against the business as

usual of female dependence and dispossession. Of the three, Id add, Fullers metaphor of

presenting a lawsuit is actually the most confrontational.

What then does she have in common with Wollstonecraft? First of all, because of her

scandalous life, Wollstonecraft was not an easy ally. Fuller had grown up knowing of her; all

she needed to do in childhood was read her fathers letters home from Washington (as she almost

surely did) to get the double message. Within the same week Timothy Fuller described

Vindication as a sensible and just guide to female educationindeed, it was a major influence

on his extraordinary ongoing program for Margaretand a book that, on account of its authors

libertine life, no woman dares to read. Both in Timothys day and still in Margarets,

Wollstonecraft was widely discredited; and as a result, in her book about law, Fuller calls her an

outlaw, a woman whose existence better proved the need of some new interpretation of

womans rights, than any thing she wrote. Any woman wishing to reform others, Fuller goes

on, must be unstained by passionate error. In fact she brings up Wollstonecraft not in the

midst of her own basic arguments for women, but in describing the marriage of intellectual

companionship that the loyal husband William Godwin proved by defending his wife after herdeath. According to Fuller, it was because William could value Marys inner life that their

marriage seemed the sign of a new era. In later years Fuller would act out life choices

uncannily like Wollstonecrafts, almost act out her script, giving birth to her own child amidst

revolution. But she identifies with no such libertinism in 1844.

What she does instead is to draw silently on a significant portion of the language and ideas of

this first, truly founding vindication of womans rights. For example, Wollstonecraft declares

that women are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties, not to fulfill the prevailing

opinion, that woman was created for man. Fuller in turn protests that only a rare man can riseabove the belief that woman was made for man.What woman needs isto unfold such powers

as were given her when we left our common home. Both feminist writers primarily, forcefully

urge womens intellectual development, not just through formal education but through a

remaking of the mind itself. This kind of echoing is not plagiarism, but implicit

acknowledgement of a mentor.


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Beyond similarity of language lie deep resonances of principle. Wollstonecraft is directly

grounded in liberty, experiencing the French Revolution as her immediate scene of commitment;

half a century later, Fuller finds in the French Revolution her first evidence that as the principle

of liberty is better understooda broader protest is made in behalf of Woman. Wollstonecraft

and Fuller are both utopian thinkers, looking to future transformation of human nature itself.

The British feminist affirms that all will be right, if it is not so as yet. And in doing so she

engages passion and imagination as well as Age-of-Enlightenment reason. A wild wish has just

flown from my heart to my head, she writes, I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex

confounded in society. Not only the content of that wild wish but its very flight from heart to

head is Fullers debt to her. And while Fuller augments the older wish into a trans-historical,

religious quest, her predecessor also affirms the divine intent behind her own vision: These

may be termed Utopian dreams, writes Wollstonecraft. Thanks to that Being who impressed

them upon my soul.

Such a sense of Wollstonecraft sets in relief both Fullers grounding as a feminist in the age of

revolutions and her leap beyond that earlier utopian wish into fully Romantic constructions of the

soul and universe. Wollstonecraft knew something about Romanticism too, finding her chief

adversary in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who offered only male representatives of the human race to

embody a vibrant conception of natural, independent virtue. This was Rousseaus opinion

respecting men, she declares; I extend it to women. Fuller may have learned from that bold

act of appropriation how to deal with male mentors of her own, like Emerson and Goethe. In

Wollstonecrafts world, all the virtues were masculine, so, she said, let women be more

masculine. Fuller finds a much greater prophetic power in the female, in Muse, even whilealso allowing women to become masculine as Minerva. But then she also redefines the sexes as

a great radical dualism, continuous and open to negotiation for every man and every woman.

It was her Romantic faith in the openness of soul to the divine universe that, fifty years after

Wollstonecraft, allowed for such possibility.

In those fifty years, much closer to Fuller than to Wollstonecraft, Sarah and Angelina Grimk

also raised their voices and took up their pens in defense of women. They were not conscious

revolutionaries, let alone sexual rebels. But from the grounding of Quaker faith, they dared an

equally radical act in their public, vocal opposition to slavery. Their 1837 season of lectures inMassachusetts had seismic repercussions because in response the Congregational Clergy issued a

Pastoral Letter condemning public speech by women as a violation of their Biblically defined

sphere. And the womens responses drew battle lines for an immediate and long-term struggle

over womens right to public voice. Margaret Fuller crossed paths with them in Concord in

1837, at a time when her own primary attention was still on Ralph Waldo Emersons American

Scholar address, but his wife Lidian (her host) was simultaneously inviting the Grimks for tea


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and joining townswomen in planning an antislavery society. Fuller recorded no impression of

them then, but her writing of the 1840s had most assuredly caught up on the significance of these

recent protests.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft, Angelina Grimk appears in Fullers Woman in the NineteenthCentury as a relatively brief allusion, occurring at a moment in mid-stream that suggests rather

than encompasses her larger debt to the two sisters. Cataloguing current motions that overflow

upon our land, Fuller tells of women who speak in publicfor conscience sake, and in

particular Angelina. Indeed, this brief appearance is part of a theme developed throughout the

essay of Quaker women pleading their holy cause of abolition, and at the end she draws in her

readers, too, as Exaltadasexalted oneswho must oppose the annexation of Texas with the

same boldness as the abolitionist women, rather than risking offense to God. Fuller is

amplifying the voice of Angelina Grimk to Romantic registers of power for herself and readers

alike.

However, just as with Wollstonecraft, theres more Grimk in Fullers argument than she

acknowledges explicitly. In particular, she never mentions Sarah Grimk, the writer who

decisively turned moral agency to feminist pleading and provided her with an invaluable

ideological source. Fullers lawsuit depends significantly upon Sarahs arguments in Letters

on the Equality of the Sexes, written amidst that forbidden speaking tour of 1837. Never as

confident a public speaker as her younger sister, Sarah was the legal analyst of the pair, laying

bare the Common Law of married womens coverture in a cogent form that would echo

through subsequent American and British feminist arguments. She quotes directly from the

highest British authority, Sir William Blackstone, and dissects his logic to show womens

suspension of legal existence as a form of abuse and degradation at one with slavery. Legaldisempowerment, she argues, destroys womans responsibilityas a moral being. She does

not evoke tyranny or revolution and never even shows awareness of Wollstonecrafts previous

manifesto. But this second major beginning of feminist argument hinges equally upon abuse of

power and is just as enraged. Both content and tone are crucial to Fuller, who directly mimics

parts of Grimks argument as she makesher primary case for womans need. It may be an

Anti-Slavery party that pleads for woman, she asserts, if we consider merely that she does not

hold property on equal terms with men. Like Grimk, Fuller offers a litany from first person

witness of husbands robbing their wives earnings. Even though she promises rhetorically not to

speak directly of them, she cannot resist speaking, for the subject makes me feel too much.

But, Fuller also expresses the large ideals of personhood within marriage that will givenew hope and destiny to women. If principles could be established, she concludes,

particulars would adjust themselves. Thats where she goes beyond Grimk. Fuller is a

Romantic in both feeling too much and moving from mere fee ling to universal principles that

promise redress. Her transcendental idealism is a means of at once releasing the inner self from

emotional turmoil and addressing problems at the root: trust in self and universal justice

amounts to a non-conflictual strategy for change. Her argument and Grimks might be


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considered complementary, sequential steps in such a strategy. Grimk clears space with a

negative critique, responding in explicit, lawyer-like detail to the edicts of male authority: first

the Massachusetts Pastoral Letter and its attempted prohibition of womens speech, then

Blackstone and his legal definition of womens moral non-being. While alluding

knowledgeably to both controversies, Fuller rehearses neither one, but instead steps beyond them

by calling forth womens actual voices, arising from podium and printed page, and claiming their

harmony with natural law. She evokes such a law but does not just write like a lawyer, adding to

her Grimk-esque argument satiric and celebratory portraits of her own making. Her early

speech for womens rights is preceded by dialogue with a smugly possessive husband and

followed by conversation with Miranda, the self-reliant woman who would have all women share

her riches of knowledge.

In the religious bedrock that makes such self-reliance possible, Woman in the Nineteenth

Century also advances a conversation begun by Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. Grimks

tract is intensely scriptural, a feminist commentary on Americas Second Great Awakening

orthodoxy. I am in search of truth, Grimk avows on her first page, and shall depend solely

on the Bible to designate the sphere of woman. But her reading of Genesis and Paul is highly

revisionary, critiquing the perverted interpretation that underwrites womens subjection with

apparently sacred authority. She affirms the equality of female and male in Gods creation and

their equal guilt in the fall, reading as mere prediction rather than command Gods word to Eve

that she will be subject to Adam. She responds to Pauls command for women to keep silence

in the church by reciting womens gift of prophecy throughout the Bible and Pauls positive

guidelines for its practice. Such a reading of scripture frames her withering response to the

Pastoral Letter, where she bypasses clerical authority in favor of Jesus injunction to Come untome and learn of me, then recalls the direct word of God, Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice

like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression. Given such scriptural words, no

woman of faith would dare be anything but a public reformer.

Immersed in New Critical and Romantic approaches to the Bible as poetry rather than

revelation, Fuller does not join Grimk in patient argument. But she is more like Grimk than

Wollstonecraft in engaging with the Bibles patterns of prophecy and millennial possibility.

Acknowledging the fall only as a projection of the severe race that created the Bible, she finds

that even they greeted, with solemn rapture, all great and holy women as heroines, prophetesses,

judges in Israel. Instead of a fall, there has been a loss of the divine inheritance; still,

however, a future Eden awaits its recovery. In that recovery she combines elements of theJudaeo-Christian tradition with other nations by affirming Sita, Isis and the Greek pantheon

alongside Eve and Mary. Fuller lays out the content as well as capacity of womans holy voice

across world cultures and eras. But, as with Grimk, the language of Jesus provides a touchstone

for her hope: This is the law and the prophets. Knock and it shall be opened, seek and ye shall

find.

In Fullers hands prophecy turns primarily from Grimks indictment of iniquity to such


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seeking and finding. She writes with a utopian confidence outside her predecessors range;

neither Quaker conviction nor antislavery politics gives Grimk such possibility. The Letters

end without vision of Gods kingdom, but only with a call for woman to labor against sin in a

fallen world. Each letter closes identically, Thine in the bonds of womanhood; her arguments

do not loosen those bonds. In this sense Fullers greater affinity lies with Wollstonecraft, who

sees the world opening to revolutionary change. However, Fullers confidence in transformative

possibility far surpasses both. Souls can discover their own power and their creators law,

allowing the prescriptions of church and state simply to be overwhelmed by the higher truth of

equality. As she says, There is but onelaw for souls, enfranchising both woman and African

slave, and this law cannot fail of universal recognition.

Possibly Fullers greatest gift to nascent feminism is this rhetoric of expectancy as a means to

its own fulfillment. Such optimism both arises from self-reliance and directs the self outward to

social change. Both of her predecessors ask for the support of powerful men in changing the

status quo. Our brethren are called upon, Grimk writes, by every sentiment of honor,

religion, and justice, to repeal these unjust and unequal laws. Despite her radicalism,

Wollstonecraft concludes similarly: Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues

of man.Be just then, O ye men of understanding! Fuller asks men for attention but does not

depend on their power. When she uses the verb let it is to proclaim rather than ask

permission: But if you ask me what offices [women] might fill; I replyany. I do not care

what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will. She is not asking permission; her

sentence is syntactically parallel to let there be light. Likewise she lays down a queenly

mandate of hopefulness: We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have

every path laid open to woman as freely as to man. Giving voice to such possibilities is herunique way of pleading the cause.

In the years of conventions that produced an politically active transatlantic feminist

movement, between Stantons 1848 gathering at Seneca Falls and the Civil Wars opening, all of

our early writers had either died or (with the Grimks) gone into retirement. But all were

influential. To put it briefly, Stantons Declaration of Sentiments learned its rhetoric of liberty

and tyranny from Wollstonecraft, its argument about the ways the law obliterated women from

Sarah Grimk, and her affirmation of divinely originated self-respect from Fuller. We can be

certain of the Fuller influence because, as I discovered some years ago, Stantons first speech forthe movement that year took whole sentences from Woman in the Nineteenth Century:

sentences of inspiration calling upon women to live first for Gods sake, urging that they

persist to ask and it will come. Through her long career, Stanton did not completely embrace

Fuller. She rarely mentioned her, and in one overtly hostile moment quoted Theodore Parker

remembering how Fuller would twaddle forth about art and the soul to gawky girls and long -

haired young men. Quite a picture of Fullers conversations! But in writing the History of


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Woman Suffrage, she did list Fuller as well as Wollstonecraft and the Grimks among those to

whom she dedicated the work, and she called Fuller a precursor especially in her vindication

of womans right to think. That phrase made Fuller a clear partner of that other precursor and

vindicator, Wollstonecraft. Finally, near the end of Stantons life, when the once warring Boston

and New York factions of the womens rights movement had rejoined, they gathered in 1901 to

dedicate a memorial to Fullers life at the scene of her death on Fire Island, and Stanton wrote to

the Boston Womans Journal honoring Fuller as one I knew and admired. I had the

privilege, she now acknowledged for the first time, of enjoying many of her famous

conversations. So picture young Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others, in this room about

1843.

But it was the Bostonians, disciples of Fullers transcendentalism and feminism, who really

kept her memory alive throughout the nineteenth century. I have time for only a few snapshots.

In May, 1870 the recently formed New England Womans Club began the custom of celebrating

Fullers birthday in their elegant new quarters, shared with the Womans Journal and American

Woman Suffrage Association, just off of Beacon Street near the State House. Amidst banks offlowers and memorial recollections were placards with words of Fullers lettered upon them:

We must have units before we can have union. We would have every path open to woman as

freely as to man. For this group, at least some of them spiritualists, it was almost as though she

had not died at all. Maybe the most uncanny report is from William Henry Channing in the early

1870s, that a day of thinking of his old friend made him feel possessed by her spirit. I speak to

you, he told a Boston audience, not as a man, but as a woman. I am speaking as Margaret

Fuller would have spoken. In their politics, religious activism, and writing, Fullers disciples

including the young women who attended her conversationsworked on her strength. Caroline

Healey Dall in fact wrote a history of feminism with Fuller at the center. Thinking specifically of

her relation to Wollstonecraft, Dall wrote, [Margaret Fuller] caught the rumor which floated insubtle discord all around her. That lovely sentence perfectly catches her way of listening to the

conversation and then venturing her own word.

There is much more to tell of this afterlife of Margaret Fuller, but tonight is not the time.

Let me leap ahead to a conclusion in the making: that Fullers legacy has indeed continued to

live on through both direct and subterranean channels into the Second and Third Waves of

feminism in our own lifetimes. No other founder of American or transatlantic feminism was as

early and strong as she in affirming identity and consciousnessconsciousness raising, we

might call itas the foundation of any movement for womens wider lives. No other feministmade the claim, integral to an affirmation of the human race, that gender was not fixed but fluid,

that women could be like men and men like women. No other feminist saw the possibilities of

utopian transformation so clearly, and based it on such faith in the fluid potential of human and

divine nature. In all these ways she drew upon her predecessors Wollstonecraft and Grimk but

went beyond them, so making a great difference both to her immediate feminist heirs and to us

today

fuller's influence on early feminism in the usa

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