Margaret Fuller
The name of Margaret Fuller may not register with many people, especially the younger generation; but her story needs to be updated and brought into the limelight once again; for she was an extraordinary woman and American pioneer – not only for the causes she fought for and the books she wrote, but for her life itself, which was a struggle to manifest all her hidden powers as a woman, in a time – the early part of the nineteenth century – when women’s roles were strictly defined and limited.
She wrote: “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.”
She had a brilliant mind. Her early education was administered by her father, and it was not until she was about nine that she began her formal education. By her early 30s, she had earned a reputation as the best-read person, male or female, in New England. She was a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and for two years, beginning in 1840, she was the editor of the “The Dial”, the journal of the Transcendentalist Movement, among such compatriots as Henry David Thoreau, Emerson, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody, Louisa May Alcott, William Ellery Channing, and others.
In 1844 she joined Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune as a literary critic, and in 1846 became the publication’s first female editor. She wrote about art and literature, politics, the slavery issue, and women’s rights.
In 1839, she began the first of a famous series of “conversations” among local women in Boston. She wanted to compensate these women for the lack of women’s education, with discussions and debates on the fine arts, history, mythology, literature and nature. She said she intended also to answer the “great questions” facing women: “What were we born to do?” and “How shall we do it?”
Her most famous work was “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”, which is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.
She wrote: “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”
Born and raised in a climate where doors everywhere were closed to women, she carved out a life for herself and spent her great energy attempting to open those doors to other women as well.
In “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”, she commented on the state of life in America:
“My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal.
“We doubt not the destiny of our country — that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.”
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two of the greatest American social reformers and women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century, wrote of Margaret Fuller:
“She possessed more influence on the thought of American women than any woman previous to her time.”
Margaret Fuller had a vision of America and of Americans that still adds to the vision of what America will eventually become and be.
