“The Most Remarkable Woman of Our Time” Margaret Fuller, Transcendental Feminism, and Women’s Rights
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BY DR. KRISTI LYNN MARTIN
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a “feminist” before the word existed. Fuller’s father rigorously educated his eldest child as if she were a son, bestowing on her a formative belief in the genderequality of the mind and spurring her own career as a teacher. In her thirties, Fuller’s erudite reputation preceded her as a leader in the emerging Transcendentalist movement, a philosophy that revitalized the role of the individual in society in the decades preceding the American Civil War. Along with Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Ripley, Abigail May Alcott, and Lidian Emerson, Fuller was among those women who actively shaped Transcendentalism and used its impetus to further social aims. Concord, Massachusetts was a sometime home to these women, excepting Fuller, who nonetheless spent significant time at the Emerson house, visiting with the Hawthornes at the historic “Old Manse”, and with her sister and brother-in-law, poet Ellery Channing. As protégée of Ralph Waldo Emerson; editor of the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial; leader of a public conversational series (183736
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1844); and a correspondent for the New York Tribune, Fuller was the movement’s foremost female voice. She used education and her writing to empower women. A journalist and author of several books, most notably Women in the Nineteenth Century (based on an 1843 Dial article expanded in 1845, three years before the Seneca Falls convention), Fuller argued for the enfranchisement of women and the emancipation of humanity from confining gender roles. She appealed to the Transcendentalist ideals - promoting cultivation of the individual, an Emersonian self-reliance, and a reform impulse - as a means to feminist empowerment. Having struggled to support her family following the death of her father, Fuller was keenly aware of the societal inadequacies that did not recognize women’s equality with men. To improve their condition, women needed “legal protection.” Fuller argued for their recognition as full citizens, and, further, as autonomous individuals and sexual beings.1 Eschewing arguments based in women’s moral superiority, Fuller made women’s
rights a human rights issue. Opponents defended the sanctity of women’s place in the domestic sphere and characterized public life as a threat to familial harmony (they contended, much as abolition disrupted the national economy and union). Fuller decried “ludicrous” imaginings of “ladies in hysterics at the polls, and the senate chambers filled with cradles.” She reasoned that a woman was not merely the hand or the heart of the family, but she had a head of her own – and natural law demanded her divine right to use it. Fuller argued that women’s choices were not matters beholden to societal or male approval, but to a woman’s own “consent” as an individual being.2 In a world where women had little legal recourse and were themselves considered property, Fuller embarked on a high-minded and Transcendentalist search for spiritual remediation and social justice. Women and men were, in Fuller’s Transcendentalist view, no less than equal and androgynous souls, universal beings bound by cultural constructions of biology. She boldly declared, “We would have every arbitrary
