Happy Birthday, Margaret Fuller

Friday, May 23rd marks the 204th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Fuller, literary icon and “America’s first true feminist.” Fuller, born in Cambridge in 1810, is lately enjoying a bit of a renaissance. She was a female editor in a man’s world of letters far earlier than Jill Abramson, and was leading women in small-group discussions and empowering tutorials two centuries before Sheryl Sandberg.

On the occasion of her bicentennial, fans and historians spread the word about Fuller’s legacy of sharp (often confrontational) writing and revolutionary social activism. This year, Megan Marshall won a Pulitzer Prize for her expansive biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.

Back in Issue 20 of The Baffler, Kim Phillips-Fein wrote about Fuller when another biography was published by John Matteson. Her essay, “The Threshold of Joy,” which is accompanied by a portrait of Fuller by David Johnson, begins like this:

Margaret Fuller was thirty-three and suffering from migraines when she wrote “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” a manifesto on behalf of sexual equality, and saw it published in The Dial, the journal founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson whose editorship she had recently resigned. The article, expanded into a book and published in 1845 under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century, made its stirring claim to equal rights in the rhetoric of transcendentalism, according to which the self was limitless and unbounded, with each human being containing the possibility of divine perfection.

Fuller, far from limiting her vision to political or legal equality, saw sexual inequality in terms of its corrosive power to destroy not only love, marriage, and family relationships, but also the inner or existential lives of women. Sexual hierarchy robbed women of “the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe, to use its means, to learn its secret as far as nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and their judge.” In the book-length version, she wrote of little girls encouraged to play with feminine toys; of society’s unfair denigration of single women (or “old maids”), whom she argued could play an important social role; and of the necessity of widening the range of occupations open to women. Most of all, she wrote of how the psychological and economic dependence of women trapped them as permanent children, a condition that stunted their spirits and therefore held back the whole development of humanity. For male and female souls were entwined; masculine and feminine “energies” spilled into each other. Men and women were thought to occupy two separate spheres, two entirely different ways of being in the world, “but, in fact,” Fuller wrote, “they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

Read Phillips-Fein’s piece in its entirety here.