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 gender-equality 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 (1837-1844); and a correspondent for the New York Tribune, Fuller was the movement’s foremost female voice. 

The only known daguerreotype of Margaret Fuller (by John Plumbe,1846)

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 barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to women as freely as to men.”³  

Following her assignment as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune and embroilment in the Italian Revolution, Fuller’s return to America in 1850 held potential promise for her leadership in the women’s rights movement then gaining momentum, with the Worcester convention scheduled three months later. Tragically, Fuller’s death (along with that of her domestic partner and their son) in a shipwreck off the shore of Fire Island, New York, thwarted all such hopes of her involvement, but Fuller’s feminist energy lived on as an inspiration. Her students Ednah Dow Cheney and Caroline Healy Dall became leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, and prominent figures, such as Pauline Davis, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, recognized her influence.⁴  Fuller’s ideas offered possibilities for “new womanhood.”

The impact of Ms. Fuller’s work continued on long after her passing – culminating in the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting the right to vote to all women

Suffragists were among the literary pilgrims who made Concord their destination, adopting the town’s symbols of political and literary revolution to their own fight for independence.⁵ The living legacy of Transcendentalism was a welcoming invitation to generations of women wanting to exercise their own minds. Female intellectuals and reform-minded women could visit the Emerson House (a home ironically divided over women’s rights, with Lidian Emerson a local leader of the movement and her daughter Ellen opposed), as if in the footsteps of Margaret Fuller.  Louisa May Alcott, the first woman to vote in Concord’s school board election in 1880, noted the many “M. Fullers’ in white muslin” drawn to the Concord School of Philosophy, which welcomed both female presenters and audiences.⁶ Alcott’s father, Bronson, who founded the school, was a colleague of Fuller’s. He called her “the most remarkable woman of our time,” a model to the “benefit of many young women.”⁷  Although Fuller never resided in the town, a 1903 tourist guidebook even promoted a “Margaret Fuller house” on Concord’s Main Street.⁸

Fuller’s feminist ideals remain modern and relevant. Again, amidst debates over national prosperity and disunion, in 2020 – the one-hundredth anniversary of the 19th amendment - Fuller’s arguments for the protection of women’s citizenship and human rights to their own bodies and life choices remain prescient to social dialogues. So, too, does her belief in a gender-fluid humanity.  Margaret Fuller’s voice is one for the 21st century.

 Photos © Wikimedia Commons

NOTES

 ¹Fuller, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” 1845.  ²Ibid. ³Ibid. ⁴Phyllis Cole, “The Nineteenth–Century Women’s Rights Movement and the Canonization of Margaret Fuller,” ESQ:  A Journal of the American Renaissance, (No.  27, 1998): 1-28. ⁵Todd H. Richardson, “‘Another protest that shall be ‘heard round the world’:’ The Woman’s Journal and Woman’s Pilgrimages in Concord, Massachusetts,” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, Vol. 23 (2015), 20 – 49. ⁶Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, Madeline Stern, Eds. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997), 235; Tiffany Wayne, “The Concord school of Philosophy and the Feminization of Transcendentalism after the Civil War,” Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America, (Lantham: Lexington Books, 2005), 107-128.  ⁷Richard L. Herrnstadt, Ed. The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, (The Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, 1969), 541. ⁸Souvenir & Guide to Historic Concord and Lexington, (Concord, MA: John F. Craig, 1903).