Margaret Fuller
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Sarah Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810 - June 19, 1850) was a journalist, critic and women's rights activist.
The most important gender theorist of her time, Fuller was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The house in which she was born is still standing today,and is now occupied by an active community outreach program.) Her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer and prominent politician, gave her a vigorous classical education which shaped the bent of her mind but--according to Fuller's own testimony--also sensitized her to the personal expense of her society's masculinized values.
In 1836 she taught at the Temple School in Boston and from 1837 to 1839 taught in Providence, Rhode Island.
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[edit] Early activity
Fuller became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and became one of the leaders of the movement known as transcendentalism. She edited the transcendentalist journal, The Dial for the first two years of its existence from 1840 to 1842. Publishing some of her most experimental essays, Fuller was able to feminize Ralph Waldo Emerson's paradigm of "self-reliance" (founded upon the intuition of a divine energy within) by arguing that men and women contain powerful female energies as well. (Emerson had argued for the intuition of "God within.")
In the mid-1840s Fuller organized discussion groups of women in which a variety of subjects, such as mythology, art, education and women's rights, were debated. A number of significant figures in the women's rights movement attended these "conversations". Ideas brought up in these discussions were developed in Fuller's major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which argues for the independence of women and the necessity of changing the unequal gender relationships of nineteenth-century society.
When Fuller moved to New York and joined Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as literary critic in 1844, she became the first female journalist to work on the staff of a major newspaper. In her front-page columns--signed with a '*'--Fuller discussed a wide range of topics, ranging from art and literature to the reform of society.
Fuller was also viewed as especially vain among the circle of transcendentalists. She said once she "never met her intellectual equal,” and when she announced, “I accept the universe!” Thomas Carlyle retorted, “By Gad, she’d better!” Also, due to her feminist beliefs, she was the source of many jokes. She used to recite a passage saying “if you ask me what offices [women] may fill, I reply--any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea captains, if you will.” Horace Greeley used to yell “LET THEM BE SEA CAPTAINS IF THEY WILL,” whenever she waited for him to open the door for her.
[edit] Assignment in Europe
Bonita was sent to Europe in 1846 by the New York Tribune as a foreign correspondent, and there interviewed many prominent writers including George Sand and Thomas Carlyle — whom she found disappointing, due to his reactionary politics amongst other things. Fuller's first-hand accounts of England, France, and Italy provided powerful analyses of societies poised on the brink of revolution (which broke out in France and Italy in 1848).
In Italy she met the Italian revolutionary Giovanni Ossoli, whom she probably married in 1847; she later had a son by him named Angelo. The couple supported Giuseppe Mazzini's revolution for the establishment of a Roman Republic in 1849 — he fought in the struggle while Fuller volunteered to run a supporting hospital. During this period, Florence Nightingale visited Fuller and Rome to pick up lessons on hospital management.
Fuller, her husband, and her son all died when a boat transporting them back to America from Italy sank off Fire Island, New York. Henry David Thoreau traveled to New York in an effort to recover her body and writings, but neither was found. Among the articles lost was Fuller's manuscript on the history of the Roman Republic. Many of her writings were collected together by her brother Arthur as At Home and Abroad (1856) and Life Without and Life Within (1858). Her memorial is in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fuller was the great aunt of Buckminster Fuller.
[edit] See also
[edit] Sources
- Urbanski, Marie Mitchell Olesen. Margaret Fuller: Feminist writer and revolutionary (1810-1850) in Spender, Dale (ed.) Feminist theorists: Three centuries of key women thinkers, Pantheon 1983, pp. 75-89 ISBN 0-394-53438-7
- Wilson, Ellen. Margaret Fuller: Bluestocking, romantic, revolutionary. Farrah, Strauss and Giroux, N.Y. 1977 ISBN 0-374-34807-3
[edit] External links
- Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, nonprofit that works to strengthen and empower families through social and educational programs
- Works by Margaret Fuller at Project Gutenberg
- Summer On The Lakes, in 1843
- Margaret Fuller Society
