Margaret Fuller: Pioneering Muckraker of The Antebellum Reform

Recently, the now infamous quote by Mitch McConnell about Elizabeth Warren has stricken the hearts and minds of many of America’s gender equality movements. “Nevertheless, she persisted” was said in an attempt to scold Senator Warren, but instead resulted in a positive backlash from women across the nation, many who have felt silenced or oppressed. Although it holds very modern connotations, the phrase can still be applied to women of the feminist movements of the 19th century—Sarah Margaret Fuller was one such woman. Following Fuller’s enlightened upbringing within her political household and frustrations with her secondary female status, a new national renaissance fueled new transcendentalist and humanitarian values in the Antebellum Era. Fuller utilized her political and literary background to convey her philosophical reflections of critics there before her—ultimately helping to expose the glossy façade of America’s gilded age.

“Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow” (Fuller).

Already, at a young age, Margaret Fuller was phenomenally ahead of her female contemporaries in both literature and philosophy. Her father, Timothy Fuller, “fostered in Margaret his own passion for accuracy, [which] set masculine ideals of character for his daughter” (4, 12). Fuller was being taught how to write, contemplate, and debate like many of the males in the Antebellum Era, giving her an early advantage that would set her platform for her future career as an author. In contrast to the male-dominant society of her upbringing, Fuller views herself as a man’s mind in a woman’s heart (9, 3). The concept exposes how as Margaret was growing up, the only peers amongst her at her educational level were male, but ultimately her heart was one of intense passion and complexity no man could match. Her father was a prominent lawyer and later a Congressman. She attended several schools and continued to educate herself, learning German and Italian, and would soon do translations of Goethe and Bettina von Arnim. (13, 4). Fuller’s vast and intense educational background would prove to provide her a significant advantage throughout her future career as a writer, journalist, and overseas correspondent.

Although it seems that with her high society father, and world-class educational uprising Fuller’s life should have just been an easy upbringing. However, with the second class citizen standard for women still prominent in her social environment, Fuller found herself in many positions that are overwhelmingly male dominant. She openly reiterates that she knows she is fortunate enough to have the privileges of education and a job in a workplace she enjoys, and when asked what office she felt women should fulfill she responded, “Any... let them be sea captains if you will. I do not doubt that there are women well fitted for such an office” (2, 6). The middle ages of Fuller’s lifetime were when America began to fully acknowledge the oppressive sexism associated with women’s lack of education. The enlightenment period brought about the significance of education for all women—despite race or class status. Oberlin was “one of the few places at which African American women could receive an education. Between 1835 and 1865, at least 140 African-American women attended Oberlin College, many of whom were former slaves” (6, 3).

Frances Wright is a prime example of how women were not taken seriously in the 19th Century. This cartoon, featuring Wright as a goose was designed to humiliate her, and keep her from speaking her mind. Although slandered harshly by the press, Wright could not be deterred. Despite public protest, Wright continued to give lectures. She called for equality for women, freedom for slaves, and free education for all children. She passionately declared: “Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it” (3, 6). Her perspective connects to Fuller’s argument for the spirituality of women, the “immortal beings” that are compelled to forget about their nature to grow, as an intellect to think for itself, and a soul to live freely.

Education and feminism were both significant ideologies that inspired Fuller to pursue a career as a social advocacy journalist, however, the most dominant philosophy she believed in was transcendentalism. It is known that Emerson was the fountainhead of the transcendental wave of spirituality. Many of his works dealt with humanistic and romanticist concepts, and one of his major legacies is his firm belief in mortal spirituality. This happens also to Margaret Fuller. Her life can be seen as an effort to find what she used to call “sovereign self” (5, 2). The key to her character and the secret of her strong individual influence and fiery sympathies was the power of the soul to receive and evoke. Fuller also sustained the idea that the soul of the human being is perverted and annihilated by society, and that after living among other humans and depending on the system, one becomes unaware of their inner resources and powers, leading them to confusion and overall chaos (4, 2). Margaret Fuller’s transcendentalist uprising would prove to be evident in her writings later on in her journalistic career after her marriage to Giovanni Angelo, where her platform was used to advocate for the reformation of New York City. “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion” (3, 9).

When Fuller first arrived in New York City, she said one of her first assignments was to “survey the institutions here of a remedial and benevolent kind” (8, 3). She visited these institutions and wrote a series of articles describing holidays at the institutions. Fuller tinged her reports with romantic irony. She went to church services at Sing Sing prison on Christmas and Thanksgiving, as well as visited the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane on Valentines Day (5, 12). She in many ways ends up abandoning transcendentalism and instead decides to focus on a more rapid, ongoing goal. In the “Twenty-Fifth Report of the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane” Fuller stated her general philosophy on the reform of institutions. She believed “that criminals, the insane, or the destitute improved when they received kind treatment, good living conditions, education, and respect. Harsh treatment made them worse” (3, 2). However, in 1848 reformer Dorothea Dix toured Bloomingdale and described a much harsher place with overcrowded wards and inadequate physical facilities and supervision.

When Margaret Fuller left New York for Europe in August of 1846, many of her contemporaries assumed that she had abandoned American life permanently and that her dispatches from London, Paris, and revolutionary Rome signaled her turn away from a national agenda in literature and criticism. The fact that Fuller herself never returned to American shores has led scholars to conclude that the body of her journalistic work overseas, like her physical body, could not be “repatriated” (5, 7). On the eve of the 1848 uprisings in Italy, Austria, and France, Fuller plunged into the turmoil. No longer the “outsider” she had seemed in New England, she felt at home in Italy, free to express her fullest sense of self. When war broke out, she saw a role for herself “either as actor or historian” (3, 4). To her, the revolution meant freedom and human rights for the laboring class and for women. She rededicated herself to Rome, “City of the Soul,” and sent vivid eye-witness reports to the Tribune.

In her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller discusses the state of marriage in America during the 1800‘s. She is “a victim of her own knowledge, and is considered unattractive simply because of her wisdom. She feels that if certain stereotypes can be broken down, women can have the respect of men intellectually, physically, and emotionally. She explains why some of the inequalities exist in marriages around her” (8, 10). Her perspective conveys that once women are accepted as equals, men and women will be able to achieve a true love not yet known to the people of the world. Fuller personifies what is wrong with the thoughts of people in nineteenth-century society. She is a well-educated, attractive woman and yet, in America, she is considered unmarriageable because of the unintended intimidation her knowledge brings forth. She can’t understand why men would not want to find a woman with whom they can carry on an intelligent, meaningful conversation and still be physically attracted to. She knows that once this inferiority complex is gotten past, women will start to excel in all different fields (7, 8). The intense passion of her message in Women in the 19th Century blows away both her male and female audience alike. “She could not be absorbed, she had to be dealt with” (9, 10).

Another long lasting legacy that Fuller was a part of were her contemporary salon sessions with other women, and later on men as well, known as Women’s conversations. These Conversations proved very popular, drawing women all the way from Providence, RI. Some had studied in Fuller’s private German class in 1837-38, and most were associated with the women’s rights movement (8. 7). Among those who subscribed and attended regularly were Lydia (Mrs. Waldo) Emerson and Elizabeth Hoar from Concord, Susan Burley from Salem and an advocate of higher education for women, Caroline and Ellen Sturgis, Mary Ward, Mary Channing, Marianne Jackson, Jane Tuckerman, Elizabeth Bancroft, Eliza Farrar, Sarah Clarke. The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was well represented, including the wife of the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips (8, 6). Charging $10 for a series of energetic two-hour sessions weekly the first week, an amount later doubled as attendance grew, Fuller was able to make as much money as she had teaching school in Providence and have time for her scholarship and writing. She supported herself in this fashion for five years (8, 5). After her death these conversations would continue and help push forward activists of the post-civil war era. Her popularizations of the concept of formal discussion and debate appealed to the oppressed masses and open-minded privileged before the civil war.

Fuller also expresses the “large” ideals of personhood within marriage that will give new hope and destiny to women. “If principles could be established” she concludes, “particulars would adjust themselves” (9,10). Fuller is a Romantic in both “feeling too much” and moving from mere feeling to universal principles that promise redress. Her transcendental idealism is a means of at once releasing the inner self from emotional turmoil and addressing problems at the root: trust in self and universal justice amounts to a non-conflictual strategy for change. She claims that “it is one of the women’s burdens that make her accept the status of wife.