Life and Legacy of Margaret Fuller - Research Paper Example

? and Section # of Margaret Fuller – Life and Legacy Margaret fuller was an American journalist,critic and women’s rights advocate, known famously for her extensive literature on the matter, and her particular focus on women’s rights in terms of education and the right for employment among many other issues. Her book ‘Woman in the nineteenth century’ is widely considered as the first book on Feminism in the United States. Born Sarah Margaret Fuller on May 23 1810 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts to Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane, her father was a prominent lawyer, who eventually went on to become a Congressman, and her mother was a housewife who taught Fuller skills such as cooking and sewing in her spare time. Fuller’s father took a profound interest in the education of his daughter and it was from him that Fuller received her early education, starting to read from the age of three as well as allowing her to have a strong grasp on languages such as Greek and Latin from a very early age. Her father can be considered to have had a profound impact on shaping Fuller’s feminist personality, as he gave her an education that did not differentiate her based on her gender, by giving her lessons in general subjects, rather than just on subjects such as etiquette, which was expected at the time (Von Mehren,, 1994). Fuller was well schooled and went on to attend several schools, learning both German as well as Italian. Fuller had started publishing one-off articles in magazines by 1934, but when her father died in 1935, leaving the family in financial trouble, she was forced to take a break from her writing and instead take focus on the responsibility of educating her younger siblings. Therefore she became a teacher in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School and Green Street School for a period of two years, from 1936 to 1938. In 1939, Fuller received an offer from a literary and philosophical journal called The Dial, which she accepted and where she worked during the two year period of 1840 to 1842. Fuller served not only as the editor but also wrote a great number of articles and reviews on a great many topics on the subjects of art and literature. It was because of her work here that Fuller first began to gain a reputation as an important figure in the transcendental movement (Gura, 2007). During this time period Fuller kept her own writing up, publishing her book ‘Summer in The Lake’ in 1944 and publishing her famous essay, ‘The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men, Woman versus Women’ in 1943, which is widely considered as the first feminist work of America. The essay was originally written to be published in The Dial and focused on women's equality and the role women played in American Democracy. In 1844, Fuller moved to New York where she joined the New York Tribune as a literary critic, thereby attaining her position as the first full-time female book-reviewer. 1n 1846, Fuller had become the journalist’s first female editor. Fuller wrote a great many columns for this publication, and her works included discussions on wide-ranging topics such as art and literature, as well as socio-political issues relevant to both women and other oppressed minority groups. In 1846, fuller travelled to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, again, the first female to do so, where she interviewed a great number of prominent writers and then sent back reports to America. It was also in Europe that Fuller met Giuseppe Mazinni, with whom she was later to have a relationship as well as a child. In May, 1850, Fuller and her family embarked on a ship to sail back to the United States. Unfortunately, the ship crashed at a short distance from the shore of New York, killing Fuller and her family, with their bodies unfortunately never recovered. Fuller died at the age of forty. Margaret Fuller died young but left behind a legacy so great that perhaps most women’s rights and activist groups can accredit their progress of the greater part of the twentieth century to her (Dickenson 1993). She produced works that inspired women to get inspired, which is the fundamental start to all other starts. Of all of Margaret Fuller’s work, her most influential piece is mostly considered to be her book ‘woman in the nineteenth Century’, originally published in 1843 as an essay entitled ‘The Great Lawsuit’ for the , considered to be so not only for its content but also for its milestone position as America’s first piece of Feminist literature. Fuller started the essay in 1843 and published it as an essay but was later encouraged to turn it into a full book. The basic ideology behind the book is that man will only be elevated to his highest position when he learns to understand divine love. Throughout time, man has been aware of this understanding but they continually tend to forget it and go into periods of oblivion. Fuller stated that although all man was capable of reawakening to this understanding, it gets harder to do so as we are continually being plagued with selfish and tainted desire. Fuller also regarded America’s inability to attain equality between men and women, which would only arise out of the aforementioned understanding of divine love, to the fact that the Americans had inherited wickedness from the ancestral roots. The people that acted upon that divine love were most likely to achieve understanding and owing to their natural compassion, women formed a large part of this group. In her book Fuller further goes on to examine the defined roles men and women in America have undertaken and the impact that it has on women. Because women were considered second best to the head of the household who was predominantly male, and because women were equated to children rather than men even in terms of law, they considered their own role to be less than that of men. That was why she said that women needed to learn to consider themselves equal to men, as they originally were intended to be and they had to do it themselves through intellectual debates and freedom, as nobody else could be expected to help them in the regard. Throughout her book Fuller reiterates how equality of man and women in religious an intellectual terms is the solution and key to all happiness. She illustrates this through examples, particularly in the union structure of marriage and its various forms as well as the fundamental spiritual differences between man and women. Fuller states that the happiest form of marriage is one in which man and women are equals progressing equally towards an ultimate goal. This allows them to have trust and respect for each other, along with dependency and regard, with neither aspect compromising on the other. Although Fuller explained the regard of a happy marriage she also made sure to acknowledge that even those women who did not get married, and stated that although they were generally looked down upon by the times, they often had the opportunity to reach a level of divinity which many married people could not, owing to the complications that arise from mutual dependency. Fuller further explains how women can attain the equality that they should strive for by explaining the basic differences that tainted the equality in the first place. In this she focused on how women needed to strengthen themselves from within, as both men and women are equal, but most men in general had some traits predominantly highlighted and most women in general had certain other traits predominantly highlighted. Therefore, if these traits were equally highlighted and balanced, women would attain the equality that would allow them to transgress to the position of divine understanding they were fundamentally inherent to. In conclusion, Fuller states that the only way a true union can occur between man and woman and this divine understanding would be when each person considered themselves as an individual unit before regarding themselves as mutually dependant on each other or their inherent prejudices. It would be easier for men to achieve this but more difficult for women as they would need to free not only themselves but also would need to free themselves from the naturally dominant attitude of men. Nonetheless, if they themselves developed their independence to an intellectual and religious point where they could be considered equal to men, this dominant influence would fade away by itself. Fuller’s famous essay, later a book, aimed to revive in women the spirit of independence of soul for their better understanding of divinity and happiness. She focused mostly on women because they were the ones suffering most from the feeling of mutual dependency and a position of dominance under men, but her aim was general and relevant to both male and female. She focused on individuals and aimed to teach how every person, man or woman, was rightfully meant to be an individual before anything else. In her essay she also drew parallels to how slaves in America were treated and how they eventually got their rights and freedom, as it was the right of a human to be so. Women, she illustrated, were meant to be no different. This essay is Fuller’s most popular and important piece of work because it in a nutshell exemplifies her entire perspective, aim, outlook and purpose. Throughout her life, her aim was to revive in women a spirit of individuality so they could stop relying on men for their existence and instead they could be the person that they were destined to be, with no hindrances to their path of full progress and potential, whether it was to lead a happy family life or it was to lead a women’s political activists’ group. This spirit was prevalent through all her work and it took rise from this particular essay. It is also important because it served as an exemplary beacon of hope for countless others to take inspiration from and work further upon. It is recognized in American history as the first piece of work on women’s rights, where women were told to attain freedom through being women, or as being as they naturally were (Douglas 1977), not through drawing themselves as parallel to men and aiming to be ‘masculine’. The important thing to understand is that Fuller did not wish for men and women to conflict against each other; rather her purpose was that the notion of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ be eliminated entirely. She wished for people to start viewing themselves as individuals, illustrating why it should be so and why it currently wasn’t. Margaret Fuller started the concept of feminism in this light far before many women could even imagine stepping up to a position where they could argue the dominance of men, much less put themselves in a position where they would not only break free from the dominance of a particular gender, but they would also be considered equals (Blanchard 1983). This is partially credited to the early education of her father who himself chose not to differentiate his child’s education based on the fact of whether she was a woman or a man, and in fact gave her the best intellectual education that any individual should have, but also due to her own passionate drive and belief where she truly wished for other individuals to benefit from the divine understanding that could lead to the happiness every soul was seeking. She focused on women as she felt them to be the most oppressed and she did so in a way where women could easily relate and apply her theories to their life. Margaret Fuller’s famous work, The Great Lawsuit was important not only in itself and of the ideas that it presented but rather because it paved the way for many other women to follow her lead and produce works that inspired further other women, as well as give rise to further political and freedom movements. Bibliography Blanchard, P. Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1987. Dickenson, D. Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman's Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993 Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977. Von Mehren, J. ‘A life of Margaret Fuller – Minerva and the Muse’, University of Massachusetts Press 1994 Gura, P. American Transcendentalism: A History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007 Read More