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  • Exaltadas:A Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism
  • Phyllis Cole (bio) and Jana Argersinger

In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller looked to the young as "harbingers and leaders of a new era." She named their male and female exemplars "Los Exaltados, Las Exaltadas," constructing upon the masculine name of a Spanish political party a name for utopian womanhood. But as her thoughts continued rushing to the page in November 1844, futurity and partnership with men both fell away before a call for women's collective resistance in the present moment. "Last week" had brought news of James Polk's election as president, along with the ominous prospect that the people's choice would "rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy of sin permanently on this nation" by annexing Texas. It was in the face of such apostasy by the voting public that Fuller directly addressed her female readers as bearers of moral force:

Women of my country!—Exaltadas! if such there be, . . . have you nothing to do with this? You see the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness of countless generations of fellow-creatures, the honor of their country, and their immortal souls, for a money market and political power. Do you not feel within you that which can reprove them, which can check, [End Page 1] which can convince them? You would not speak in vain; whether each in her own home, or banded in unison. 1

We have titled this essay collection "Exaltadas" for the multiple resonances of Fuller's term: cosmopolitan allusion and American application, utopian imagination made urgent in the present political moment, direct appeal to readers for change in themselves and the world. In all these respects, "Exaltadas" exemplifies Fuller's claim for women as possessors of a high, quasi-divine consciousness and truth-telling power "within"; it was a claim that intervened powerfully in the larger histories both of the transcendentalist movement and of women.

From our vantage point, the name Exaltadas evokes a constellation of women stretching well beyond Fuller's immediate readers and disciples: a range of predecessors, contemporaries, and heirs who contributed to transcendental thought or felt its impact, with or without her mediation. One of Fuller's disciples, Ednah Dow Cheney, testified in 1895, "She planted in my life the seeds of thought, principle, and purpose which have grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength." Yet Cheney insisted as well on the contributions of others in a generation of burgeoning intellectual life, naming Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick, Sophia Ripley, Eliza Farnham, and Eliza Cabot Follen among the "fellow-workers." 2 To these we would add, even in the first circle, such women of the previous generation as Mary Moody Emerson and such friends as Caroline Sturgis, along with a host of heirs to the movement including Caroline Dall, Julia Ward Howe, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Sweat, and Cheney herself. In counterpoint with other scholars who have extended the timeline of American transcendentalism forward from core moments in the 1830s and 1840s, we open this study of female originators and legatees to a full century—reaching not only through the end of Peabody's movement-spanning life but, more unexpectedly, into the prime of Pauline Hopkins's. 3

While investigating "female genealogy" through that [End Page 2] period, our authors have observed and theorized beyond a simple progression of literary mothers and daughters. To be sure, creativity could arise from the grateful or resistant response of younger generations to older, yet it also flowered in lateral dialogue among contemporaries, often fostered by the private circulation of manuscripts—an exercise in "mutual self-cultivation" that was particularly important to women's cultures of the pen. Relationality, in some scenarios, might become a term more apropos than influence or lineage. 4 In the story of what Margaret Fuller and the younger Caroline Sturgis were to each other, we find such multiplicities of vertical influence and cross-wise exchange: teacher-critic and student; intimates and possible lovers; interlocutors of mind, soul, and transcendental artistry; travelers to a mutually reverenced Italy on journeys separated in time but parallel in aesthetic spirit.

Early and late...

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