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35. “What Is the Lady Driving At?”
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222 the “fine castle” of her writing singing / Its hymn to the Gods,” will not be, as Fuller felt she had been, “shrunk from as unnatural.”29 In this poem, Fuller refers indirectly to both herself and Sand, from whom she borrowed the phrase “lyrical glances.” Her deliberate reference to intense and even potentially “unnatural” passions—what Emerson referred to as “perverted” erotic “flashes”—hence cannot be overlooked here. Still, Fuller makes it clear throughout her text that she does not want to be a man or even “a manly woman.” She contends that the only reason women appropriate any of men’s “masculine” qualities is that they are not allowed to develop their feminine faculties fully.30 Were women, however, allowed to develop their full strength as women, then an intellectual woman like herself might be “fit” to run for the Senate. Fuller asserts her belief that a Senate made up of women could “affect the morals of the civilized world,” could even redeem it since, says she, reflecting a common view, if women have power at all, “it is a moral power.”31 In the voice of a romantic millennialist who wishes to remake earth into heaven, Fuller ends the pamphlet by declaring: “the time has come when a clearer vision and better action are possible. When man and woman may regard one another”— not as “lord and tutor” over woman as “blind” pupil—but as “brother and sister, the pillars of one porch, the priests of one worship.” Until that day, however, Fuller knows that she, as “a daughter”—nay, more, as a daughter of Timothy Fuller— must “live through the life of man.”32 35S“What Is the Lady Driving At?” As Fuller in mid-November was finishing Woman in the Nineteenth Century at Fishkill Landing, she wrote her friend William Channing that she felt as if she had left her “foot-print” on the earth.1 When the pamphlet came out early the next year, it would lift Fuller into the ranks of the immortals who have helped to shape our shared world with their vision. She had shaken readers into an awareness of the complex nature of sexual identity, as well as of the many unacknowledged problems that women then had to face daily having to do with sex, work, and marriage, intractable problems brought on by Americans’ inculcated sense that women are inferior to men. In a Bible-based society, for a woman to challenge the hierarchical structure of Christian marriage, to dare call men hypocrites and beasts and even urge women to separate from men to seek religious self-dependence, was, indeed, bold. In arguing women’s right to religious self-dependence and power, Fuller challenged the biblical view propounding that man’s position over woman as guide, protector, and provider is God given. American men who were raised on the Bible believed what Paul in his letters to Timothy (1 Tim. 2:12) and the Ephesians (5:22– 24) taught: that women should neither “teach” nor “have authority over men.” They should “keep silent” and as wives “be subject in everything to their husbands” since “the husband is the head of the wife,” a perception that had been reinforced in the United States by the writings of John Locke and Sir William Blackstone. Locke, whose vision of human rights underlay the affirmation of equality in the Declaration of Independence, had also concluded that women in some sense belong to men, their protectors and providers. For he believed that between husbands and wives there existed a difference of understandings and wills such that authority in a family must “naturally” fall “to the man’s share, as the abler and the stronger.” Supporting Locke’s seventeenth-century view on the descending staircase relation of men to women in marriage was Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which fixed in Americans’ minds the biblical view of women as chattel. Relying on tradition, Blackstone in 1765 wrote that “the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” According to Blackstone’s Commentaries, which Thomas Jefferson said were to Americans “what the Alcoran is to the Mahometans” and an ambitious Timothy had read while studying to become a lawyer, a woman in marriage becomes an object, a...