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1 | Fuller’s Lawsuit and Feminist History
- University of New Hampshire Press
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11 11 1 Fuller’s Lawsuit and Feminist History Phyllis Cole In their History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her coauthors claimed Margaret Fuller as a “precursor” to the American women’s rights movement, which began just three years after the 1845 publication of Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Moreover, they specified, she had wielded this power by offering “a vindication of woman’s right to think.” By implication the phrase made her a disciple and partner of that other precursor , Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman had issued a galvanic call from England in 1792. Indeed, these feminist historians described Wollstonecraft by quoting lines about her from Fuller’s manifesto. They suggested no comparable linkage between Fuller and American founders Sarah and Angelina Grimké, whose antislavery eloquence and resistance to clerical opposition provided the dominant foreground to their own massive record of conventions and public oratory. But all these individuals appear in a chapter titled “Preceding Causes,” with Fuller positioned just after the antislavery women, and all are listed among the nineteen to whom the authors dedicate their work.1 In this influential account of American feminist origins, Fuller both initiates and transmits a shared revolutionary discourse. As Charles Capper comments, however, such a role has been “strangely missing from both Fuller biographies and feminist histories, which often assert or imply that her book floated somewhere above the movement’s turbulent waters.” One can easily see why. Not only did Fuller make her argument as a writer rather than a platform orator; in addition, her writing is difficult, an allusive literary and religious meditation as well as a feminist tract. Fuller understood what she had written even as she sent Woman in the Nineteenth Century to press, conceding that it would require “too much culture in the reader to be quickly or extensively diffused.” She still hoped for influence, however, precisely through the literary means of addressing “a 12 PHYLLIS COLE mind here and there and through that others.” Her successors soon testified to an impact of just this kind; by 1867, in an especially telling commentary on the proliferation of feminist ideas, Caroline Healey Dall paired Wollstonecraft and Fuller as structurally definitive “Lives That Have Modified Public Opinion” on two sides of the Atlantic.2 Capper’s point about Fuller’s absence from movement histories applies less to the nineteenth century than to academic women’s studies scholarship as it has become more specialized since the 1970s: students of Fuller have celebrated her feminist voice primarily within the history of literary and philosophical Romanticism, while students of feminist politics have focused on the Grimkés and Stanton without pausing for long over Fuller’s elusive text.3 There have been exceptions to this academic division of labor, however . Political scientist Elizabeth Ann Bartlett helpfully distinguishes four foundational traditions of feminism: an Enlightenment strand, exemplified by Wollstonecraft; a Romantic strand, by Fuller; a utopian socialist strand, by Frances Wright; and a radical sectarian strand, by Quakers such as the Grimkés. Like Bartlett I find no evidence that Fuller knew Wright, though she acknowledged learning from the significantly different utopian socialism of Charles Fourier.4 In this contribution, I consider Fuller especially through dialogue with her two other most important female precursors, Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Sarah Grimké in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. Even Bartlett leaves each of the four strands of feminist argument essentially separate from the others. But I argue for a Romanticism in Woman in the Nineteenth Century of sufficient depth and breadth to incorporate the Enlightenment reason of Wollstonecraft, the prophetic piety of Grimké, and the political urgency of both. To make such an argument in no way denies the expressive power of Fuller’s post- Christian religious myth making, elucidated in recent studies by John Paul Gatta and Jeffrey Steele. Fuller’s persona was that of a questing Eurydice, a compassionate Mary, a goddesslike Minerva or Isis, as she gathered women’s history toward the millennial future. Yet Gatta marvels at discovering the Virgin Mary in a “feminist polemic aimed at enlarging the scope of liberty and action,” while Steele specifies that Fuller aimed “to summon the power of female myth into the public domain of social reform.”5 Here the obverse of that duality is emphasized, with liberty and reform in the foreground and spiritual power as motivation and means. In particular, like her predecessors Fuller considered women...