# Margaret Fuller’s Reproductive Method and the Making of Women’s Voices Margaret Fuller redefined education as a "reproductive" act. Ulrike Wagner examines how Fuller's criticism and series of Conversations translated Romantic philology into a democratic pedagogy, positioning women’s voices as a medium through which knowledge can be remade. February 18, 2026 By Ulrike Wagner, *Guest Contributor* | Edited by Russell C. Powell Building on author Megan Marshall’s focus on the women of Transcendentalism in this series, I ask what use the movement had for them and what use it might still have for us. Marshall characterizes these women’s stance as a deliberately lived, “practicing” Transcendentalism and highlights Margaret Fuller’s series of “Conversations” for women in Elizabeth Peabody’s Boston bookshop. As hosts of weekly gatherings, these women created spaces for exercising what Peabody called “our power of choosing.”[\[1\]](#_ftn1) The pronoun “our” here is crucial because it folds speaker, listeners, and readers into a shared subject position, suggesting that individual choice unfolds within a communal process. How, though, did Fuller turn these meetings into laboratories where women explored autonomy in decision-making by testing new roles, claiming their voices, and experiencing freedom as something communally and actively exercised rather than passively assumed? Fuller, I argue, transforms the specialized humanist scholarship of her era into something at once public, practical, and personal—a method of teaching and a principle for living. ![Portrait of Margaret Fuller reading](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/Margaret%20Fuller.jpg?itok=gkebRw8d) Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 1810-1850Unlike her close friend Emerson and the male Unitarian circles she moved in, Fuller did not have access to a university education. She owed her training to home learning, intermittent schooling at Cambridge Port Private Grammar School, and to her father, Timothy Fuller, a Harvard Classics graduate who devised a rigorous classical curriculum for her.[\[2\]](#_ftn2) Drawing on this formative experience, she came to regard education as the crucial means by which women and other marginalized groups could gain influence in society, and she made advancing the “great work of popular education” central to her public activity.[\[3\]](#_ftn3) With this background and an expansive intellectual network, Fuller was well-positioned to carve out a public role at a time when such posts were typically reserved for credentialed male experts. Yet in promoting general education, she also recognized that these efforts transformed not only her audience but the conditions of intellectual life itself. In a changing literary market where “princes and nobles” no longer “patronize\[d\] literature and the arts,” authors and artists depended on public recognition and support, while publishers faced growing pressure to acquire works that would “find an immediate market.”[\[4\]](#_ftn4) Fuller treats journals and daily newspapers, which she describes as “next door to conversation,” as the most “efficient instrument\[s\]” for public education and for allowing the cultivation of taste to flourish in “every corner of this great land.”[\[5\]](#_ftn5) She considers these media indispensable for fostering a public sphere in which literature would fall on fertile ground and for securing broader social support for the humanities within educational institutions. As literary editor and social critic for *the New-York Tribune*, Fuller observed “a growing prejudice” against the “boasted advantages of ‘classical education.’”[\[6\]](#_ftn6) Professional classicists such as Charles Anthon of Columbia College, whose *System of Latin Versification* she reviewed for the Tribune, seemed oblivious to this skepticism. In the opening of her review, she contrasts a passage from Anthon’s preface, in which he praises the educational value of his book, with the experience of a younger generation living in the age of the new sciences and expanding modern literature. In her account, classical schooling, with its emphasis on rote learning, appears anachronistic, disengaged from students’ needs, and ill-suited to equip them for everyday challenges. While she readily concedes that many *Tribune* readers likely shared doubts about the usefulness of classical education, she also uses the newspaper as a forum for a counterargument, insisting that “there is a beautiful propriety in going back to the Greeks and Romans” and that “we must not lose the sense of this greatness because our practice is in a different sphere.”[\[7\]](#_ftn7) The review crystallizes a project that runs throughout her work: she treats literature—“that great mutual system of interpretation between all kinds and classes of men”—as a social glue that can spark communication across temporal, cultural, and social divides.[\[8\]](#_ftn8) For this social power of literature to take effect, however, and for her broader project of female education to succeed, readers must engage texts actively, drawing on what she calls our “reproducing power.”[\[9\]](#_ftn9) In the summer before she began convening her weekly Conversations classes, Fuller wrote to her friend Sophia Ripley to explain why she wanted a class specifically for women. She saw many well-educated wives and daughters of wealthy or professional men as ill-equipped to discern patterns and principles across the various “departments of thought and knowledge” and to “place them in due relation to one another.” Women, in her view, lacked the intellectual training to “systematize” their ideas and to give “precision and clearness” to their thinking, a deficit that kept them from pursuing the questions “What were we born to do? and how shall we do it?”[\[10\]](#_ftn10) Her critique goes further: women, she argues, are denied not only systematic access to knowledge but also opportunities to put what they learn to work. Men, she notes, are “called on, from a very early period, to *reproduce* all that they learn” through college exercises, political duties, professional studies, and the first actions of life, whereas “women learn without any attempt to *reproduce*.”[\[11\]](#_ftn11) “Reproduction” is thus a gendered concept in Fuller’s writings: she treats the teaching, development, and exercise of this capacity as a male prerogative and privilege, yet she defines it not as mere memorization but as active engagement with existing knowledge. The reproducing subject does not simply follow predetermined paths but confidently and deliberately shapes its own lifeworld. This concern with reproduction surfaces at the very outset of the Conversations. The lack of opportunities for women to “reproduce” is the opening theme of the first meeting of twenty-five women on November 6, 1839, as recorded by Peabody: “This is what is most neglected in the education of women—they learn without any attempt to reproduce. … It is to supply this deficiency that these conversations have been planned.”[\[12\]](#_ftn12) Fuller draws her circle of women out of their shells not by lecturing but by “provok\[ing\]” them to reproduce and reclaim their stance as “thinking women.”[\[13\]](#_ftn13) Three years earlier, in her essay on “The Present State of German Literature,” she had introduced Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel—key figures of German Romanticism and modern philology—as originators of the concept of “reproduction,” describing their work as “reproductive criticism” that approximates “the fixedness of a science.”[\[14\]](#_ftn14) ![Friedrich Schlegel](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-02/Schlegel%202.jpg?itok=2gGLZgva) Friedrich Schlegel, 1772-1829The “liberal school of criticism” associated with the Schlegels, Fuller suggests, avoids losing itself in scholarly minutiae and instead approaches its objects empathetically, holistically, and at eye level.[\[15\]](#_ftn15) Extending philology beyond textual collection, editing, grammatical analysis, and translation, Friedrich Schlegel places the discipline in dialogue with philosophy: “The philologist must be a philosopher.”[\[16\]](#_ftn16) As philology enters both the speculative realm of philosophy and the creative realm of poetry, it emerges as what Schlegel calls “the art of scientific scholarship” \[“Wissenschaftskunst”\].[\[17\]](#_ftn17) He provocatively asks whether the accomplished philologist must also be a poet and insists that philosophy and poetry are indispensable to the philologist’s central task of “understanding the understanding” \[“das Verstehen zu verstehen”\].[\[18\]](#_ftn18) Philology thus becomes a mediating practice that grounds interpretation in rigor and imagination. As Chaouli notes, poetry for Schlegel is not confined to genre but constitutes “a creativity in thinking”; poetic criticism in this sense reveals even “the humblest poetic act” as transformative, altering the “texture of the world” and showing that neither language nor world is exhausted by what is given.[\[19\]](#_ftn19) Key aspects of Schlegel’s reflections on criticism appear in dispersed form across Fuller’s publications, yet she develops these practices—variously described as reproductive, poetic, or comprehensive—independently and within a wide network of references. Like Schlegel’s exploration of “understanding the understanding,” Fuller’s poet, in an imagined dialogue with a critic, reflects on the value of “looking again at what has already been seen.”[\[20\]](#_ftn20) The critic, in turn, introduces himself as the poet’s brother, a relationship Fuller would later define succinctly in a newspaper review: a critic, she writes, “should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three,” and must possess a “poetical temperament.”[\[21\]](#_ftn21) In the Conversations, Fuller radicalizes the separation of the poetic from the literary. Peabody’s notes record Fuller defining “poesy” as “the only path of the true soul.” To be “poetic in life,” in “thought and intention,” does not, for Fuller, entail an extraordinary existence. On the contrary, she urges attentiveness to ordinary experience and warns her listeners “never \[to\] yield inwardly to the common notion that poesy was a luxury, out of the common track.” Strikingly, she suggests that one might live a poetic life without ever producing a work of art: the “true art of life” may consist in a way of seeing, a “thought,” or an “intention.” What sort of life, thought, or intention might truly merit the name of poetry remains unclear to the scribe of the day’s report, who notes that Fuller “guarded her meaning, and said that to seek beauty was to miss it often.”[\[22\]](#_ftn22) One of the subsequent sessions takes up the question “What is life?” and the responses recorded there clarify what living poetically might have meant in this setting. “Miss P.” replies: “Life is division from one’s principle of life in order to a conscious reorganization.” Pressed for her own view, Fuller begins with God as spirit and life, and describes love and creativeness as dynamic forces through which creatures bearing the divine image “add constantly to the total sum of existence” until, “in short, we become gods, and able to give the life which we now feel ourselves able only to receive.”[\[23\]](#_ftn23) “Miss P.” probably refers to either Elizabeth or Sophia Peabody, and her formulation is revealing: to live is to separate from and consciously reorganize a principle of life, thereby reproducing an eternal law. Fuller’s account pursues an analogous relationship between divine and human creation. True poetic life consists in adding to and transforming what already exists; it is a practice of inhabiting a position from which we experience the plasticity of language and the freedom not to accept things as they are. Fuller’s Conversations and critical writings reveal how she transforms specialized philological and humanist discourse into an educational practice that is at once rigorously informed and radically public. Drawing on notions of “reproduction” and poetic criticism, she reframes understanding as an active, creative, and communal process through which women learn to “reproduce” knowledge rather than merely receive it. By relocating this reformed philology from the university and professionalized scholarship to conversation circles, newspapers, and the quotidian “art of life,” Fuller fashions a mode of teaching that both challenges the narrowness of classical schooling and mobilizes philological rigor in the service of popular education.[\[24\]](#_ftn24) Her Conversations thus exemplify a mediating practice between scholarly expertise and a broader reading public, staging a model of intellectual life in which the poetic, reproductive mind becomes the condition for democratic participation in culture. **Ulrike Wagner** is Director of the German Studies Program at Bard College Berlin. Her research focuses on the history of the humanities and practices of philology, as well as on the intersections of German Romanticism and American Transcendentalism within the broader contexts of religious debates, historicism, classicism, and aesthetics. She is currently completing a monograph titled *Transcendental Philology: Emerson, Fuller, Nietzsche, and the Migrations of a Method.* --- [\[1\]](#_ftnref1) Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures: No. 1, The Creation,” *Christian Examiner* 62, no. 32 (May 1834): 188, quoted in Megan Marshall, “[Practicing Transcendentalism](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/10/17/practicing-transcendentalism).” [\[2\]](#_ftnref2) On Fuller’s classical education see Isobel Hurst, “Classical Daughters: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller,” *Women’s Studies* 40, no. 4 (2011): 448–68. [\[3\]](#_ftnref3) Margaret Fuller, *The Letters of Margaret Fuller*, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, 6 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983–94), vol. IV:39; hereafter cited parenthetically as *LMF*, followed by volume and page number. [\[4\]](#_ftnref4) Margaret Fuller, “American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future,” in *Papers on Literature and Art*, vol. 2 (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 126. [\[5\]](#_ftnref5) Ibid., 137–38, 140.​ [\[6\]](#_ftnref6) Margaret Fuller, “Review of Charles Anthon, A System of Latin Versification,” in Margaret Fuller, *Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846*, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 121. [\[7\]](#_ftnref7) Ibid., 121-122. [\[8\]](#_ftnref8) Margaret Fuller Ossoli, “Poets of the People,” in *Art, Literature, and Drama*, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860), 178. [\[9\]](#_ftnref9) *LMF* I:210. [\[10\]](#_ftnref10) Margaret Fuller, *Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli*, ed. R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, 2 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884), 1:324–25. hereafter cited parenthetically as *M*, followed by volume and page number. See also Charles Capper, “Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston,” *American Quarterly* 39, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 513. [\[11\]](#_ftnref11) *M*, I:329; my emphasis. [\[12\]](#_ftnref12) Nancy Craig Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: The 1839–1840 Series,” in *Studies in the American Renaissance*, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 203. [\[13\]](#_ftnref13) *M* I:329; I:324. [\[14\]](#_ftnref14) Margaret Fuller, “The Present State of German Literature,” *The American Monthly Magazine*, July 1836, 7. [\[15\]](#_ftnref15) Ibid., 6. [\[16\]](#_ftnref16) Friedrich Schlegel, *Hefte zur Philologie*, ed. Samuel Müller (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2015), 17. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own. [\[17\]](#_ftnref17) Friedrich Schlegel, *Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe*, founded by Ernst Behler, continued by Andreas Arndt, ed. Ulrich Breuer (Munich et al.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958–); hereafter cited as *KFSA*, followed by volume and page number, *KFSA* 16:66 (no. 65). [\[18\]](#_ftnref18) *KFSA* 16:49, nr.168; 2:412. [\[19\]](#_ftnref19) Michel Chaouli, “Schlegel’s Words, Rightly Used,” in *Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature*, ed. Michel Chaouli et al. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021), 31. [\[20\]](#_ftnref20) Fuller, “A Dialogue. Poet. Critic,” *The Dial* 1, no. 4 (April 1841): 495. [\[21\]](#_ftnref21) Fuller, “Review of James Russell Lowell, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” *New-York Tribune*, January 21, 1845; repr. in Margaret Fuller, *Writings from the New-York Tribune*, *1844–1846*, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 7. [\[22\]](#_ftnref22) *M* 1:341-342. [\[23\]](#_ftnref23) *M* 1:345–347. [\[24\]](#_ftnref24) M 1:342. See also:- [ Transcendentalism Initiative ](/programming-threads/transcendentalism-initiative)