Margaret Fuller and the Self-Reliance of Women
With Phyllis Cole, Professor Emerita, English, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Penn State Brandywine, and Associate with the CSWR Transcendentalism Initiative
In the third episode of "Living Texts," Phyllis Cole explores how Margaret Fuller took the Transcendentalist ideal of self-reliance and transformed it into a much broader argument for women’s freedom in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller begins from the conviction that women, like men, possess an intuitive inner authority and must be free to develop their own intellectual, spiritual, and practical capacities rather than “learn their rule from without.” Cole shows how this emphasis on self-reliance becomes Fuller’s idea of “self-subsistence”: the ability to stand as an independent person before entering into marriage, social roles, or other forms of relationship. But Fuller also pushes beyond the individualism often associated with Emerson. She questions fixed distinctions between masculine and feminine, insists that women should be free to pursue whatever forms of life and work their abilities call them toward, and ultimately imagines women’s self-development as a source of collective moral and political power.
Videos
Watch Phyllis Cole on Margaret Fuller and the Self-Reliance of Women
Watch Phyllis Cole in conversation with Gosia Sklodowska about What Feels Alive Now: Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Featured Texts
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).
Select Passages
“I have urged upon the sex self-subsistence in its two forms of self-reliance and self-impulse, because I believe them to be the needed means of the present juncture.
I have urged on Woman independence of Man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in Woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.
I wish Woman to live, first for God’s sake. Then she will not make an imperfect man her god, and thus sink to idolatry. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then, if she finds what she needs in Man embodied, she will know how to love, and be worthy of being loved.”
“There is, on this subject, a nobler view than heretofore, if not the noblest, and improvement here must coincide with that in the view taken of marriage. ‘We must have units before we can have union,’ says one of the ripe thinkers of the times.
If larger intellectual resources begin to be deemed needful to Woman, still more is a spiritual dignity in her, or even the mere assumption of it, looked upon with respect.”
“But if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains, if you will. I do not doubt there are women well fitted for such an office, and, if so, I should be as glad to see them in it, as to welcome the maid of Saragossa, or the maid of Missolonghi, or the Suliote heroine, or Emily Plater.
I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers.”
“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them. They make a rule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning…”
“We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty.
We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue.”
“As the friend of the negro assumes that one man cannot by right hold another in bondage, so should the friend of Woman assume that Man cannot by right lay even well-meant restrictions on Woman. If the negro be a soul, if the woman be a soul, apparelled in flesh, to one Master only are they accountable.
There is but one law for souls, and, if there is to be an interpreter of it, he must come not as man, or son of man, but as son of God.”
“What Woman needs is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.”
“Women of my country!—Exaltadas! if such there be,—women of English, old English nobleness, who understand the courage of Boadicea, the sacrifice of Godiva, the power of Queen Emma to tread the red-hot iron unharmed,—women who share the nature of Mrs. Hutchinson, Lady Russell, and the mothers of our own revolution,—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, which can convince them? You would not speak in vain; whether each in her own home, or banded in unison.”
“Tell these men that you will not accept the glittering baubles, spacious dwellings, and plentiful service, they mean to offer you through those means. Tell them that the heart of Woman demands nobleness and honor in Man, and that, if they have not purity, have not mercy, they are no longer fathers, lovers, husbands, sons of yours.”
“If you have a power, it is a moral power. The films of interest are not so close around you as around the men. If you will but think, you cannot fail to wish to save the country from this disgrace. Let not slip the occasion, but do something to lift off the curse incurred by Eve.”
“Think of this well! I entreat, I conjure you, before it is too late. It is my belief that something effectual might be done by women, if they would only consider the subject, and enter upon it in the true spirit,—a spirit gentle, but firm, and which feared the offence of none, save One who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.”
Phyllis Cole
Phyllis Cole is a past fellow of Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program and currently a Professor Emerita of English, Women's Studies, and American Studies at Penn State Brandywine. She has been an officer or board member of the Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller Societies and participated in their meetings through the years. Much of her work has concentrated on the letters and journals of the Transcendentalists, as both a genre and a source of insight into published works. She is the author of Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (Oxford University Press, 1998) and co-editor of the essay collection Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (University of Georgia Press, 2014). Her current work is a study of health issues in Transcendentalist women's private writing.
