Talk was her salvation, her métier. It was the medium in which she felt most alive. Everyone who knew Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) said the same thing: her speech was splendid. One friend described her conversation as “finished and true as the most deliberate rhetoric of the pen”. The dazzling flow of her words was an effortless freshet, always polished yet somehow managing to evince “an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment,—the result of some organic provision that made finished sentences as natural to her as blundering and hesitation are to most of us”.¹ Waldo Emerson said that “in discourse, she was quick, conscious of power, in perfect tune with her company, and would pause and turn the stream with grace and adroitness”.² Another friend, the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke, said that Fuller’s conversation was “Full of thoughts and full of words; capable of poetic improvisation . . . capable of clear, complete, philosophic statement, but for the strong tendency to life which melted down evermore in its lava-current the solid blocks of thought”. Fuller’s conversation was unlike anything Clarke had ever heard before; it made “our common life rich, significant and fair . . . [giving] to the hour a beauty and brilliancy which shall make it eminent long after, amid drear years of level routine!”³

In Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller set out to translate her conversation into writing. The book, published in 1845, ranks as the first major work of feminism by an American author. It remains a landmark in the history of women’s studies. From start to finish, it rustles with the spoken word: with dialogues, speeches by various personae, with the associative back and forth of conversation. Woman in the Nineteenth Century is as close as we can get to hearing Margaret Fuller’s voice, her inimitable speech.

She began writing it when she was thirty-three, at a time of life when most of her friends were married and had become pillars of respectability. Margaret Fuller was none of these things. Her heart was just as ambitious as her intellect, eager for conquests and partners. But she had been supremely unfortunate in love and had come to agree with her literary idol Goethe “that women who love and marry feel no need to write. But how can a woman of genius love and marry?”⁴

Fuller wanted to be a genius and she wanted to be loved. She wanted to write, to cultivate her intellect, to feel passion, to be a mother. “I love the stern Titanic parts, I love the crag, even the Drachenfels of life”, she wrote (she was referring to the steep mountain on which Goethe’s Faust is set), “I love the roaring sea that crashes against the crag—I love its sounding cataract”.⁵ Thomas Carlyle, who met her toward the end of her life, wrote of Fuller’s insatiable hunger for experience: “Such a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul”.⁶

That women should have the opportunity to experience as much as possible is precisely the argument she made in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. When the book appeared, Lydia Maria Child described it as “a contralto voice in literature: deep, rich, and strong”. She admired Fuller’s courage in questioning the inequity of marriage and admitted that “I should not have dared to have written some things in it, although it would have been safer for me, being married. But they need to have been said and she is brave to do it”.⁷ Child was responding to the kind of criticism levied by the one-time transcendentalist Orestes Brownson, who declared, “Miss Fuller thinks it is man who has crowded woman to one side, and refused her full scope for self-development; and although the sphere in which she moves may really be that most appropriate to her, yet man has no right to confine her to it, and forbid her to take another if she prefer it . . . All very plausible. But God, and not man, has assigned her the appropriate sphere”.⁸ As news of the book spread, it roused the curiosity of Mary Moody Emerson, who called its author “The Fuller”. From Maine, she wrote her nephew Waldo, asking, “Have you Fuller’s ‘Woman.’ I am longing to see it, & Brownson’s review of it. I want something exciting”.⁹

The book began as an essay, published in an 1843 issue of The Dial, titled “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men; Woman versus Women”. Fuller’s central focus was on the obstacles that prevented female happiness and fulfillment. As she stated early in the essay, “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”.¹⁰ Domestic space was both a metaphor and a contested realm throughout the essay. Fuller complained that the “current opinion” of home that influenced most women’s lives was the “belief that she must marry, if it be only to find a protector, and a home of her own”.¹¹

This arrangement, Fuller declared, was utilitarian, unpoetic. “The man furnishes the house, the woman regulates it”.¹² The problem with domesticity was that it deprived women of their right to grow and develop. Now Fuller imagined a “higher grade of marriage”, one in which “home sympathies, and household wisdom” enabled each partner to “know how to assist one another to carry their burdens along the dusty way”.¹³

Some readers had difficulty with Fuller’s style, including the great English prose stylist George Eliot. Fuller’s mind, she wrote, at least as it appeared in her essay, was precisely “like some regions of her own American continent, where you are constantly stepping from the sunny ‘clearings’ into the mysterious twilight of the tangled forest”. The author’s sentences shifted with no warning from “forcible reasoning” to “dreamy vagueness”. But Eliot, a woman who obscured her identity behind a pseudonym and lived with a married man who could not obtain a divorce, was sympathetic to the crosscurrents of prejudice that made it difficult to even speak of women’s rights. “On one side we hear that woman’s position can never be improved until women themselves are better”, Eliot observed, “and, on the other, that women can never become better until their position is improved—until the laws are made more just, and a wider field opened to feminine activity”.¹⁴ Fuller’s difficult style was an effort to navigate these countervailing attitudes, to show that women were capable of improvement even as they imagined a society where such efforts were unnecessary.

Fuller had long felt trapped between two competing impulses. One was the desire to express herself freely, to speak to an audience as an artist and critic. The other was a longing for love and home. If one had been spurred by her father’s ambition, the other was a social ideal she could never entirely resist. While writing “The Great Lawsuit”, she discovered that it was not her fault she had so far been unable to accomplish either goal. She no longer needed to blame herself. The problem was outside, broader than the individual. It would require a dramatic reorientation.

The distinctions between men and women continued to preoccupy her in 1844, now more than ever as she began to revise “The Great Lawsuit” while in Concord. Mulling over her interactions with the infants of her friends, she was struck by the mysterious, ineffable differences she observed between male and female babies. (She seems not to have considered that the infants’ behavior may have been conditioned by the way they were treated by their parents.) “By what modification of thought is this caused?” she asked herself. “Impossible to trace; here am I the child of masculine energy & Eugene [her brother] of feminine loveliness, & so in many other families”.¹⁵

The question was still in her mind that October, when she became interested in the female penitentiary in Ossining, New York. By this time, Fuller had made up her mind to accept Horace Greeley’s offer to work at the Tribune. Early in the month, she stopped at his home on the remote east side of Manhattan to cement the deal, then traveled sixty miles north along the Hudson River to work on expanding “The Great Lawsuit” into a book. Nearby was Mount Pleasant, the women’s portion of Sing Sing Prison, where one of Fuller’s friends, Georgianna Bruce, had recently taken a position as an assistant to the warden.

With the instincts of a born reporter, Fuller began interrogating this new source of information. “You say few of these women have any feelings about chastity”, she wrote Bruce. “Do you know how they regard that part of the sex, who are reputed chaste? Do they see any reality in it; or look on it merely as a circumstance of condition, like the possession of fine clothes?”¹⁶ These were not prurient questions. In “The Great Lawsuit”, Fuller had alluded to the familiar notion that men were naturally more lustful than women and therefore less in control of their moral and physical selves. The overwhelming number of prostitutes in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were the tangible result of this belief. Now she wanted to explore the human toll that accompanied this double standard. Bruce dutifully questioned one of her prisoners, who replied that “everybody in the world knew that promiscuity was wicked”, but “if no one knew, you did not seem a bit different from anybody else. In fact, you did not stop to think of yourself at all”.¹⁷

Late in October, Fuller visited the women in Mount Pleasant prison and spoke to them about their experiences. (About the trip, her journal for Sunday, October 27 simply says: “I need not rememorate: it is all inscribed on my brain, a theme for long instruction”.) These interactions would inform the second half of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the book that emerged from Fuller’s essay in The Dial. In it, she extended her analysis of the double standard that allowed men to seek sexual gratification from women who could be imprisoned for the act. She now saw that what was often considered a necessary evil — an unfortunate accident of biology — was in fact a societal evil, deliberately unfair and hypocritical. Speaking on behalf of the women at Mount Pleasant, she raged at men who were “incapable of pure marriage; incapable of pure parentage; incapable of worship; oh wretched men, your sin is its own punishment!”¹⁸

Fuller made another substantial addition to her essay. For a dozen or more pages, she described celibacy as a form of resistance to the unfair sexual economy which resulted in prostitution. She may have had in mind Mary Moody Emerson and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, women who had made conscious decisions to remain outside the marriage market. “In this regard of self-dependence”, she wrote, “and a greater simplicity and fulness of being, we must hail as a preliminary the increase of the class contemptuously designated an old maid”.¹⁹ Marriage might be “the natural means of forming a sphere, of taking root on the earth”, Fuller continued, echoing Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Love”, but she admired those women who had found alternative ways to contribute to society, women like Aunt Mary, who served as “spiritual parents” for their nephews and nieces.

A final addition to the original essay was its rousing conclusion. “I think women need”, Fuller proclaimed, “especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers”. Only when society’s arbitrary barriers were torn down once and for all would the world see what women were truly capable of. And for those who still insisted that certain spheres of activity were unfit for women, she had a message: “If you ask me what offices they 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 glad to see them in it”.²⁰

Concluding in this triumphant tone, she finished the book in November 1844. As she explained to her friend William Henry Channing, at last she felt as though she had accomplished something worthy of her early promise. The last day of writing remained a fever dream: “After taking a long walk early on one of the most noble exhilarating sort of mornings I sat down to write and did not put the last stroke till near nine in the evening. Then I felt a delightful glow as if I had put a good deal of my true life in it, as if, suppose I went away now, the measure of my foot-print would be left on earth”.²¹