Soul Force

Margaret Fuller

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

May 2, 2010

^{Opening
Words}

^{All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities,
our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves
to that
till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we
trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these [natural]
things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me.
There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.}

^{– Margaret Fuller, “Good Sense,” in a dialogue between
Free Hope, Old Church, Good Sense, and Self-Poise, p., 127}

^Readings

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, from Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776-1936, pp. 24-26.

It should be remarked that, as the principle of Liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of Woman. As men become aware that few men have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance....

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.

Yet, then and only then will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession. 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, appareled 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.

I believe that, at present, women are the best helpers of one another.

Let them think; let them act; till they know what they need.

We only ask of men to remove arbitrary barriers. Some would like to do more. But I believe it needs that Woman show herself in her native dignity, to teach them how to aid her; their minds are so encumbered by tradition. . . .

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 .. . glad to see them in it. . . .

I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers. A party of travelers lately visited a lonely hut on a mountain. There they found an old woman, who told them she and her husband had lived there forty years. "Why," they said, "did you choose so barren a spot?" She "did not know; it was the man's notion." And, during forty years, she had been content to act, without knowing why, upon “the man's notion!” I would not have it so.

^Sermon

Margaret Fuller reached her intellectual maturity as one of the leading members of the New England Transcendentalists, so let’s begin by going back to the origins of that rich intellectual current. Well, not all the way back; that would take us to Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Practical Reason, and that, while unquestionable transcendental, would likely also be tedious. Here’s a definition by Mark Harris from the Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism:

Transcendentalism was primarily a religious movement that developed as part of a rebellion against the liberal Christian Unitarians whose faith derived from rational biblical criticism and historical tradition. Transcendentalism was more a spiritual approach to life than a systematic philosophy. Its practitioners hungered for a religious intensity lacking in their experiences of a cold, formal Unitarianism.… Rejecting the dry rationalism of the Age of Reason, Transcendentalism evoked an immediate and emotional response to life.... The Transcendentalists believed that every person could experience the divine personally and immediately.[i]

Of course, not everyone took the Transcendentalists as seriously as they took themselves. One of the historians of the movement reports some of the less positive reviews of the Transcendentalists:

To many people ... the Transcendentalists were unsettling, and as often ridiculed or reviled as respected. On his famous trip to the United States at the height of the Transcendentalist ferment, for example, the English novelist Charles Dickens observed that when he inquired of some of his American friends what Transcendentalism signified, he was given to understand that ''whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental." The Scottish writer and reformer Thomas Carlyle, [after meeting with one of the ministers who joined the utopian community at Brook Farm spoke of him as a Unitarian] minister who has left the pulpit to reform the world by cultivating onions. Even fellow travelers could not resist such humorous characterizations. In her old age, Annie Russell Marble, who had lived at Ripley's Brook Farm community, quipped that the Transcendentalists, for all their goodwill, were "a race who dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash." The historian Henry Adams, no stranger to New England's ways, concluded that they were "unutterably funny."[ii]

It should not be too surprising, then, that when Margaret Fuller traveled to London and met Carlyle – who referred to her as “an exotic from New England” – she confidently declared, “I accept the universe,” to which Carlyle replied, “By gad, you’d better.”[iii]

Margaret Fuller matters because she was one of the first to advocate full equality between men and women. Indeed, she believed that until women were free to develop all of their talents, abilities, and interests, men, too, would not be free to develop themselves to the full. As she said in our reading this morning,

“As men become aware that few men have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.... If every path [were] laid open to Woman as freely as to Man,.... 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.”[iv]

Margaret Fuller matters because she not only believed that there was a better way of life for both men and women, advocated it, wrote persuasively about it, carried it out by holding years of Conversations with Women to promote their intellectual development to be on a par with the most advance men of her age – she also lived what she believed, serving as an example in her own life. Margaret Fuller matters because she was among the most accomplished women – or men – living then or indeed at any time in history. Margaret Fuller matters because her life is a model for ours of always being responsive to whatever was before her, always filling each new role with the very best of her passions and her abilities. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a significant inspiration for the Seneca Falls Convention of women in 1848, which adopted a declaration of independence for women.

Her father took charge of her education from a very early age. Under his tutelage, she was reading by the time she was four and translating Latin by the time she was six. So fluent was she in that language that, when her father was elected to the House of Representatives, she often wrote to him in Latin. This rigorous training was not without its negative consequences. Her father

… pushed her unmercifully at her lessons … from age six on, and he kept her up late in the evenings, sending her to bed at last overstimulated and unable to sleep. This pressure exacted fearful costs in frequent headaches, a nervous stomach, insomnia, and nightmares. But she also acquired a first-rate education, and later she gave credit to her father for holding her to the same standards he would have held a son. She said, "He respected his child ... too much to be an indulgent parent. He called on her for clear judgment, for courage, for honor and fidelity; in short for such virtues as he knew."'[v]

Fuller never lost that drive for mastery, and by the time her father died in 1835 and left her in charge of the family, when she was just 25, she had already developed a reputation as a genius and brilliant conversationalist. Her first job was teaching at a newly-founded school in Providence from 1837-1839, when she left after two very successful years. When she returned to Boston, she began leading a group of “Conversations” with about 25 eminent women from the Boston area in order to help them learn as much about advanced topics as men were able to learn. In these conversations, she led discussions on “such topics as mythology, art, ethics, education, faith, health, women’s rights, and the lives and ideas of great men and women.”[vi] She continued these conversations for the next five years, and from them crystallized her own strong commitment to and advocacy of full equality for women. In leading these conversations, she also empowered other women to think and act for themselves.

In 1840, Fuller helped Ralph Waldo Emerson found The Dial, a journal of the Transcendentalist circle, thereby becoming the first woman to edit a major magazine. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845 was a passionate and persuasive argument for full equality between the sexes. Her writings brought her to the attention of Horace Greeley, who persuaded her to move to New York and become a literary critic for his newspaper, the Tribune. Once in New York, she not only wrote elegantly about literature, she was also drawn to the condition of the most marginalized of that great city, whose extremes of wealth and poverty disturbed her deeply and led her to participate in the leading circles of reform in the city. She visited Sing Sing and interviewed women prisoners, sharing with them her concerns for the plight of women in a mans world; she even continued to correspond with some of the women prisoners long after her visit. She visited and wrote about the almshouses of the city and the condition of the indigent more generally, about the insane asylums, one of which held twice as many inmates as the building was designed for, about the need to help prisoners make a transition back to society when they were released, about the fact that there was more than enough wealth in the city to ameliorate all of these conditions if only there were the will. In the course of this work, she came to see a broader responsibility for her fellow women and men than she had experienced in the rarified circles of the Transcendentalists of Boston. As one of the historians of Transcendentalism puts it,

To live the Gospel of Christ implied a profound brother- and sisterhood that would initiate a social and spiritual millennium. That Fuller had moved to such a position after her long sojourn in Emerson's orbit testifies to New York's indelible impact on her. There she could not avert her eyes from suffering, as she could in Concord or at Brook Farm. Awakened to the inequalities that gave the lie to America's purportedly egalitarian society, she subordinated her transcendent ego to her social conscience.[vii]

In 1846, Greeley sent her to Europe to serve as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune. There she met the leading intellectuals of the day, but also found herself drawn to support the Italian Revolution. She fell in love with one of the noblemen who was a supporter of the revolutionary cause and became pregnant with their son Angelo, who was born in 1848. Her letters to the Tribune gave readers an intimate sense of the brief life of the Roman Republic. After Rome fell to the counter-revolutionaries, her family was forced to flee and finally decided in 1850 to return to the United States. Tragically, her whole family died in a shipwreck within sight of land, just off the shore of Fire Island, New York. Emerson experienced her loss like a death in his own family. He wrote, “I have lost my audience. I hurry now to my work admonished that I have few days left.”[viii] As one of Emerson’s biographers summarized Fuller’s life and character:

It was her vivacity — which no portrait even succeeded in suggesting — that struck everyone. She was always lively; her face was so mobile that isolating a single feature was difficult. People remembered her "graceful carriage of head and neck and her often half-closed eyes shooting "piercing glances at those with whom she conversed." Her forcefulness was obvious. Samuel Ward, who knew her well, said of her: "How can you describe a Force? How can you write the life of Margaret?"[ix]

Fuller led an enormously fruitful life, ranging from deep philosophical and linguistic accomplishments to literature, advocacy of reform, care for the less privileged, support for revolutionary aspirations, and above all fierce and effective advocacy for the liberation and equality of women.

Just as we honor our fathers and our mothers – whom we celebrate next Sunday – so we need to honor our intellectual ancestors, heroes of the mind and spirit. Margaret Fuller blazed trails that have since been paved over, and sometimes we forget that pioneers faced much more difficult obstacles so that in our age we could accomplish what they only could only dream. The feminist movement of the 1970’s and 80’s was able to draw on Fuller’s work as well as her life for inspiration and guidance about the possibilities they could now bring into being. As women discovered in the recent past, there is a need for sharing experiences with other women, recognizing as Fuller put it that “women are the best helpers of one another.”[x] We need to cherish those like Fuller who came before us to find there a pattern for our own lives. Margaret Fuller was an explorer not of continents but of the human soul and the whole range of human living. She was engaged, committed and passionate – and also difficult! She suffered damage from her rigorous education at her father’s hand, and she was so formidable that many found her difficult to converse with. Like all of us, she had her flaws, which is part of why we can admire and emulate her; she was no more perfect than we are.

Our heroes accompany us in our living. They show new possibilities that we can learn from, new paths that can be taken, new life that can be lived. Such a one was Margaret Fuller.

May we take courage from her example to think deeply, find our selves fully, and live our lives in harmony with our highest aspirations.

May it be so, and Amen.