Footprint of Margaret Fuller
The Footprint of Margaret Fuller Margaret Fuller could well be remembered as either a Feminist matriarch or, as Nathaniel Hawthore described her, “A great humbug … defective and evil in nature” (McQuade 1305). In Fuller’s essay “The Great Lawsuit” which she later expanded into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she produces her insurrectionary thoughts and ideas about the inequality of women. This paper will consider the traditional attitudes towards women, Margaret Fuller’s ideologies and how the influences of the Transcendentalists may have inspired this work. ... Margaret Fuller was one of the scarce population of women who, during this time in American history took the stage in an attempt to establish the ideology that women as well as men were “…two halves of one thought … daughters and sons of time; twin exponents of a divine thought” (Fuller 1311). The equality of all humanity, of groups and cultures seems to be the motivating factor that inspired most of Margaret Fuller’s writings. Fuller, the eldest of nine children, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1810. Fuller’s father Timothy “had hoped that his first child would be a son who could be reared in his pattern as his heir” (Wade 6). ... Fuller gave his eldest child the education normally given to a son. Timothy Fuller was very much a self-made man. ... Fuller was very happy to be wife and mother. However, as soon as Margaret reached the age of three or four, Mr. Fuller took over as her teacher. Margaret Fuller accepted her father’s disciplines, teachings and strict schedules with great exuberance. ... Because her mother was so grief-stricken when Timothy Fuller died, Margaret took over the responsibility of supporting the family. ... Thinking only that she had ”failed her father in love and duty,” she embraced her new role as head of the Fuller household (Wade 24). Fuller’s affiliation with men like Ralph Waldo Emerson (who became her lifelong friend), Bronson Alcott, George Ripley and William Ellery Channing initiated her into the new world of so-called Transcendentalists. ... During this time, Margaret Fuller began to hold private “Conversation” groups. ... Fuller had the grand scheme that these conversations “could help aspiring women to free themselves from their traditional subservience” (Wade 69).