NEW YORK TIMES Book Review: Margaret Fuller died on July 19, 1850, in a shipwreck off Fire Island. In her intellectual prime and at the height of her influence as a social reformer, she was returning home from Europe with her Italian husband and their child. A major advocate for the rights of women, Fuller had left the United States in 1846, just a year after the publication of her influential book, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” which both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton cited as an inspiration. Having accomplished her mission, as Megan Marshall puts it in this new biography, “to meet the writers and radicals whose work she’d admired from afar and test their minds in conversation,” Fuller was coming home to the United States, having flagrantly acted out the freedoms she demanded as every woman’s right.
‘Margaret Fuller,’ by Megan Marshall
“Margaret Fuller: A New American Life” returns Marshall to the Boston Brahmin salons of her earlier and deservedly praised biography, “The Peabody Sisters,” whose three subjects, Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia, campaigned with Fuller against the sexist double standards that starved women’s intellects and denied them agency in any but the domestic sphere. It was at Elizabeth Peabody’s West Street bookstore that Fuller conducted many of her celebrated “conversations,” unorthodox gatherings of female intellectuals who looked toward “a changed world, with women as powerful as men.”
Most of those who conversed about women’s rights ended by sacrificing their noble ideals to the comforts of marriage. Not Fuller, who walked her talk, endorsing “scandalous living arrangements” over what she termed a “corrupt social contract” that, Marshall adds, “cheated wife far worse than husband.”From the time he perceived his daughter’s genius, Fuller’s father, Timothy, a congressman from Massachusetts, determined to push his firstborn “as near perfection as possible.” He lavished an education as fine as any boy’s on Margaret, who was reciting in Latin by the age of 6 and who, under a “torrent of criticism,” mastered her father’s greatest lesson: “Mediocrity is obscurity.” … (more)
