HUU – July 3, 2022
By Robin McNallie
I recall Forrest Church once asserting that Unitarian Universalism is the denomination that, in its principles, is the most representative of American democracy, and we can look retrospectively to find earlier evidence of this freedom tendency in our denomination, specifically at the era of Transcendentalism, extending roughly from the 1830s to 1850. The great guru of that avant garde Unitarian movement was, of course Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in a reminiscence published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1883, the year after his death, comments on the generation just coming of age in the 1830s decade. He characterizes that cohort in a memorably pungent sentence: “The young men were born with knives in their brains.” Pungent as it is, the sentence leaves out the young women of the time, predominantly Unitarian, who were also carrying inside their brains concealed cutlery – women all known in their own time if not ours: Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Sturgis, Sophia Ripley, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydian M. Emerson (Waldo’s wife), and Margaret Fuller.
In her rather short lifetime, Fuller was a much talked-about figure whose 1845 book, Woman in the 19th Century, was a pioneering tract in describing women’s subordination to men and the benefits to both sexes of ending it. Here, she was reiterating what the English writer, Mary Woolstonecraft, Mary Shelley’s mother, was saying in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). After her death in 1850, Fuller’s reputation faded. In a college course survey of American literature that I took as an undergraduate in the 1950s, she didn’t warrant the standard biographical sketch and sampling of her writings in the assigned text, nor was she better represented in the survey text I taught at JMU in the mid-‘60s. Only with the rising tide of the women’s movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s did she begin to acquire more standing. Finally, in 1994, the Viking Portable Margaret Fuller was published with the entire text of Woman included. It was, incidentally, the Viking Portable edition of William Faulkner in 1946 which brought him his late recognition and the Nobel Prize in 1949, and indeed, in 1995, the year after the Viking publication, Fuller was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame. Now, with Fuller’s place in the canon secure, we can see her forward-looking accomplishments more clearly.
[Read more…]