“I Weary in this Playground of Boys”

I’m a little late to the party here, but I have finally read Walden and fallen in love with the Transcendentalists, with their democratic philosophy, their belief in language, utopian socialism, and the great wild world.

Often overshadowed by her more famous male contemporaries is the smartest of them all, the lone woman in their inner circle: Margaret Fuller, thought the “brightest mind in New England.” The Library of America has just rectified this oversight by publishing Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings, allowing readers to set her published works, including her 1845 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the next major feminist manifesto following Mary Wollstonecraft’s, alongside her sparkling private letters and journals. 

Fuller was brilliant, opinionated, and awkward (“bright and ugly,” she said), and her writing laid the basis for the first wave of feminism. Unsurprisingly, she was disliked by her male contemporaries: Nathaniel Hawthorne named a heifer after her at the utopian colony of Brook Farm, even as she praised his work in print; her interlocutor Emerson also refused her offer of intimate friendship, preferring younger women who could be muses, not peers. She was called by various detractors during her lifetime and after ugly, corpulent, “unsexed,” “manhating,” arrogant, a virago, and an “old maid.”

Despite her dismissal of standard feminine graces, she was still subject to woman’s lot.

In her early twenties — the same age that Emerson entered Harvard Divinity School, when Thoreau was walking four hours a day, smoldering with ambition, and being fed and housed by Mrs. Emerson — at this age, Fuller was nursing her mother and grandmother in Groton, running a full-time school for her younger siblings, caring for her disabled brother, and managing most household chores, far from the intellectual life of Boston. “I keep on ‘fulfilling all my duties’ as the technical phrase is except to myself,” she wrote to a friend during this time. As a schoolteacher, she would rise at 4:30 to read and take notes on her planned biography of Goethe before heading to work. She suffered frequent migraines throughout her life; it’s not hard to see why.

As one of only three women in the Transcendental Club, a hub of antebellum American intellectual life, Fuller struggled mightily. She was desirous of the men’s freedom, yet scornful of their solipsism. The Club wanted a magazine, but none of the men wanted to edit it; Fuller took it on for no pay, and under her editorship, The Dial became Thoreau’s first publisher and a major literary force. Staying in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, while men like Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott played philosophy parlor games, she wrote to a friend: “I wish I were a man, and then there would be one. I weary in this playground of boys, proud and happy in their balls and marbles.”

In this way, Fuller’s feminism emerged organically — from knowing what she was capable of and setting that against what she was allowed to do. It also came from attending to, working for, and caring for others, first as a teacher at a girls’ school and then in the wildly popular philosophy conversation groups she ran for her women friends. When Emerson came to one and held forth at great length, all the women stopped talking; he was not allowed back.

Fuller was also well aware how women suffered as women. She cared for a neighbor dying from a self-induced abortion; she reported on the prisons and asylums in New York City for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune; she sympathized in print with the sex workers imprisoned in Sing Sing. It was not their crime, she wrote, but society that had condemned them.

Finally, she got to Europe, where she became the first female war correspondent in American history. She took, for the first time in her life, a lover — a minor aristocrat a decade younger, who adored her and was happy living close by while she kept her own apartment. Pregnant at 38, she roamed the hills outside Rome barefoot or on a donkey, attending closely to the revolutionary convulsions of Europe in 1848, working on a history of modern Rome, and filing her dispatches to the Tribune office in New York regularly. Here’s a woman to emulate!

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Given Fuller’s extraordinary life, I am disappointed every time I read her published writing: her prose often pushes the floridness of sentimentalism to its limit, her style is grandiose and wildly digressive. But her writing is full of surprisingly modern arguments — especially the landmark Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) — and for this, it is worth the effort of working through the overwritten thickets of her prose. 

Fuller argued for what we’d now call a kind of gender fluidity, born (one of her biographers surmises) from living the intellectual life of a man and the social life of a woman. Fuller argues that man and woman are “two halves of the same thought,” “the other chamber of the heart of the self” — that both genders sit within all of us, constantly shifting balance. And though she was not in favor of women’s suffrage, she wrote in support of abolition, noting the links and discrepancies between white women’s protected status, confined to the domestic sphere, and Black women’s enslaved status, forced to work the fields. Womanhood, she suggests here, is not an essential state but a fiction, a language of power offered to some, withheld from others, and confining all.

Hers was a feminism born from being lived, dashed off, felt, puzzled over with other minds. How should we live? the Transcendentalists asked themselves. Fuller knew that living happened with others. As she once wrote to Emerson, “You are intellect, I am life.” She was. ––Jessie Kindig