By the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans
Sunday, May 23, 2010
From time to time, we lift up a significant person in Unitarian Universalist history as the fit subject for a sermon. For example, on Mother’s Day, we honored Maja Capek for her role in establishing the Flower Ceremony. This morning, we celebrate the 200th birthday of another UU foremother, Margaret Fuller.
We do this not because we UUs have raised certain individuals to divine status, as when a Christian minister preaches about Jesus, or because we think a person has received a unique divine revelation, as when a Muslim cleric sermonizes about Mohammed. We do it because we religious liberals believe so strongly that the way a human life is lived is part of theology. That is, we say that a person’s lived experience exemplifies a person’s truest and most deeply held religious tenets.
Margaret Fuller is an excellent example of this principle, and the way she lived her life will resonate with today’s Unitarian Universalists. Al-though she lived and died within the first part of the 19th century, so much of her biography will sound familiar to our 21st century ears. And what doesn’t feel commonplace will ring true as the necessary precursor to our experience. Because she lived the way she lived, our lives move in ways that are now routine for us.
I do not know how and why Margaret Fuller, so famous, so admired, in her lifetime, is almost forgotten today. Her story would make a terrific, if somewhat melodramatic, movie – a little Jane Eyre, a little Henry James, a little cowboy and Indians, and finally winding up with a great romantic tragic ending. Who could resist? I am glad to take this opportunity to bring her back to our lineup of UU forebears.
Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts (now a neighborhood of Cambridge), on May 23, 1810, the first child of Margaret Crane and Timothy Fuller. Timothy was a prominent attorney, elected to the State Senate when Margaret was 3. From Boston he wrote home, “Tell Margaret I love her if she learns to read.” While this expression of conditional parental love sounds jarring to our ears, it was just the impetus little Margaret needed and she did indeed learn to read at that tender age. It was the beginning of an education that was unheard-of for girls in the early 19th century – her father basically outlined a course of study as if she were a boy preparing for Harvard, her father’s alma mater. The curriculum included Latin, Greek, grammar, history, math, music, and modern languages. By 6 she was translating Virgil.
Her father basically home-schooled her and was a strict taskmaster. Margaret learned early on that achievements brought her father’s approval. Kept up late at night to recite to her father on his return from the senate, she suffered migraine headaches and insomnia, which plagued her all her life. But other than earning her father’s elusive affection, it is not clear what possible purpose this rigorous educational regime might have. There were absolutely no roles for women in education once “finishing school” was done. Such teaching positions that might have been available did not assume such a background, neither Harvard nor Yale admitted women, and female educational institutions of higher learning had not yet been founded. Timothy Fuller knew this even better than his daughter; it is not clear what he could have been expecting. While the explicit challenges of her intense education could not have been clear to Margaret at the outset, she began to sense that something was wrong. One biographer wrote of her recurrent headaches, sleeplessness, and depression, “she was living a problem the more oppressive and insidious because she couldn’t name it.” (I am reminded of a short article in the Times-Picayune from the 1980s that I carried around in my wallet until it fell apart; it reported that women suffered from more depression than men and wondered if that could have anything to do with women's place society. No duh.)
She did her best to cope. In 1818, after her father’s election to the U.S. Senate, and his move to Washington, DC, she began to attend The Port School, a Harvard-prep academy that allowed girls to attend. She and her father exchanged long, recondite letters. By age 10, she mastered the classics and began reading in French. At 11, when the rest of her family moved to Washington, she moved in with relatives to attend the Boston Lyceum for Ladies. Her aunt and uncle bring her with them to services at First Church Unitarian.
When Margaret was 12, seemingly realizing what they had done, her parents threw a ball in her honor, to help their daughter with her social awkwardness and increase her circle of friends. It must be admitted that Margaret could be insufferable, with her high-toned intellectual conversation and her complete lack of and interest in social chitchat. The affair was an unmitigated disaster. Ninety young people were invited, but only a few showed up. Afterwards, those few refused to speak to her.
Still flailing to help Margaret fit in, they transferred her to an elite Young Ladies’ Seminary in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1824, in order to increase her chances of a suitable marriage. For whatever reason, she did not end the year there (and one can only imagine poor Margaret sticking out like a giant sore thumb there), but went back to The Port School to study Greek and Latin. Only a year later, she left school forever to continue once again to homeschooling under her father. At only 15, she became close friends with such leading progressive and Unitarian intellectual figures as Lydia Maria Child, James Freeman Clarke, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, and William Ellery Channing. They basked in her admiration, and admired in turn the intensity, intelligence and breadth of her conversation.
While she enjoyed the intellectual companionship of male friends, she found the society of most women to be deadly dull. Both to stimulate herself and perhaps with an eye to developing more female friends, she instituted winter “Conversations” for young women of her acquaintance. Over 5 winters, 20-25 young women gathered in the parlor of a friend’s home to talk over the questions of the day in structured discussions. It helped, but it did not fill Margaret’s yearning. In a letter, she poured out her heart: “With the intellect I always have, always shall, overcome; but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life! O, my God! Shall the life never be sweet?” How sad is that?
More and more she found herself in a class by herself. (Edgar Allan Poe said there were 3 types of human beings: men, women and Margaret Fuller.) There were no examples, in her life or in her extensive readings, of women like herself. She saw little chance of a conventional future, with loving spouse and children. She would have to blaze her own trail, alone, often lonely, sometimes despairing, but always, always bravely.
In 1831, when she was 21, her father forced her to return to church at First Unitarian in Cambridge. The joyful, grateful tone of the worship so jarred her sad spirits that she complained of it in her diary, but later that day, still feeling her off-and-on depression, she took a long walk in the “meditative woods” outside town and there found herself refreshed and renewed. Afterwards, she referred to that day as her conversion experience.
In 1833, Margaret’s father retired from politics and moved his family out to Groton. Margaret was devastated to be so far from her friends and the life she had cobbled together. For the next 2 years, she was able to visit Cambridge only 2 or 3 times a year. During this time, encouraged by her father, Margaret begins to write for the Boston Daily Advertiser, the New England Galaxy, and the Western Messenger – and, under her father’s direction, becomes the full-time governess for her younger siblings, which she finds “a serious and fatiguing charge.”
With her deep love for the restorative powers of nature, it is no wonder that she was drawn to the philosophical teachings of Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, both of whom she met in 1836 when she was 26. Margaret and Waldo shared their writings and their thoughts with each and engaged in fearless intense debates over ideas. Their passionate and platonic relationship ran hot and cold for the rest of their lives. That same year, her father died, ending his physical influence and his power over her person. She became the de facto head of her family, and was obsessed with keeping the family financially secure. She started giving language classes to young ladies and teaching at Alcott’s innovative Temple School to help make ends meet.
The following year she accepted a better-paying position at a school in Providence, Rhode Island; among her subjects was an historical exploration of “female culture” – one of the earliest examples of academic gender studies. Her earnings went to send her 3 younger brothers to Harvard, where she still could not go. 1837 was also the year she was accepted as the first woman member of 2 previously all-male intellectual societies, The Transcendental Club and the Coliseum Club. In addition to teaching and attending meetings, she wrote for various publications, and began her long career as a public speaker. The pace, in addition to her chronic anxiety, ruined her fragile health and she left her teaching position and moved with her family to Jamaica Plain, outside Boston.
In 1839 she apparently felt well enough to embark on a series of seminars for women called, as those parlor gatherings years before, “Conversations,” held at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston. These are considered to be a major development in organized American feminism; they also launched her as a public leader of the Transcendentalist movement. That same year, Emerson promoted her as the first editor and literary critic of The Dial, the influential Transcendentalist magazine. Other contributors included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Henry Hedge, Caroline Sturgis, Ellery Channing, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody, George and Sophia Ripley.
Two years later, at age 31, having given up her lease on the house in Jamaica Plain, she began an uncertain existence, moving from the home of one relative or friend or another. Her younger sister Ellen had married the nephew of Margaret’s friend Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, and she and her mother were virtually homeless. Her finances grew even worse when The Dial, in financial straits, ceased to pay her while she continued to work. In her private writings, she reflected painfully on her status as an unmarried woman, surrounded by married friends; she pondered women’s rights, suffrage, sex, and the expectations of women’s place and role in society. She suffered another setback in her health and was chided by Emerson: “You have played the martyr a little too long alone; let there be rotation in martyrdom!” (Still, he had seen nothing and done nothing until her health collapsed.)
In 1842, Margaret and her mother leased a large house and began a boarding house for young Transcendentalists. She continued her Conversations and her language classes, and her reputation as a public intellectual grew. In 1843, the Conversations became increasingly political, as Margaret delved into abolition, suffrage for African Americans and women, women’s rights, and gender roles. She wrote a controversial article for The Dial, entitled “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men and Woman vs. Women” in which she contended that the ideals of the American Revolution were unrealized for women, African Americans, and Native Americans, and declared human freedom to be a universal right. Horace Greeley was so impressed he published an excerpt in the New-York Tribune.
With a married couple, she traveled to the Western wilderness areas of Illinois and Wisconsin (remember it was 1843!), where she was transported by the beauties of the West, but was disheartened by the injustices to Native Americans. Unlike other white travelers of the era, she took the time to get to know Native American women and men and learned their stories. She had other adventures too, shooting rapids in a canoe, sleeping overnight in a barroom, and witnessing the hardships of white pioneer women. On her return, she wrote Summer on the Lakes about her experiences, spending time in the map room of the Harvard Library to complete the manuscript – the first time any woman had been granted such a privilege.
Her reputation had grown to the point that Horace Greeley offered her a job with the New-York Tribune, writing reviews of literature, drama, and art, and penning social critiques – this time, at a salary equal to male reporters. For the 20 months she was with the newspaper, she lived in New York City. On behalf of the paper, she made a groundbreaking visit to Sing Sing prison, gathering women prisoners (mostly prostitutes) in seminars similar to her Conversations with Boston female intellectuals. She also went to hospitals, asylums, immigrant enclaves, and urban slums – one of the first of the “muckraking” investigative reporters.
In 1845, her essay the “The Great Lawsuit,” revised and expanded, was published as Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In it, she examined the role of women from every possible perspective and fearlessly challenged the existing social order. Reviews of the book ranged from “bold” and “brave” to “indelicate” and “horrendous.” The books caused a sensation and offered encouragement to women reformers everywhere.
The next year, she publicly denounced the Mexican War; she did not feel that her country was living up to its professed ideals. So it was fortuitous when her friends Marcus and Rebecca Spring offered to take her to Eur-ope with them if she would agree to tutor their son; she leapt at the chance. She sent back dispatches on famous art, music, and literary figures, and on social conditions in England, Scotland, and Paris, thus becoming the first female foreign correspondent for an American newspaper. She met and engaged in conversations with George Sand, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth. (While she admired George Sand, also known as Mary Ann Evans, Margaret did not aspire to wearing men's clothing.) She was welcomed and respected. It was perhaps the most fulfilling time of her life.
In England she met the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and became interested in his cause. With the Springs, she traveled to Italy and spent time talking (in Italian, of course!) to the locals, learned more about the political situation – Italians were trying to throw off Austrian and papal control and establish a democratic society. She wrote of a sense of belonging, how she felt removed from American racism and misogyny. She was excited by the revolution, found herself simpatico, and left the Springs to settle alone in Rome, for the first time in her life completely on her own. She was 36.
In Rome, she met the revolutionary nobleman Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, 10 years her junior. They became friends, then lovers; Margaret became pregnant. Having many years before given up any hope of a partner and children, one can only imagine the fulfillment she experienced. At some point, before the child was born, they were secretly married. (The marriage was secret because Margaret, as a Unitarian, was Protestant and Ossoli as an Italian nobleman, needed a papal dispensation for a public ceremony.) Their son, Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli, was born September 5, 1848 and baptized on November 3, in Reiti, where Ossoli’s sister lived. The couple called the baby by the nicknames Angelino or Nino, which can be translated as Beloved or Darling.
The couple left the baby with a wet nurse in Reiti and returned to Rome, where both resumed revolutionary activities. Margaret sent reports on war activities she observed – making her the world’s first war correspondent. She worked in a hospital caring for those wounded in the conflict, and began a history of the Italian Revolution. She wrote urging for an American Ambassador to be sent to Rome to support and advise the revolutionaries.
In 1849, French troops invaded Rome to restore the Pope to power; Ossoli was arrested but released. The revolution collapsed and the couple fled Rome for Reiti, and lived together as a family for the first time. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning visited them there. Margaret continued working on her Italian history and decided it would be more lucrative to have it published in America.
The Ossolis made plans to relocate to New York City, where there was a large Italian community. Strangely, Margaret began to have an intuition of something terrible happening. In the spring, she wrote to a friend:
I am absurdly fearful, and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling. I am become indeed a miserable coward, for the sake of Angelino. I fear heat and cold, fear the voyage, fear biting poverty. I hope I shall not be forced to be as brave for him, as I have been for myself, and that, if I succeed to rear him, he will be neither a weak nor a bad man. But I love him too much! In case of mishap, however, I shall perish with my husband and my child, and we may be transferred to some happier state.
They booked passage on a merchant ship; everything that could go wrong did. Soon after sailing, the captain died of smallpox. Other crew members also caught the disease; some died, some survived. Little Nino was infected but recovered. In mid-July, the ship encountered a terrible storm, likely a hurricane, and on the morning of July 19, 1850, the inexperienced first mate, to whom the command had fallen on the captain’s death, ran the ship aground off Fire Island, New York. As the ship broke apart in the surf, onlookers looted cargo from the ship but did nothing to help. Some of the crew made it to shore, but all 3 Ossolis drowned. Only the baby’s body was later recovered.
Laying the foundations for the modern women’s movement; insisting that spirituality was connected to nature and to lived experience; encouraging women of every ethnicity, class, and culture to rely on themselves and develop their own talents; promoting women’s financial independence; inventing investigative journalism, foreign correspondence bureaus, and in-person war reportage; advancing the cause of democracy and human rights on an international scale – Margaret Fuller is the most exciting, most innovative, UU ancestor you never heard of. That she accomplished all this in a time when women were denied the most basic of rights, and while she herself coped with lifelong depression and poor physical health gives us even more inspiration.
Let us be strengthened and energized by Margaret Fuller’s story to make use of our talents to the best of our abilities, no matter what challenges we face. We end with her words:
I never lived, that I remember, what you call a common natural day. All my days are touched by the supernatural, for I feel the pressure of hidden causes, and the presence, sometimes the communion, of unseen powers.
May all our days be thus. AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
