6.2: Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and the Transcendentalists
This article outlines a presentation given by Dr. John Matteson, who wrote a critical text on Margaret Fuller called The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography in 2012. In this article, he contemplates her genius as well as her place in nineteenth century American literature and letters.
For further insight into Margaret Fuller and her young life, read this excerpt from her 1852 autobiographical text, Memoirs of Margaret Full Ossoli. You will see an example of her writing skills here, as well as the way that she conceptualizes herself and her past.
In Fuller's essay "The Great Lawsuit", she applies Transcendentalist thought to the question of women's rights. This essay was published in The Dial, which she co-edited with Emerson. She later expanded this essay into the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller, as with many early feminists, connected the difficulties women faced to the evils of slavery in making her case for women to develop their souls as freely and fully as they could. She makes few to no allusions to legal or political changes, as later feminists would insist upon.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was a teacher and educational reformer, founder of the kindergarten system in the United States, and an advocate of Native Americans' right to education. She was a prominent figure within the Transcendentalist movement, and published their literary journal, The Dial, in 1842 and 1843. In 1849, in the periodical Aesthetic Papers, she was first to publish Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. She supported important writers of the era, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller, with her bookstore and publishing house in Boston. It was the seat of cultural and intellectual thought in America in the mid-1800s. She was also instrumental in publishing the Paiute Indian activist Sarah Winnemucca's autobiography, Life Among the Paiutes. Peabody has been called "an American Renaissance Woman" for the scope and breadth of her work, which included writing, lecturing, publishing, and activism for minority rights. Her experimental work with kindergartens ignited an educational revolution in the public school systems throughout America, and resulted in a lasting legacy for today's children. Read this biography of her life to understand the important role she played during this time.