Introduction
Margaret Fuller positions herself in “The Great Lawsuit” as women’s legal council to argue on their behalf for their lawful rights to the same opportunities as men. Given nineteenth-century laws of coverture, which rendered women legally invisible, their rights “covered” by their husbands, this kind of council was much needed. Marriage and property laws of “coverture” at the time dictated that wives were their husbands’ property. Divorce was very rare and Fuller repeatedly points to the ways in which the laws establish an unequal balance of power in marriage, leaving women legally unprotected and vulnerable to abuse. For example, due to coverture laws, husbands had the legal right to deny wives access to their own children and could potentially use this as bargaining power against them. In addition, marital rape was not recognized as a punishable crime until the late twentieth century. While the laws gave men the benefit of the doubt, and society encouraged men to be literal gentlemen, they did not protect women from men who would use power to serve their best interests over the interests of the women in their charge, be they wives, daughters, or sisters.
Fuller first published “The Great Lawsuit” in The Dial in 1843, and later expanded it into a book-length publication, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), adding substantial research and literary, mythological, and Biblical references to important historical women figures and heroines. Often compared to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century and “The Great Lawsuit” differ greatly in rhetoric and structure. Like Wollstonecraft, Fuller is invested in illustrating that women have not yet been given the chance to show what they are truly capable of. Her main argument is that women need to be given equal opportunities to men—then it is up to individuals to decide what they will do with those opportunities. “Let them be sea-captains,” as she writes in Woman. However, Fuller’s method for making this argument is distinctly influenced by her Transcendentalism and the pedagogical method she used in her famous Boston Conversations series, which was radical for her time. Rather than dictate to her audience, she would prefer readers come to personally meaningful conclusions of their own. Her writing leaves room for a reader’s self-reliance to guide her. As she writes in “The Great Lawsuit,” “the position I early was enabled to take, was one of self-reliance. And were all women as sure of their wants as I was, the result would be the same. The difficulty is to get them to the point where they shall naturally develop self-respect, the question how it is to be done.”
Instead of presenting a linear argument with a clear thesis, organization of points, and topic sentences, which one would expect from college level writing and beyond, Fuller takes a different approach to make her case using example after example and allowing the reader to determine her own conclusions as a result of her ample evidence. This approach to making her case for women’s rights can make tracing her argument a challenge. The point is not to look for a linear argument but to allow the text to do its intended work and affect the mind with a general impression: the examples and anecdotes within are meant to guide readers in reconsidering commonly held assumptions about gender roles and social norms (although “gender” was not a term in use then.) Jane Duran, in “Margaret Fuller and Transcendental Feminism,” advises: “Fuller’s writing is digressive and allusive, and a great deal of what she says flows from her implicit contention that the human spirit ought to flower in a certain sort of way, and that the ultimate flowering of the female spirit has yet to take place” (66-7).
At times, the text oscillates between essentialism and radical gender fluidity. Nancy Craig Simmons, in her introduction to “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: The 1839-1840 Series,” writes: “Though Fuller and her women students frequently state ‘essentialist’ views of women in conversations 16 through 18, the reports also show their resistance to notions of difference that promote inequality and their understanding of the concept of woman’s ‘sphere’ as a cultural construction” (1994, 196). Indeed, in conversation 17, Fuller asserts that there is “no essential difference” (215), and she caused a general laugh when she complained in conversation 18, in all seriousness, that “she constantly heard people talk as if men were only animals & women were only plants” (217). We might take the same informed approach to reading “The Great Lawsuit” and Woman in the Nineteenth Century: on the one hand, it was rhetorically useful to Fuller to draw from essentializing sexual difference so she could further her argument that women have something to offer society that men cannot. This is part of her point that two halves (one female, the other male) make a whole society, one that achieves a “ravishing harmony of the spheres.” On the other hand, Fuller refuses to box either expression of gender as categorically limited from the other. Look no further than her most famous passage to see how she, in some moments, anticipates the radical troubling of gender we find in Judith Butler’s work: “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” The question of what to do with these paradoxical moments is really up to you, the reader.
Christina Katopodis,
The Graduate Center, CUNY
December, 2019.
Works Cited
Duran, Jane. “Margaret Fuller and Transcendental Feminism.” The Pluralist, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 65-72.
Simmons, Nancy Craig. “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: The 1839-1840 Series.” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1994, pp. 195-226.