"No Purely Feminine Woman"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cWhile women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, \u2018men never.\u2019\u201d This statement appears in Megan\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""No Purely Feminine Woman"\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201cWhile women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, \u2018men never.\u2019\u201d This statement appears in Megan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Anxious Bench\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-05-27T05:01:37+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2015-01-03T20:47:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Agnes Howard\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Agnes Howard\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/\",\"name\":\"\\\"No Purely Feminine Woman\\\"\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2013-05-27T05:01:37+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2015-01-03T20:47:00+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/#\/schema\/person\/fc2cee04061a5ae3e685e9683c67b32d\"},\"description\":\"\u201cWhile women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, \u2018men never.\u2019\u201d This statement appears in Megan\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"“No Purely Feminine Woman”\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/\",\"name\":\"Anxious Bench\",\"description\":\"The Relevance of Religious History for Today\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/#\/schema\/person\/fc2cee04061a5ae3e685e9683c67b32d\",\"name\":\"Agnes Howard\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/02a9ccb6020ab4e457da8a132fee204a?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/02a9ccb6020ab4e457da8a132fee204a?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Agnes Howard\"},\"description\":\"Agnes Howard teaches at Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso University. 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{"id":4123,"date":"2013-05-27T01:01:37","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T05:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=4123"},"modified":"2015-01-03T16:47:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T20:47:00","slug":"no-purely-feminine-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/no-purely-feminine-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"“No Purely Feminine Woman”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u201cWhile women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, \u2018men never.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This statement appears in Megan Marshall\u2019s new biography<\/a> of\u00a0 Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). \u00a0\u00a0The quotation continues: men never \u201cin any extreme of despair, wished to be women,\u201d Marshall summarizes, since there was nothing enviable in women\u2019s lot, no advantages to be had in that direction.\u00a0 Fuller is a fascinating character, well anthologized and covered in earlier biographies but deserving of broader familiarity.\u00a0 Marshall\u2019s new book serves that end.<\/p>\n

Margaret is an important figure in American intellectual history.\u00a0 Educated by her father and by her own lights, Margaret taught school; led famous reading groups or \u201cConversations\u201d for women, a sort of Great Books program for the wives and daughters of Boston luminaries; served as editor of the Transcendentalist literary journal The Dial<\/em>; and was hired off by Horace Greeley to write for the New York Tribune<\/em>.\u00a0 Covering for the Tribune<\/em> the 1848-49 revolutions in Europe, Fuller was the first female foreign correspondent for an American newspaper and sent dispatches from the short-lived Roman Republic.\u00a0 Holed up on her own in a Rome apartment, she observed and recorded the fearful season when Pope Pius IX fled the Vatican in disguise and Tiber hospitals filled up with revolutionaries. Fuller married Giovanni Ossoli, a young Roman of faintly aristocratic status, and bore his son, whom she kept hidden away in the country with a wet nurse as fighting raged in the Eternal City.\u00a0 Fuller intended to publish her history of the Roman Republic upon return to the United States but the manuscript was lost\u2014along with the lives of Margaret, Giovanni, baby Nino, and others, when their ship wrecked in a storm just off Fire Island, New York.\u00a0 The passengers drowned about 300 yards from shore.<\/p>\n

Fuller was never much taken by orthodox Christianity, bucking against the Unitarian religious establishment, admiring religion as \u201cthe thirst for truth and good, not the love of sect and dogma,\u201d and lampooned by poet James Russell Lowell as having \u201clived cheek by jowl,\/Since the day I was born, with the Infinite Soul.\u201d\u00a0 She belonged to the circle of Transcendentalists, a world Marshall already has displayed well in her 2006 joint biography<\/a> of the three Peabody sisters, the Boston-Cambridge-Concord orbit of men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, George Ripley, and James Freeman Clarke, with smart women at its edges wondering what to do with their genius.<\/p>\n

Fuller struggled long with the mismatch between her intellect and her opportunities, and considered the question in her major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century<\/em>.\u00a0 Unlike suffrage or other contemporary projects for female advancement, Fuller aimed not for uplift of women in general. Noting that men and women had like faculties in different measures, \u201c[t]here is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,\u201d \u00a0she called for the development and elevation of the individual woman.<\/p>\n

Fuller regretted that girls are told \u201cthey can\u2019t do that\u201d when they try to play ball or called \u201cmasculine\u201d when they perform well at schoolwork.\u00a0 Her friend William Channing\u2019s observation that Fuller was \u201covertasked by her father, who wished to train her as a boy,\u201d echoes the lament of Elizabeth Cady Stanton\u2019s father, who was said to have wished his smart daughter had been born a boy.<\/p>\n

Under the circumstances, what girl wouldn\u2019t think so too? Reading the biography presses contrasts with our own time, our schools and sports awash in a cheerful go-girl boosterism, girls told from early ages that they can be \u201canything they want to be.\u201d\u00a0 Women now need not \u201cwish to be men,\u201d in Fuller\u2019s language, to partake of those freedoms.\u00a0 But \u201cmen never\u201d? \u00a0Consider how curious to Fuller would be cases of boys asking to be treated as girls.\u00a0 Massachusetts commissioner of elementary and secondary education, Mitchell Chester, this spring issued fresh directives<\/a> on school treatment of students questioning gender.\u00a0 Much aghast attention was paid to troubles that might arise over bathrooms and locker rooms, if students were allowed to go where preferred gender led them.\u00a0 Many factors might be at play in such difficulties.\u00a0 But if we place respectfully to the side the many principled concerns that could be offered on this matter, the situation is remarkable even in historical contrast.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"