The
19th Century writer Margaret Fuller is relevant in the fight for
women’s rights in the 21st Century because of her ideal that the
individual has a personal journey to arise a more perfect self: reflective,
reliant, and active. She is most often associated with the Transcendentalist
movement and wrote one of the first American feminist masterpieces (Woman In The 19th Century).
She would later in life branch out from the group to follow the very ideal of
personal journey and self-reliance, moving away from literary circles and into
social consciousness, yet both are significant in preserving her identity. She
journeyed west in the United States to witness ill treatment of the Native
Americans in 1843, made visits to the notoriously harsh Sing Sing Prison in
1844, and while in Rome partook in the 1848 Italian Revolution. The 21st
Century author, playwright, and activist Eve Ensler is a great example of a
woman today who embodies Margaret Fuller’s ideals. She does not only have a
literary presence that embodies self-awareness, but a social consciousness. Her
work in the US, the Congo, and Bosnia, and with the recent campaign One Billion Rising, which is a global
movement to end violence towards women, carries with it an active, responsible
life.
Marget
Fuller and Eve Ensler have each produced groundbreaking reflective work paving
the way for future artists and activists. The importance here is the notion
from Transcendentalism, that reflection, particularly self-reflection, can help
people achieve a truer self. Margaret Fuller was America’s first published
feminist. Prior to her 1845 manifesto, Woman
in the Nineteenth Century, only Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was printed in England in
1792, which some fifty years had passed between. Margaret Fuller had previously shared her pivotal ideas on
multiple occasions, the first in the article "The Great Lawsuit,"
which appeared in the Dial (1843). Margaret
Fuller was a strong advocate for self-reflection. She believed, “Let every
woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself” (102). For after she or he
has begun to examine life and think, Fuller fully aware of Socrates, they will
find no other choice but to expand past literary circles and take an active
life of social consciousness.
Margaret
Fuller ‘outlines’ her understanding that her thoughts about men and women are
that both men and women are more significantly human. The social and political barrier
between them is arbitrary. This profound self-examination came one hundred
years before Simone de Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex. Here Fuller states, “a stream, which is ever flowing from the
heights of [her] thoughts” (112). Her vision noticed, “Man is a being of
two-fold relations, to nature beneath, and intelligences above him” (112). She
persists that yet only a fraction of purpose is lived in the life of any one man
and the “growth of Man is twofold, masculine and feminine” (112). Her
understanding of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Over
Soul is one that must embrace both masculine and feminine. The whole idea
of the transcendental movement was for men, along with women, to rise above the
limitations society had created for them to make a more responsible mankind.
While
Margaret Fuller’s masterpiece gave the academic literary world its second
biggest feminist work, Ensler’s literary achievements were produced on the
stage. As a survivor of childhood trauma, where her own father raped her
countless times, she felt isolated and alone. Her individual power gave her the
outlet to write deep personal monologues. What started as her own personal way
to obtain a sense of examined life, provided women locally and then globally
with a collective of confessions. Her most groundbreaking play was entitled the Vagina Monologues. Though it was first
performed in 1996, it is a continually evolving performance that women have
interactively participated in more than seventy countries from Argentina to
Belgium, Turkey to Indonesia, Kenya to Israel, etc.
Once
Ensler and Fuller reached literary acknowledgment, it wasn’t enough for them to
claim notoriety. Ensler, following the footsteps of Fuller, pushes for the
individual’s path for self-perfection, which actually includes this
responsibility that Emerson had nurtured as well: to be aware of one’s impact
on others. But unlike, the men in the American Romantic movement, Fuller picked
up and went to a part of the world and remained in Italy during a highly
violent time. Such men in the movement mostly talked the talk but did not step
out of bounds (unless one considers being a semi-hermit on a pond and
temporarily not paying taxes a radical step).
The
active life required travelling outside one’s comfort zone. Only after risking
a journey to uncharted territory would an individual begin to think
differently. This ideal of ‘active life’ is to journey beyond one’s own
personal history. Both Ensler and Fuller had exceeded this journey. In 1843, Fuller traveled west in the United
States to witness injustice in the treatment of Native American tribes such as the Ottawa
and the Chippewa tribes. Her reflections on the experience appear in Summer on The Lakes, published in 1844. Just as she witnessed white women
being mistreated back in New England, in Michigan she witnessed white men
enforcing superiority over the natives. She stated:
The
Chippewas have lately petitioned the state of Michigan, that they may be
admitted as citizens; but this would be vain, unless they could be admitted, as
brothers, to the heart of the white man. (199)
Instead, she witnessed traders
degrading the Indians and providing them with rum mixed with red pepper and
damaged tobacco.
In
her lifetime as well, Sing Sing prison was infamous in its inhumane treatment
of inmates; Georgiana Bruce was in the process of reforming it when Fuller
visited in 1844. There she met recovering prostitutes and she observed, “As to
this, it must be considered that, as the vanity and proneness to seduction of
the imprisoned women represented a general degradation in their sex” (Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 80).
Since “men do not look at both sides,” their claim to criminalizing the
prostitute but not the ‘vulgar man’ who creates the conditions that she lives
under and pays for his way with her submission (78). Yes, prison reform was
necessary in New York just as mental institutional reform was necessary, which
had treated mentally ill patients as if they were prisoners. Just as the
protective rights of Native Americans, rarely did the legal authority protect
women in Fuller’s time from abuse, whether it were sexual, economic, or verbal.
Since the legal system required reform, women like, Georgiana Bruce and others
gained a powerful ally with Fuller. In Margaret
Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York Tribune 1844-1846, in the
introduction by Judith Mattson Bean, Bean noted that:
American
women were active in reforming public institutions despite social expectations
that they confine themselves to private life. During 1846-47 alone, the Tribune reported on the public
activities of women such as Dorothea Dix, who was petitioning the New Jersey
legislature for improved care of the insane; Abby Kelley, who was lecturing
against slavery; … Although women could undertake humanitarian reforms and maintain
social respectability, direct political involvement (such as lobbying) and
public political argumentation was still very risky. (xvi)
Margaret Fuller “admired the
risk-takers and praised them in her columns, reviewing the works of reformist
women … and Fuller implicitly identifies herself with them” (xvi). Fuller knew
that in order to reach a path of self-perfection legal and economic reform were
necessary. But the individual, who dared to risk reform, had to transform
her own personal life first. There is equally a risk in most countries in the
world today outside of the United States. Fuller would have equally as much
praise for women willing to dare to make reform and change than to accept an
uneven path. Eve Ensler has dared to travel to Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Congo,
and more for her individual commitment to her cause.
Eve
Ensler traveled to Bosnia shortly after the violence of the 1990’s plagued the
former Yugoslavian region. Women were raped, men were killed, and little
involvement from the international world stepped in to stop the violence until
years had passed. Ensler’s play Necessary
Targets, actually confronts the challenges that authors and journalists
must face when trying to portray the experiences of trauma that women living
through wartime experience and share in confidence. Her character Zlata accuses
the therapist J.S. in the play of assuming the superhero role that she must
save them, without realizing this only aggrandizes the therapist. The real hero
must assume an anonymous role; as well as, each writer must have an ethical
responsibility to not capitalize and break the trust of victims of violence
when relaying the story in a play or any other format. Like Margaret Fuller, who “went from the
commitment to individual perfection to social reform--essentially giving up
‘Transcendentalism’ after 1845 when she left New England,” Ensler has followed
that real life transcendence beyond writing circles that “concept of the
'individual's path to self-perfection'” (Altman). The literary movement of
Emerson and those associated with him was vital in Fuller’s influential growth,
but Fuller, as mentioned prior, had to travel beyond to prefect her own life.
The
21st Century socially conscious individual comes to the realization
that this message that Fuller expressed has gone far since Margaret’s time but
it still has got a distance to go. Ensler’s current movement, if it is
considered a movement, has attracted interests from socially conscious
individuals not only in the United States, but in places where the living
conditions of men and women are still deeply underdeveloped: Congo, India,
Afghanistan, and more. On February 14th, Eve Ensler has pushed the campaign for
One Billion Rising, where the global
fact claimed by the campaign is that at this time one out of every three women
in the world today has been either beaten or raped in her lifetime. On V-Day,
women and men since the opening year of the movement, 2013, have come out into
public space to communally dance to express the global need to end violence
against women: from honor killings in Pakistan to female genital mutilation in
Uganda to Japanese school girls raped by U.S. soldiers in Okinawa near the
military base, the list of atrocities is endless. Those who partook in the
V-Day events were inspired by the amount of people willing to stand up. For
example, in Mutare, Zimbabwe, Nyasha Dhalndhara noted how the experience impacted
her own life:
Being
part of the OBR coordinating team made me feel like I was a part of something
big, something important and something necessary. I was overwhelmed by the turn
out at Odzi. Young mothers brought their children along and some came with
their husbands, their brothers and their friends. As a young person, this to me
was a point to note, young men gathering together with their wives, their
sisters and their girlfriends to speak against violence against women and
girls. Men are often the perpetrators of violence against women and girls but
part of the Odzi male population came to rise with us, to demand justice for us
and this to me was a priceless revelation. I bowed when they read their pledge
to stop raping and abusing women and girls and start protecting and respecting
them. (Onebillionrising.org)
Women in countless nations and cultures
saw grass-root involvement, as Nyasha Dhalndhara had, and were empowered to
rise up. Such echoes are the lessons that Margaret Fuller had pressed in her
lifetime, which still have relevance in today’s movement to make a better society for the
continual reachable future. This ongoing commitment to women’s emancipation
requires constant endurance. In Fuller’s lifetime, women in America,
predominantly white women in association, were in subordinate and submissive legal
and social relations with power controlling males. This has now changed, white
women have exceeded far beyond Fuller’s expectations, yet the dominance of
power still excludes women of developing nations, minority women in the United
States, and opportunities that the rich have that the low-income women do not. Often
when economic limitations hold large groups of people back, violence onto
others becomes an easy escape; and often this tends to target women the most statistically.
Fuller
argued, “As this whole [society] has one soul and one body, any injury or
obstruction to a part, or to the meanest member, affects the whole. Men can
never be perfectly happy or virtuous, till all men are so” (Woman In the Nineteenth Century, 112). The obstructions of man over women
are fully covered in her inclusion in this limitation of society and achieving
happiness if women are not treated equally or just. In light, Eve Ensler’s
campaign takes the words here to even more open space than the text of a page.
She and the countless women involved leading the way of One Billion Rising have
organized global activity. Women on V-day as well as men who support ending
obstructions to human rights are physically putting their bodies out on the
streets across districts in India, where families are getting fed up about the
rise in rape and lack of legal justice to protect victims and the lack of
punishment to those who commit the crimes; people are out in the city centers
and squares from San Francisco to Washington DC, New York to London; from the
Philippines to the Congo, Peru, Guyana, Hungary, and more. By using
synchronized dancing in numbers individuals involved in the rising movement to
end violence are using a universal form of cultural tradition. All cultures
embrace music and dance, and rather than embracing war and using a violent word
such as war. The use of Valentines
Day, where the use of ‘love not war’ goes beyond, or transcends the human
condition, this is uniting rather than dividing.
In many
ways using the day of Valentine’s to reclaim what is now a consumer holiday,
the reinventing the Western notion of going out and buying chocolates, flowers,
and other materialistic goods for one individual partner is an attempt by those
who celebrate V-Day in an activist approach, exceeds past one’s own personal circle
with the use of public dance; this can be even more embracing for an
individual’s soul. The self-reliant woman stands up for her self and stands out
by going to a public forum, as Ensler addresses, for the first time in many
cases to feel solidarity with other individuals eager to transcend the current
conditions of society. This is empowering.
The
notion that everyone can love is in part the 19th Century’s humanist’s
hope. While Margaret Fuller had been included in Emerson and Thoreau’s canon,
as true today too, economic inequalities discouraged women from seeking an
equal gain. Economic opportunity was a significant key and still is in the
emancipation of women’s rights (and minority rights). At one point in her
essay, Fuller stated that, “We only ask of men to remove arbitrary barriers”
(114). Arbitrary barriers limited all women and all races other than wealthy
white men in the United States in 1845. This separation has led to resentment
and white men claiming they were better over others, so they had the right to
judge and even impose violent restraint. However, Fuller confronts this false
claim with, “Ye cannot believe it, men; but the only reason why women ever
assume what is more appropriate to you, is because you prevent them from
finding out what is fit for themselves” (38). Love, Fuller confesses, as like
any relations between two people requires mutual respect, and mutual
opportunity. This stems to the importance of mutual economic opportunity.
Resentment
between the sexes has historically been imbalanced by the type of work that men
and women were able to gain access to. In the Nineteenth Century, Margaret
Fuller was often adamant about “I think women need, especially at this
juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their
latent powers” (115). She persists to note eagerness for women to be
locksmiths, carpenters, sea captains, and more than just what was culturally
limiting if not considered ‘proper’. She sternly insists that a country that
claims freedom and equality must also provide that economic freedom to women
too; otherwise, no one is free. She rallies:
Women
of my country! … Women who share the nature of Mrs. Hutchinson, Lady Russell,
and the mothers of our revolution: have you nothing to do with this? You see
the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness of countless
generations of fellow creatures, the honor of their country, and their immortal
souls, for money market and political power. (110)
The market and the political power that
controlled the market has changed in two hundred years, because now with the
globalized interconnected market more foreign powers have raised the stakes
other than just one’s from white male dominant cultures. However, the ability to spread that wealth to
the lowest economies, and the women in the poorest nations, is still blocked by
barriers. Yet since Margaret Fuller’s time, other than the Queen of England,
women have taken leadership roles in the highest offices in numerous nations.
Unfortunately, the United States has not yet seen a female president. This is
one occupation that has not reached the activism Fuller had anticipated.
Economic
barriers continue to limit women’s opportunity as well as men’s. In a recent
interview promoting V-Day activities, Eve Ensler was on Democracy Now, with host Amy Goodman, and fellow activist Kimberle
Crenshaw, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum, and professor of law
at UCLA and Columbia University. When asked about what was so important about
the One Billion Rising movement, especially at this time, Crenshaw states that
organized groups are “finally linking many of the movements around domestic
violence and violence against women, in general, to a global understanding that
these are risks that women face around the world as a group” (Democracy Now).
Though Fuller does not address violence towards women, the violence that is often
taken against women involves the lack of equality between the sexes, the ‘arbitrary
barrier’ for the other to notice the full human in the female half. Economic
opportunity has been a key player in gaining mutual respect. Violence is more
predominant in low-income communities and nations; yet Goodman reiterates that
even wealthy and white-collar women face sexual harassment, rape, and
resentment.
In
more clear terms, flashing forward to the future that Margaret Fuller had
anticipated, women of certain backgrounds at least in the United States in the
21st Century have succeeded in every occupational opportunity but
the equal pay and respect for their energies in such fields are still a
significant obstacle. Firstly, wage equality is still far off in the United
States. Only certain countries in Europe have women’s pay gap been nearly
eliminated such as Belguim, Denmark, and the Netherlands. According to a recent
speech by President Obama women in America on average only make .77 cents for
every $1.00 that men make. On Democracy Now, Kimberle Crenshaw goes even
further in detail to make clear that for even though Obama addressed a basic
gap:
He
talks about the economic marginality of women. But if you were to really ask
where do women of color show up, women of color make—African-American women of
color make .66 cents for a dollar that a white man makes, Latinas .56 cents.
You didn’t hear that when he talked about women, and you didn’t hear it when he
talked about men of color. (Crenshaw)
With such knowledge about the current
facts that are economically limiting, Margaret Fuller would say that Americans have
not yet reached equality. Her emphasis that souls regardless of gender or race
should be treated one to one; the economic barrier indeed limits transcendental
options. The future that Margaret Fuller stressed for has not yet been
achieved, but is getting closer in grasp.
There
are transcendental rewards to the One Billion Rising movement. The One Billion
Rising campaign is just part of the growing action. Towards the end of the Woman in the Nineteenth Century, like
Goethe to man’s position in life, who Fuller admired, Fuller disentangles the
misconceptions of men in power of her day who used religion to limit women but
not man; she says, “in the metamorphoses of life, the soul assumes the form,
first of man, then of woman, and takes the chances, and reaps the benefit of
either lot. Why then, say some, lay such emphasis on the rights or needs of
woman? What she wins, not as woman, will come to her as man” (118). If all
gains and successes of mankind have assisted in human progress, then by
limiting one gender would limit all of man’s potential. Fuller wants to make
clear to those in her time, and those still reading today, that if one soul is
one soul, don’t limit the body! In other words, on the One Billion Rising website continually, updates and
postings reflect social networks ability to gather solidarity; one of these
postings was a quote tweeted on Twitter by a young eleven year old Afghan girl,
which stated: “You won’t allow me to go to school. I won’t become a doctor.
Remember this; One day you will be sick.” Women in the US and in developing
nations are making strides or challenging unnecessary barriers that are
economically and politically limiting overall human progress. A young female
doctor in Afghanistan, or even in New York, can save lives.
While
some Americans believe that women’s equality has been achieved and the gains
are all present here in the US far exceeds countries, like Afghanistan or the
Congo, or Iraq or Cambodia; others know better that this is only still a
limited concept. In the Winter/Spring Edition 2014 of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem, a contemporary of Ensler, entitles
her riveting contribution as “Our Revolution Has Just Begun.” Economically, she
states, “this country still profiteers on the underpaid or unpaid work of
females, comes near the bottom of modern democracies in electing women to
political office and is at the bottom when it comes to childcare or
family-friendly work policies.” The goal of equality is not yet here:
For
a modern democracy, and yet we don’t have some form of national child-care
system. … We are an advanced country that saddles its college students with
debt at the exact time when they should be most free to explore. Also, women
pay the same tuition as men, yet are paid an average of $1 million less over
their lifetimes, making it harder to repay those loans. (Steinem, Ms. 2014)
Margaret Fuller would have been engaged
and eager to be a part of the current voices trying to wake up the masses of
society too willing to accept rather than refuse the contemporary condition. At
times in Fuller’s life, she was discouraged to see so many women willing to
accept the repressive model of society.
Eve
Ensler, like Kimberle Crenshaw and Gloria Steinem, is not the only 21st
Century woman to break the grounds and risk stepping beyond the acceptable
place that women have been confined to. Internationally, women that even
Margaret Fuller would take notice of would be: Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi of
Iran, and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, the infamous female doctor in Somalia, Hawa
Abdi, are just some of the growing risk takers to push back at the arbitrary
barriers and take risks across the globe daily. Margaret Fuller had her own
contemporaries fighting for human rights as well: Harriet Tubman, Sojourn
Truth, and Dorothea Dix. Though the task
that Fuller had dreamt about is still far from reach, leaders with real drive
and motivation have used their self-reliance and Over Soul to bring about change as best as they can. Social
consciousness is prevalent, even if the mainstream media is not promoting the
positive light.
As
long as one person is exploited physically, economically, or spiritually; then
as Fuller spoke, this obstruction limits all men in the 19th Century
and still today in the 21st Century. The One Billion Rising campaign
is a movement to have the revolution without violence but with physical
movement, like dance; public spaces filled with hundreds and even thousands of
women and men alike stepping out to exceed the current conditions of the times.
This kind of courage is necessary. This transcendental life beyond the mere
literary circle is a continuous challenge. It requires continuous endurance and
support. After Fuller’s life had tragically been lost at sea, her words lived
on. So the literary tradition is also significant to preserve her essence.
Margaret went to Europe and actively got
involved in the Italian Revolution of 1848 as a war correspondent and took
charge of a hospital. Her willingness to go into difficult situations during
her lifetime set an example for women today, like Eve Ensler, who has in her
own life carried forward into heated territory. The parallels of Fuller and
Ensler are significant, as well as Fuller’s principles during her time about
the occupation of women, the emancipation of the individual soul. In Ensler’s most recent memoir In The Body of The World, she ‘traces
many paths of reconnection’: living through her own childhood trauma of
violence, living through her chemo treatments and overcoming cancer, and
working close at hand with women who continue to survive and endure the
horrific life Congo has provided women. She spent significant time in 2010
working with UNICEF and locals to create a safe-haven for women, but just
before the project was complete, “Cancer threw me through the window of my
dissociation into the center of my body’s crisis … All the work I was doing in
conflict zones” would have to temporarily halt until she could “Sav[e] my own
life” (7, 30). Once she got cured, Ensler got just as active again and
continued work in the Congo and campaigned for the One Billion Rising. She
reflected on her trauma, found a higher purpose, and got involved. This is a
courageous task, and yet everyone has inner potential to strive for it.
This
is why Margaret Fuller is still relevant in the fight for women’s rights in the
21st Century because of her ideal that the individual has a personal
journey to arise a more perfect self: reflective, reliant, and active. On parallel,
Eve Ensler ends her newest memoir with: “We are the people of the second wind …
be part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can’t
help rising. Rising. Rising. Rising.”
Sources:
Fuller,
Margaret. “Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings”
Oxford World Classics, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1994.
Ensler,
Eve. “In The Body of The World”.
Picador, New York, 2013.
Goodman, Amy. "One Billion Rising: Eve
Ensler & Kimberle Crenshaw on Global Movement to End Violence Against
Women." Democracy Now! N.p., 03 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
Bean,
Judith Mattson and Joel Myerson. “Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the
New York Tribune 1844-1846” Columbia University Press, New York, 2000
Dhalndhara,
Nyasha. “Rising: STILL I RISE.”
OneBillionRising.org. 12 Mar. 2014.
Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
Steinem,
Gloria. “Our Revolution Has Just Begun”
MS.
Magazine. Winter/Spring 2014, Washington DC, February, 2014
