Sunday, March 23, 2014

Margaret Fuller still Relevant in the Women’s Movement


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


            

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