120 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865Not long after returning from the West, Fuller went to work for Horace Greeley
(1811–1872) at the New-York Tribune. Greeley, whose main claim to fame now is as
the coiner of the phrase “Go West, Young Man!,” had become interested in Fuller after
reading Summer on the Lakes. And he offered to publish her next book. Fuller obliged
by revising and expanding an essay she had written for The Dial into what is
undoubtedly her most famous work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). The
book is written in a rhetorical style similar to that of Emerson and draws its inspiration
from the Emersonian and Transcendentalist belief in self-reliance and self-
emancipation. “The gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds,
which live and aspire,” Fuller declares in the preface. What gives it its originality and
impact is that Fuller, insisting that individualism and liberty are indivisible, applies
the idea of self-development to “the woman question.” The law of freedom, she argues,
“cannot fail of universal recognition.” Linking the cause of female emancipation to the
abolition of slavery, she attacks all those who would try to reduce people to property,
black or female, or insist that they have to be limited to a particular “sphere.” It is “the
champions of the enslaved African,” Fuller points out, who have made “the warmest
appeal in behalf of Women.” This is partly because many abolitionists are, in fact,
women, she explains, and see in the plight of the people whose cause they embrace a
reflection of their own plight and problem. But it is also because, at the moment,
neither is allowed the power and prerogatives of an adult. “Now there is no woman,”
Fuller remarks bitterly, “only an overgrown child.”
“What Woman needs,” Fuller writes, “is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a
nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to
unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home.” But, at
present, she is stopped from doing this. “Every path,” Fuller suggests, should be “laid
open to Woman as freely as to Man,” and “as a right, not ... as a concession.” “If the
negro be a soul, if the woman be a soul, apparelled in the flesh, to one master only
they are accountable”; and that master is certainly not man. Woman in the Nineteenth
Century makes wry fun of all those men who would claim that women are too weak
and delicate for public duty but “by no means ... think it impossible for the negresses
to endure field work, even during pregnancy, or the seamstresses to go through their
killing labors.” And, characteristic of its author, it places emphasis on education as
an enabler, a determining influence that can lead women to “self-dependence” and
“self-reliance.” The use of Emersonian principles is particularly noticeable here, as
Fuller explains how a proper education can allow a woman to “naturally develop
self-respect, and learn self-help.” If a woman wants eventually to confine herself to
the domestic sphere, she acknowledges, that is fine, but that should not be the only
sphere open to her. On the contrary, everything that is open to men, in education
and after, should be open to women. Fuller may admit the existence of “masculine”
and “feminine” qualities, a series of dualisms gathered around “Energy and
Harmony,” “Power and Beauty,” “Intellect and Love.” What seems like a surrender to
gender stereotypes, however, turns out to be precisely the reverse. There may be an
“especially feminine element,” Fuller argues, “but it is no more the order of nature
that it should be incarnated pure in any form, than that the masculine energy shouldGGray_c02.indd 120ray_c 02 .indd 120 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM