Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 121exist unmingled with it in any form.” There are no roles that are specific to one
gender or the other, because “male and female represent the two sides of the great
radical dualism” that are “perpetually passing into one another.” Like Emerson,
Fuller envisions a world of flux, process, interpenetration, where “fluid hardens to
solid, solid rushes to fluid.” So, “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely
feminine woman.”
The imperative of education is one that Fuller sees as primary. She also sees it as
one that women will have to pursue for themselves. Men, she argues, have habitually
kept women weak and circumscribed; it is hardly to be expected that they will now
see the error of their ways and work to make women strong and free. “At present,”
Fuller explains to her readers, “women are the best helpers of one another.” “We only
ask of men to remove arbitrary barriers,” she declares; and it will then be up to women
to move toward “self-subsistence in its two forms of self-reliance and self-impulse.”
“I wish Woman to live, first for God’s sake,” Fuller insists. “Then she will not make an
imperfect man her god, and thus sink into idolatry.” If she develops properly, finding
her true vocation, whatever that may be, then “she will know how to love, and be
worthy of being loved.” What Fuller anticipates, eventually, is a partnership of equals,
a time “when Man and Woman may regard one another as brother and sister, the
pillars of one porch, the priests of one worship.” In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller writes
of how, when contemplating the vastness of the Midwest, she felt elated and proud.
“I think,” she reveals, “I had never felt so happy that I was born in America.” Now, in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a similarly patriotic feeling inspires her as she
contemplates the possibility of a new dispensation, a new and better relation between
the sexes, in the New World. “I have believed and intimated that this hope” for an
equal partnership “would receive an ampler fruition, than ever before, in our own
land,” she informs the reader. “And it will do so if this land carry out the principles
from which sprang our national life.” In later life, Fuller did not confine herself to the
woman question: as a reporter and reviewer, she turned her attention to such diverse
issues as the abolition of slavery, capital punishment, the treatment of immigrants,
and the ill. Nor did she restrict herself to the rights of Americans: by 1847, she had
taken up residence in Rome and become involved in the revolutionary movements
sweeping across Europe. Nevertheless, it is for her passionate commitment to the
liberation of women that she is remembered today, and for her belief that the
opportunities for such a liberation were greatest in the country of her birth. For
her, the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and the principles of Trans-
cendentalism, really did inspire the conviction that it was in America that the life of
woman was likeliest to be “beautiful, powerful,” as she put it, “in a word, a complete
life of its kind.”
“I know of no more encouraging fact,” wrote Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), “than the unquestionable ability of man to
elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” That was not only the creed that Thoreau
preached in his writings, along with Emerson, Fuller, and the other Transcendentalists.
It was also the creed that he embraced, and tried to follow, in his life. Elsewhere in
Walden, Thoreau makes the distinction between “professors of philosophy” andGGray_c02.indd 121ray_c 02 .indd 121 8 8/1/2011 7:54:39 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 39 AM