Happy Birthday to journalist, editor, and women’s rights activist Sarah Margaret Fuller (b. May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, MA), who led a series of feminist classes known as her “conversations” in Boston from 1839 to 1844. These programs rigorously engaged women in intellectual discussions about gender in American society, emphasizing real-life examples and applications. The manuscript from one of these conversations shows how Fuller saw women’s empowerment as an intergenerational struggle. It states: “Miss Fuller . . . spoke of the education of our grandmothers as healthy though confined, & said that in what was called the improved education of the present day the boundaries had been enlarged but not filled up faithfully—& consequently superficialness, unhealthiness, & pedantry had been introduced—This perhaps was a necessary effect—temporarily,—of the transition— & did not prove that an attempt at enlargement was not legitimate— She believed that enlargement not only lawful in itself—but inevitable.”
Citations: Nancy Craig Simmons, “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: The 1839-1840 Series,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1994): 195-196, 203, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227655; “Margaret Fuller,” engraved portrait (location unknown, c. 1840-1880), http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a47196.
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