Crosscurrents: Transcendentalism

Slide 1:Crosscurrents: Transcendentalism, Women, and Social IdealsImage Courtesy Library of Congress

Clockwise: Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) with her daughter Harriet , and Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis) (1811-1872)Clockwise: Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) with her daughter Harriet , and Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis) (1811-1872)

Slide 2:Key Figures

Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894) Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) Fanny Fern (1811-1872) Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Slide 3:Key Dates

1841�46 ? Brook Farm 1842 ? Elizabeth Peabody published �Plan of the West Roxbury Community� [Brook Farm] in the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial. 1842 ? Dickens tours the factories of Lowell, Massachusetts. 1845 ? Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Slide 4:Key Dates

1846 ? Thoreau goes to jail for refusing to pay the poll tax in protest of the Mexican War and slavery. 1848 ? Women�s Rights Convention is held in Seneca Falls, New York; Declaration of Sentiments is published. 1849 ? Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience. 1850 ? Passage of the Fugitive Slave Act

Slide 5:Key Dates

1851 ? Sojourner Truth addresses the Women�s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio. 1853 ? Fern Leaves from Fanny�s Portfolio, including �Aunt Hetty on Matrimony� (originally published earlier in Boston�s The Olive Branch). 1868 ? �Working-Girls of New York� collected in Folly as It Flies.

Slide 6:Transcendentalism and Utopian Communities

In 1841, George Ripley, an original member of the Transcendentalist Club, founded Brook Farm, a Utopian community on a 200-acre farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The goals of the community were to foster self-realization and individual freedom, to share labor and rewards fairly, to create a society in which women would enjoy equal rights, and to promote the abolition of slavery. Elizabeth Peabody wrote an article about Brook Farm, �Plan of the West Roxbury Community,� for The Dial, a Transcendentalist magazine edited first by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson and Thoreau.

Slide 7:Transcendentalism and Utopian Communities

The Lowell Mills might be considered an urban attempt to create a Utopian society. The mills were staffed by young women, who lived together in well-run boarding houses, worked 6 days a week, were paid decently (though still less than men), and were provided with medical care. For the period, the conditions were unusually positive, as attested to by Charles Dickens, who toured the Lowell Mills in 1842.

Slide 8:Transcendentalism and the Woman�s Movement: Margaret Fuller

In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Margaret Fuller has three main objectives: To demonstrate the ingrained discrimination of the patriarchal culture that oppresses women. To advocate that women should have the same rights and opportunities for inner and outer development as men. To hold up an idealized concept of womanhood to which women could aspire.

Slide 9:Transcendentalism and theWoman�s Movement: Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized a convention to discuss women�s rights at Seneca Falls, NY (July 19-20). About 100 supporters attended the convention. The convention approved resolutions calling for educational and professional opportunities for women. The delegates called for women to have more control over their property, recognition of legal equality, and repeal of laws awarding the father custody of the children in divorce. The convention launched the movement for women�s suffrage that would last until 1920. But the resolution did not pass unanimously. With the convention about a week away, Stanton and Mott issued the Declaration of Sentiments, modeled after the Declaration of Independence.

Slide 10:Transcendentalism and the Woman�s Movement: Sojourner Truth

As Isabella Baumfree, she escaped slavery in 1827 and took the name Van Wagener after the family who protected her. Inspired by visions and voices, she renamed herself Sojourner Truth in 1843 and became an evangelist. Tall, gaunt, and with a deep voice, she was a dramatic speaker and singer, who spoke of God, abolition, and women�s rights. She cultivated a mythic persona of herself, as if she were an Old Testament prophet: �I am sittin� among you to watch; and every once and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is.� She was illiterate. Others made transcripts of her speeches, and she dictated her autobiography.

Slide 11:Transcendentalism and the Woman�s Movement: Fanny Fern

Battling poverty after widowhood and then divorce, Fanny Fern turned to writing. In 1855, Fern became the highest-paid columnist of her era when she earned $100 a week at the New York Ledger. Her columns were often autobiographical, concerned domestic issues, and advocated women�s rights. Fern also wrote of poverty, prostitution, work conditions, and urban pressures. Fern was one of the founders of Sorosis, a pioneer women�s press organization.

Slide 12:Transcendentalism and Abolition:Thoreau

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave�s government also. �Civil Disobedience (1848)

Slide 13:Transcendentalism and Abolition: Emerson

I waked at night, & bemoaned myself, because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable question of Slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured voices. But then in hours of sanity, I recover myself, & say, God must govern his own world, & knows his way out of this pit, without my desertion of my post which has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man, ?far retired in the heaven of invention, &, which, important to the republic of Man, have no watchman, or lover, or defender, but I.� �From Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals (August 1, 1852)

Slide 14:Transcendentalism and Abolition: Whitman

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, And brought water and fill�d a tub for his sweated body and bruis�d feet, And gave him a room that enter�d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass�d north, I had him sit next to me at table, my fire-lock lean�d in the corner. �Walt Whitman, Song of Myself #10 (1855)

Slide 15:Key Questions

How does Peabody envision Brook Farm (first called West Roxbury)? Outline her plan. Does Dickens present the mills of Lowell as a kind of Utopian community? Outline what he finds so appealing about the community and the living conditions of its workers. How does Margaret Fuller achieve her objectives in Woman in the Nineteenth Century? What effect is achieved by modeling the Declaration of Sentiments after the Declaration of Independence? Consider the rhetorical strategies of Sojourner Truth. What effect do you think her dialect, use of repetition, rhetorical questions, and imagery had on the audience?

Slide 16:Key Questions

Consider Fanny Fern�s tone in �Aunt Hetty on Matrimony� and �the Working-Girls of New York.� Would you consider her voice traditionally feminine? Explain. Although Fuller, Stanton, Truth, and Fern are all concerned with women�s rights, how do they express their positions differently? How do they emerge from their works as very different individuals? The Transcendentalists emphasized �action from principle.� How do Thoreau (in �Civil Disobedience�) and Whitman (in Song of Myself, #10) demonstrate this concept with regard to abolition? Does Emerson contradict this concept in his journal entry of August 1, 1852? Does Lincoln act from principle in his defense of the Union and in his position on slavery?

Slide 17:Reading Crosscurrents: Transcendentalism, Women, and Social Ideals (pp. 454�65)

Elizabeth Peabody Charles Dickens Elizabeth Cady Stanton Sojourner Truth Fanny Fern Additional Reading Margaret Fuller, from �Woman in the Nineteenth Century� (pp. 467�78) Henry David Thoreau, �Civil Disobedience� (pp. 545�60) Walt Whitman, selections from Drum-Taps (pp. 966�70) Abraham Lincoln, �Reply to Horace Greeley� and �Gettysburg Address� (pp. 846�48)