Margaret Fuller: Woman As Fluid — and As Solid
Jessica Lipnack
Address to the Thoreau Society 80th Annual Gathering
July 8, 2021
I’m here today because I’m a “Fullerene,” a member of the imaginary club I joined when I accidentally discovered Margaret Fuller many years ago. I’ll explain later why I choose “ene” as the word’s last syllable.
Until 1975, I’d never heard of Margaret Fuller. It’s hard to believe now given her renaissance in the past fifty years: the many excellent biographies, papers, and collections of her letters, journals, and articles that have been published; inclusion of her in courses from elementary school to higher education; and this very Margaret Fuller Society itself — not to mention The Fuller Project and The [new] Dial.
Margaret bounded into my life via an out-of-the-blue writing job. Addison-Wesley’s best-selling American history textbook needed some updating for its second edition. Its editor asked me to surface some feminist history by looking at women’s roles in the American Revolution. This was in keeping with the times — 1975 — the year when Time named its “Man of the Year” as “American Women.” The Second Wave of feminism was crashing on all kinds of shores.
Off I went to research one of those Revolutionary women, Deborah Sampson. In 1782, this Pilgrim descendant disguised herself as…
