The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Fuller, with all her passionate sensibility, is more of the literary woman, who

would not have been satisfied without intellectual production; Mary Woll

stonecraft, we imagine, wrote not at all for writing's sake, but from the pressure

of other motives. So far as the difference of date allows, there is a striking

coincidence in their trains of thought; indeed, every important idea in the

Rights of Woman, except the combination of home education with a common

day-school for boys and girls, reappears in Margaret Fuller's essay. One point on which they both write forcibly is the fact that, while men have

a horror of such faculty or culture in the other sex as tends to place it on a

level with their own, they are really in a state of subjection to ignorant and

feeble-minded women. Margaret Fuller says: Wherever man is sufficiently raised above extreme poverty or brutal

stupidity, to care for the comforts of the fireside, or the bloom and orna

ment of life, woman has always power enough, if she chooses to exert it,

and is usually disposed to do so, in proportion to her ignorance and child

ish vanity. Unacquainted with the importance of life and its purposes,

trained to a selfish coquetry and love of petty power, she does not look

beyond the pleasure of making herself felt at the moment, and govern

ments are shaken and commerce broken up to gratify the pique of a female

favorite. The English shopkeeper's wife does not vote, but it is for her

interest that the politician canvasses by the coarsest flattery. Again: All wives, bad or good, loved or unloved, inevitably influence their hus

bands from the power their position not merely gives, but necessitates of

coloring evidence and infusing feelings in hours when the�patient, shall

I call him?�is off his guard. Hear now what Mary Wollstonecraft says on the same subject: Women have been allowed to remain in ignorance and slavish depen

dence many, very many years, and still we hear of nothing but their fond

ness of pleasure and sway, their preference of rakes and soldiers, their

childish attachment to toys, and the vanity that makes them value accom

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MARGARET FULLER AND MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT / 133 9

plishments more than virtues. History brings forward a fearful catalogue

of the crimes which their cunning has produced, when the weak slaves

have had sufficient address to overreach their masters. . . . When,

therefore, I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense; for

indirectly they obtain too much power, and are debased by their exertions

to obtain illicit sway. . . . The libertinism, and even the virtues of superior

men, will always give women of some description great power over them;

and these weak women, under the influence of childish passions and self

ish vanity, will throw a false light over the objects which the very men view

with their eyes who ought to enlighten their judgment. Men of fancy, and

those sanguine characters who mostly hold the helm of human affairs in

general, relax in the society of women; and surely I need not cite to the

most superficial reader of history the numerous examples of vice and

oppression which the private intrigues of female favorites have produced;

not to dwell on the mischief that naturally arises from the blundering

interposition of well-meaning folly. For in the transactions of business it is

much better to have to deal with a knave than a fool, because a knave

adheres to some plan, and any plan of reason may be seen through sooner

than a sudden flight of folly. The power which vile and foolish women have

had over wise men who possessed sensibility is notorious. There is a notion commonly entertained among men that an instructed

woman, capable of having opinions, is likely to prove an unpracticable yoke-

fellow, always pulling one way when her husband wants to go the other, orac

ular in tone, and prone to give curtain lectures4 on metaphysics. But surely,

so far as obstinacy is concerned, your unreasoning animal is the most unman

ageable of creatures, where you are not allowed to settle the question by a

cudgel, a whip and bridle, or even a string to the leg. For our own parts, we

see no consistent or commodious medium between the old plan of corporal

discipline and that thorough education of women which will make them

rational beings in the highest sense of the word. Wherever weakness is not

harshly controlled it must govern, as you may see when a strong man holds a

little child by the hand, how he is pulled hither and thither, and wearied in

his walk by his submission to the whims and feeble movements of his com

panion. A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, will be ready to

yield in trifles. So far as we see, there is no indissoluble connection between

infirmity of logic and infirmity of will, and a woman quite innocent of an

opinion in philosophy, is as likely as not to have an indomitable opinion about

the kitchen. As to airs of superiority, no woman ever had them in consequence

of true culture, but only because her culture was shallow or unreal, only as a