Super bowl Sunday left me feeling decidedly hungry for something meaningful and substantive after being fed a steady stream of buy buy buy! The barrage of sexual sexist objectifying commercials left my fourteen-year-old daughter and I disgusted, so I was absolutely thrilled to read a review in the Los Angeles Times about the new Margaret Fuller biop The Lives of Margaret Fuller By Laura Skandera Trombley, Special to the Los Angeles Times February 5, 2012.
I loved the review and cannot wait to read the book and am always delighted to see ANY mention, coverage or acknowledgement of women’s roles, but I took issue with captioning the article First Modern Woman. Hardly. One could – and I do – argue that Margaret Brent (1601-1671) the thirty-seven year old never married first woman in America to demand the right to vote (was refused), attorney, property owning, savvy businesswoman to whom Lord Baltimore (Maryland’s Governor) gave the power of attorney on his deathbed – was our first modern woman. The great Margaret Fuller is just one of the MANY modern woman before us who are unknown and unheralded. (See Fabulous Female Facts http://sheshistory.com/site/?cat=7)
Fuller was easily one of the most brilliant minds of the nineteenth century, with an Oprah-like influence on women and men. She inspired her colleagues, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne to write about HER. One cannot measure the influence she had on The Seneca Falls Convention – the first Women’s Convention – in 1848 including the drafting of the groundbreaking Declaration Of Sentiments. And her influence on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony – the greatest unknown partnership in American Women’s History and on feminism in general, is incalculable. But women of the 1600s such as Brent and Anne Hutchinson – called “The Mother of the First Amendment” – who not only stood up to the men in charge but to The Church itself – were radical, independent and challenged authority, making them thoroughly modern women. Fuller was not the first and not the last.
Amy Simon
Cultural Herstorian
Writer/Performer SHE’S HISTORY! The Most Dangerous Women In America, Then And Now…
(310) 308-0947
Sheshistory.com