● ● ● Rose” for the Young Ladies’ Literary Society at the seminary36 or a gushingly feminine tribute to “Odd Fellowship” in The Covenant,37 she was in a state of far deeper protest against women’s lot than she yet knew how to express.38
She was not, however, a part of the feminist movement which was then forming. In 1845 Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century had been published, with its passionate statement of woman’s special genius. All soul is the same, wrote the great Margaret, but “in so far as it is modified in her as Woman, it flows, it breathes, it sings, rather than deposits soil or finishes work; and that which is especially feminine flushes in blossom the face of the earth, and pervades like air and water all this solid seeming globe.” Women of genius, she wrote, even more than men, “are likely to be enslaved by an impassioned sensibility. The world repels them more rudely, and they are of weaker bodily frame. . . . Sickness is the frequent result of this overcharged existence.” She herself knew this wearisome disability, and it was in vain that she wrote a friend, “I intend to get perfectly well, if possible, for Mr. Carlyle says ‘it is wicked to be sick.’ ”39
Other women, less sibylline than Miss Fuller, were taking up the more prosaic but vitally necessary task of battling for women’s ● ● ●
36 [Mary Baker Glover, “The Wild Rose,” poem, A09002, p. 18, MBEL.] Mrs. Glover’s friend John H. Bartlett was among the founders of this society in 1846–47, and she may well have played a part in its formation. The 1847 catalogue states: “[The young ladies] from week to week assemble for the purpose of improving their faculty of reasoning, extemporaneous discussions, power of composition, etc., etc. A more powerful display of female talent is seldom witnessed than is occasionally brought forth at the public exhibitions of this society.” [Bracketed text Peel’s. Publisher’s note: This source has not been located.]
37 Mary M. Glover, “Odd-Fellowship,” The Covenant, November 1846, pp. 581–583. One statement in this article is of interest: “Fontenelle has humorously remarked:—‘woman has a cell less in the brain, and a fibre more in the heart, than man!’ Now we contend not for the truth of the former part of this statement, whereas the latter we admit.” Cf. Mary Baker Eddy, quoted in Irving C. Tomlinson, Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy, amplified ed. (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1994), p. 174.
38 Modern psychology would regard the very state of her body, of her nerves, as a state of protest.
39 Margaret Fuller: American Romantic; A Selection from Her Writings and Correspondence, ed. Perry Miller (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 172, 168–169; [Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius (New York: Viking Press, 1940), p. 40]. In one way or another most of the Transcendentalists tended to look on sickness as the Puritans looked on original sin.