ping from the sunny 'clearings' into the mysterious twilight of the tangled
forest?she often passes in one breath from forcible reasoning to dreamy
vagueness; moreover, her unusually varied culture gives her great command
of illustration. Mary Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is nothing if not
rational; she has no erudition, and her grave pages are lit up by no ray of fancy.
In both writers we discern, under the brave bearing of a strong and truthful
nature, the beating of a loving woman's heart, which teaches them not to
undervalue the smallest offices of domestic care or kindliness. But Margaret
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
