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An Extraordinary Celebration for an Extraordinary Woman!

The Margaret Fuller Bicentennial has been an incredible opportunity to celebrate and learn about an extraordinary woman and continue her global vision of equality and human rights. The major events of the Bicentennial are now over, but the resources developed during the Bicentennial will remain available through this website at least through the end of 2011.

The goal of the Bicentennial has been to raise awareness of Margaret Fuller, so that her story may inspire people of all ages to follow her lead and think independently, express their thoughts clearly, defend their convictions with courage, learn through dialogue and the free exchange of opinions, believe in the equality of all people, and be open to change. Then her legacy will be assured.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Author, editor, journalist, literary critic, educator, Transcendentalist, and women’s rights advocate....

Today we consider Margaret Fuller one of the guiding lights of the first-wave of feminism. She helped  educate the women of her day by leading a series of Conversations in which women were empowered to read, think and discuss important issues of the day. She empowered generations to follow through her ground-breaking writings, especially her landmark book Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Among her accomplishments:

  • First American to write a book about equality for women
  • First editor of The Dial, foremost Transcendentalist journal, appointed by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • First woman to enter Harvard Library to pursue research
  • First woman journalist on Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune
  • First woman literary critic who also set literary standards
  • First woman foreign correspondent and war correspondent to serve under combat conditions

Many Thanks to the Bicentennial Committee

The Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee was a grassroots group of Unitarian Universalists , scholars, and representatives from historical sites, commissions, and organizations.  Together they planned tours, exhibits, trips, programs and performances intended to celebrate the life and legacy of Margaret Fuller during the bicentennial year of her birth, and beyond.

Funding was provided by the Fund for Unitarian Universalism, Mass Humanities, the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society, and individual donations. Unitarian Universalist Women & Religion served as the fiscal agent and is continuing to host the website. To learn more about this organization, please visit www.uuwr.org.

This Web site will be updated periodically as new events and resources are developed. If you are planning a Margaret Fuller related event, we would love to list it here. Please e-mail us the details and we'll post it on the events calendar. We also welcome the suggestion and submission of possible resources to be added to the site. Donations continue to be accepted to maintain the website and resources.

Questions about the site? Contact the Webweaver.

 
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"I accept the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain things in it be radical and unforgiving, or shall we think that, even with evil, there are ways of living that must lead to good? If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission -- as Carlyle would have us -- "Gad! we'd better!" -- or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent? Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.
-- William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)