Homeschooled and Self‐Cultured: The Gendering of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall.

This article examines the gendering of the human mind by nineteenth‐century Unitarians and Transcendentalists or, more specifically, the employment of the doctrine of "self‐culture" to encourage girls and young women to cultivate traits that would lead themselves and others to gender their intellect...

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Published in:Journal of Religious History Vol. 44; no. 1; pp. 71 - 91
Main Author: Willsky‐Ciollo, Lydia
Format: Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell Mar2020
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Homeschooled and Self‐Cultured: The Gendering of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall.
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        au: Willsky‐Ciollo, Lydia
        affil: Fairfield University
      su:
        Autodidacticism
        Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850
        Dall, Caroline Wells Healey, 1822-1912
        Transcendentalists (New England)
        Femininity
      sug:
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          Autodidacticism
          Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850
          Dall, Caroline Wells Healey, 1822-1912
          Transcendentalists (New England)
          Femininity
      ab: This article examines the gendering of the human mind by nineteenth‐century Unitarians and Transcendentalists or, more specifically, the employment of the doctrine of "self‐culture" to encourage girls and young women to cultivate traits that would lead themselves and others to gender their intellect "masculine," even while many proponents of self‐culture maintained a traditional understanding of woman's role: as wife and mother and the keeper of house and home. Beholden to nineteenth‐century categories of masculinity and femininity, many Unitarian and Transcendentalist men — and women — were ambivalent about the practical results of self‐culture for women. How could the people who promoted self‐culture and self‐reliance as the primary religious duties of the spiritually engaged person show only lukewarm support and occasionally outright opposition for the women who followed such advice? To answer this question, this article examines the early lives and educational experiences of Margaret Fuller and Caroline Dall, in their own words and through primary and secondary sources that highlight self‐culture as a source of both empowerment and enervation. In doing so it tracks how both the process and effects of cultivating the "masculine mind" shaped these women and their respective understandings of what it meant to be whole in their own bodies.
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    language: English
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