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...

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1. VerfasserIn: Willsky-Ciollo, Lydia (VerfasserIn)
Medienart: Elektronisch Aufsatz
Sprache:Englisch
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Veröffentlicht: Wiley-Blackwell [2020]
In: Journal of religious history
Jahr: 2020, Band: 44, Heft: 1, Seiten: 71-90
normierte Schlagwort(-folgen):B Fuller, Margaret 1810-1850 / Dall, Caroline Wells Healey 1822-1912 / Unitarian Universalist Association / Transzendentalismus / Frau / Selbstständigkeit / Akzeptanz
RelBib Classification:AD Religionssoziologie; Religionspolitik
CB Christliche Existenz; Spiritualität
KBQ Nordamerika
KDG Freikirche
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Zusammenfassung: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.
ISSN:1467-9809
Enthält:Enthalten in: Journal of religious history
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/1467-9809.12635