Fuller Woman Quotes

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.

...above all things; to remember that hypocrisy is the most hopeless as well as the meanest of crimes...

But her eye, that torch or the soul, is untamed, and in the intensity of her reading, we see a soul invincibly young in faith and hope.

I would like to say to the men and women of the generations which will come after us: you will look back at us with astonishment. You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little, at the, to you, obvious paths to attain our ends which we did not take. At the intolerable evils before which it will seem to you we sat down passive. At the great truths staring us in the face which we failed to see, at the great truths we grasped at but could not get our fingers quite 'round. You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little. But what you will never know that it was how we were thinking of you and for you that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little that we have done. That it was in the thought of your larger realization and fuller life that we have found consolation for the futilities of our own. All I aspire to be and was not, comforts me.

We have waited here long in the dust; we are tired and hungry; but the triumphal procession must appear at last.

Accursed be he who willingly saddens an immortal spirit---doomed to infamy in later, wiser ages, doomed in future stages of his own being to deadly penance, only short of death.

Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.

But the intellect, cold, is ever more masculine than feminine; warmed by emotion, it rushes towards mother earth, and puts on the forms of beauty.

Tell me,” said Miss Fuller, “who is behind a great woman?” She looked around our circle, then stopped at me. “That’s right. No one. She has to get there by herself.

Yet, by men in this country, as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, everything has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of Heaven from its fulfilment. The cross, here as elsewhere, has been planted only to be blasphemed by cruelty and fraud.

Your daughter has schizophrenia," I told the woman. "Oh, my God, anything but that," she replied. "Why couldn't she have leukemia or some other disease instead?" "But if she had leukemia she might die," I pointed out. "Schizophrenia is a much more treatable disease." The woman looked sadly at me, then down at the floor. She spoke softly. "I would still prefer that my daughter had leukemia.

You’re one of those kinds of women—those kinds of people I should say—as am I.” “And what kind of woman is that?” Mary was very curious and excited now. “A woman who is not satisfied doing only what society says should satisfy her.

The land itself, of course, was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man's blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman's birthing with equal thirst. It doesn't care.

The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learning of this news, he leaves her for a nondisabled woman with a fuller bustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen.

Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a woman’s body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounded hips - have become distateful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.

As his counterpart, the woman completes or fills out a man's life, making him a larger person than he could have been alone, bringing into his frame of reference a new feminine dimension from which to view life that he could have known in no other way. Then, too, he also brings to his wife a masculine perspective that enlarges her life, making her a fuller, more complete person than she could have been apart from him. This marriage union by covenant solves the problem of loneliness not merely by filling a gap, but by overfilling it. More than mere presence is involved. The loneliness of mere masculinity or femininity is likewise met.

Now I am a woman of bone and skin, the patches of pigmentation like a map of a rocky archipelago; I am obdurate and uncooperative, drifting on a sea of memory between islands of lucidity.

Rachel had finally figured out that sometimes being a strong, responsible woman meant admitting you wanted something different in your life, something new-and now her life was suddenly richer, fuller, than it had ever been.

Here, as elsewhere, the gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire, as flowers bloom and birds sing, in the midst of morasses; and in the continual development of that thought, the thought of human destiny, which is given to eternity adequately to express, and which ages of failure only seemingly impede.

Forget not that I shall come back to you. A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body. A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me. Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you. It was but yesterday we met in a dream. You have sung to me in my aloneness, and I of your longings have built a tower in the sky. But now our sleep has fled and our dream is over, and it is no longer dawn. The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part. If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song. And if our hands should meet in another dream, we shall build another tower in the sky.

For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it.

If a thinking woman is offensive, then yes, I might offend a number of people. And I’ll be happy to do so.

As I cry out, Giovanni does the same, and I know that from this moment on I will forever be a fallen woman. Why, then, do I feel as though I’m soaring?

Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that men have “stronger passions,” Margaret theorized, has been “inculcated” in women for centuries, and “the preference often shown by women for bad men arises . . . from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore.

Best let hidden things remain hidden, I should have said. Sleeping dogs and all that. If I was then the woman I am now I would have shouted and stood between the sledgehammer and the door that day, when Peter opened the Museum.

In Woman, Church and State (1893), she offered a feminist reading of the witch-hunts: “When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women,’ we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.”42 Gage inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum.

He became so gloomy that she asked him, at last, if he was worried about anything. He assured her, instantly, that he was the happiest man in the world. And he was. At times he was almost bewildered by his own bliss in being there, with Tony, so terribly dear, beside him; really his own for the rest of his life. It was not her fault if the insatiable sorrows of an unequal love tormented him, the hungry demand for more, for a fuller return, for a feeling which it was not in her nature to give. As she leaned forward, absorbed in the passions staged beneath her, he felt suddenly that their box contained just himself and a wraith, a ghost; as if the real Antonia, whom he loved, was an imagined woman living only in his sad fancy.

Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women’s rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere. Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born. This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First Cause--her all; her every and only chance. How then should he look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her--so fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve; in order that it might not agonize and wreck her?

Each breaking open, each initiation into the underworld through grief, illness, depression, anxiety or loss — is a potential initiation, a portal of possibility where we get the chance to see and feel the very root of our own fire in the deepest dark. In this place we get to see our inner spark more clearly, as we are detached from our daily busyness and sense of belonging. We get to move further inwards, to let go of the shells of ourselves, and break open our self-concept to include our fuller selves.

The Bengali poet Ganga Ram in his Maharashta Purana gave a fuller picture of the terror they inspired. ‘The people on earth were filled with sin,’ he wrote, ‘and there was no worship of Rama and Krishna. Day and night people took their pleasure with the wives of others.’ Finally, he wrote, Shiva ordered Nandi to enter the body of the Maratha king Shahu. ‘Let him send his agents, that sinners and evil doers be punished.’29 Soon after: The Bargis [Marathas] began to plunder the villages and all the people fled in terror. Brahmin pandits fled, taking with them loads of manuscripts; goldsmiths fled with the scales and weights; and fishermen with their nets and lines – all fled. The people fled in all directions; who could count their numbers? All who lived in villages fled when they heard the name of the Bargis. Ladies of good family, who had never before set a foot on a road fled from the Bargis with baskets on their heads. And land owning Rajputs, who had gained their wealth with the sword, threw down their swords and fled. And sadhus and monks fled, riding on litters, their bearers carrying their baggage on their shoulders; and many farmers fled, their seed for next year’s crops on the backs of their bullocks, and ploughs on their shoulders. And pregnant women, all but unable to walk, began their labour on the road and were delivered there. There were some people who stood in the road and asked of all who passed where the Bargis were. Everyone replied – I have not seen them with my own eyes. But seeing everyone flees, I flee also. Then suddenly the Bargis swept down with a great shout and surrounded the people in their fields. They snatched away gold and silver, rejecting everything else. Of some people they cut off the hand, of some the nose and ears; some they killed outright. They dragged away the most beautiful women, who tried to flee, and tied ropes to their fingers and necks. When one had finished with a woman, another took her, while the raped women screamed for help. The Bargis after committing all foul, sinful and bestial acts, let these women go.

As women, we should feel comfortable expressing ourselves, even disagreeing with others. We are entitled, each one of us, to our own thoughts and opinions. We need not fear that it is unseemly to disagree or hold to a conviction of our own. We must learn to be comfortable in debate and discourse. We must shake off these shackles that are placed upon us by those who say a woman’s only job is to make a man feel respected and affirmed. What of our own self-respect? What of the affirmation of our own thoughts and characters?

Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with no romantic prospects but with a deep need for connection with men. Yet there it was: there could be no turning back to the Platonic after a “thorough” experience of passion. Worse, her quest for Platonic affection, for connections or covenants that dwelled only in “the higher emotions,” marked her as “undeveloped”—a notion that Margaret, with her credo of self-expansion, could scarcely tolerate.

Dahlia’s breath hissed out of her throat. Slowing the boat, she swung back toward him, glaring. “What is so damned fascinating about breasts? If I show them to you will you stop?” Her hands went to the buttons of the shirt as if she might really rip the material open. There was color in her face and her breath came too fast. “I one heard that men thought about sex every three minutes but you must be setting some sort of record.” “It isn’t just any breasts, Dahlia.” He reached for the canteen of water. His hand was shaking. Actually shaking. Just the thought of her opening her shirt sent his body into a painful, hard, unrelenting ache. “Well I have them, okay? Just like any other woman. They’re there. I can’t do much about it.” Nicolas took a long pull of water and nearly choked as she angrily unbuttoned the shirt and allowed the edges to gape open all the way to her waist. Her breasts were fuller than he’d first thought, jutting forward to tempt him more. She was beautiful. Her skin was amazing. He swallowed hard. “I don’t think that was a good idea.” Dahlia realized instantly she’d made a terrible mistake. His black eyes went from ice cold to a raging fever. His hand gripped the canteen until small dents appeared.

Here was the same feeling (Anne) had been surprised by so many years ago, when Miss Fuller had died. Everyone was - relieved. Not actually glad that she was dead, perhaps. But surely relieved, relieved of the burden of this impossible woman. Relieved that they no longer would have to read her exhortations to do good, to send money, to think more broadly, to consider the poor and the powerless, to worry over their place in history, to follow her difficult sentences, to wonder if women after all should be allowed to pester them in this way, and to do such things as Miss Fuller did and imagined. She made everybody angry. Such a terrible talent.

It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous position as a woman “of the bread-winning tribe” who earned her keep as a writer and public speaker, her rate of pay approaching his own. Margaret was Waldo’s female double, not his feminine muse, as Cary was now. Margaret felt this too; it was why she thought she would make a better man than he. And why she rarely looked at men “with common womanly eyes,” as she once wrote to George Davis, but rather with an eye to friendship—yet on her own more womanly terms. If Waldo wished she would befriend him as a brother, she willed him to befriend her as a sister. The disjunction perplexed and saddened them both.

My husband and I have been a part of the same small group for the past five years.... Like many small groups, we regularly share a meal together, love one another practically, and serve together to meet needs outside our small group. We worship, study God’s Word, and pray. It has been a rich time to grow in our understanding of God, what Jesus has accomplished for us, God’s purposes for us as a part of his kingdom, his power and desire to change us, and many other precious truths. We have grown in our love for God and others, and have been challenged to repent of our sin and trust God in every area of our lives. It was a new and refreshing experience for us to be in a group where people were willing to share their struggles with temptation and sin and ask for prayer....We have been welcomed by others, challenged to become more vulnerable, held up in prayer, encouraged in specific ongoing struggles, and have developed sweet friendships. I have seen one woman who had one foot in the world and one foot in the church openly share her struggles with us. We prayed that God would show her the way of escape from temptation many times and have seen God’s work in delivering her. Her openness has given us a front row seat to see the power of God intersect with her weakness. Her continued vulnerability and growth in godliness encourage us to be humble with one another, and to believe that God is able to change us too. Because years have now passed in close community, God’s work can be seen more clearly than on a week-by-week basis. One man who had some deep struggles and a lot of anger has grown through repenting of sin and being vulnerable one on one and in the group. He has been willing to hear the encouragement and challenges of others, and to stay in community throughout his struggle.... He has become an example in serving others, a better listener, and more gentle with his wife. As a group, we have confronted anxiety, interpersonal strife, the need to forgive, lust, family troubles, unbelief, the fear of man, hypocrisy, unemployment, sickness, lack of love, idolatry, and marital strife. We have been helped, held accountable, and lifted up by one another. We have also grieved together, celebrated together, laughed together, offended one another, reconciled with one another, put up with one another,...and sought to love God and one another. As a group we were saddened in the spring when a man who had recently joined us felt that we let him down by not being sensitive to his loneliness. He chose to leave. I say this because, with all the benefits of being in a small group, it is still just a group of sinners. It is Jesus who makes it worth getting together. Apart from our relationship with him...,we have nothing to offer. But because our focus is on Jesus, the group has the potential to make a significant and life-changing difference in all our lives. ...When 7 o’clock on Monday night comes around, I eagerly look forward to the sound of my brothers and sisters coming in our front door. I never know how the evening will go, what burdens people will be carrying, how I will be challenged, or what laughter or tears we will share. But I always know that the great Shepherd will meet us and that our lives will be richer and fuller because we have been together. ...I hope that by hearing my story you will be encouraged to make a commitment to become a part of a small group and experience the blessing of Christian community within the smaller, more intimate setting that it makes possible. 6

Still others assert that they have grown enormously as a result of their traumatic experience, discovering a maturity and strength of character that they didn’t know they had—for example, reporting having found “a growth and a freedom to…give fuller expression to my feelings or to assert myself.” A new and more positive perspective is a common theme among those enduring traumas or loss, a renewed appreciation of the preciousness of life and a sense that one must live more fully in the present. For example, one bereaved person rediscovered that “having your health and living life to the fullest is a real blessing. I appreciate my family, friends, nature, life in general. I see a goodness in people.”12 A woman survivor of a traumatic plane crash described her experience afterward: “When I got home, the sky was brighter. I paid attention to the texture of sidewalks. It was like being in a movie.”13 Construing benefit in negative events can influence your physical health as well as your happiness, a remarkable demonstration of the power of mind over body. For example, in one study researchers interviewed men who had had heart attacks between the ages of thirty and sixty.14 Those who perceived benefits in the event seven weeks after it happened—for example, believing that they had grown and matured as a result, or revalued home life, or resolved to create less hectic schedules for themselves—were less likely to have recurrences and more likely to be healthy eight years later. In contrast, those who blamed their heart attacks on other people or on their own emotions (e.g., having been too stressed) were now in poorer health.

Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other times, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant. In 1927, I met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure severe. She was the granddaughter and greatgranddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians,* but that ancient discord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons— only very rarely at night—we would go out walking through her neighbor-hood, which was Balvanera.* We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmien to all the way to the cleared grounds of the Parque Centenario.*Between us there was neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them— usurping her own—and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her. What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face—or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.

in our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession,” referring to laws that barred married women from owning or inheriting property. From girlhood, “woman is educated with the tacit understanding, that she is only half a being, and an appendage.” Once married, she “spends life in conforming to” her husband’s wishes “instead of moulding herself to her own ideal. Thus she loses her individuality, and never gains his respect.” After becoming a mother, “she is only the upper nurse,” whereas the father is “the oracle. His wish is law, hers only the unavailing sigh uttered in secret.” Through it all, “she looks out into life, finds nothing there but confusion, and congratulates herself that it is man’s business, not hers.

Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation.” The “excessive devotion” that results when women live “so entirely for men,” when a woman makes marriage “her whole existence”—or, as Sophia Hawthorne had phrased it, her “true destiny”—Margaret argued, has “cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.” Woman “must be able to stand alone.” Marriage should be to woman, as it is to man, “only an experience.” While women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, “men never,” Margaret observed, “in any extreme of despair, wished to be women.

long as man “has the physical power, as well as the conventional” to treat a woman “like a play-thing or a slave,” she’d written portentously to Sophia, “woman must wait until the lion shall lie down with the lamb, before she can hope to be the friend and companion of man.

hypocritical laws that made a woman pay for a man’s crime. Why should women “receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest”?

Today’s Children, The Woman in White, and The Guiding Light crossed over and interchanged in respective storylines.) June 2, 1947–June 29, 1956, CBS. 15m weekdays at 1:45. Procter & Gamble’s Duz Detergent. CAST: 1937 to mid-1940s: Arthur Peterson as the Rev. John Ruthledge of Five Points, the serial’s first protagonist. Mercedes McCambridge as Mary Ruthledge, his daughter; Sarajane Wells later as Mary. Ed Prentiss as Ned Holden, who was abandoned by his mother as a child and taken in by the Ruthledges; Ned LeFevre and John Hodiak also as Ned. Ruth Bailey as Rose Kransky; Charlotte Manson also as Rose. Mignon Schrieber as Mrs. Kransky. Seymour Young as Jacob Kransky, Rose’s brother. Sam Wanamaker as Ellis Smith, the enigmatic “Nobody from Nowhere”; Phil Dakin and Raymond Edward Johnson also as Ellis. Henrietta Tedro as Ellen, the housekeeper. Margaret Fuller and Muriel Bremner as Fredrika Lang. Gladys Heen as Torchy Reynolds. Bill Bouchey as Charles Cunningham. Lesley Woods and Carolyn McKay as Celeste, his wife. Laurette Fillbrandt as Nancy Stewart. Frank Behrens as the Rev. Tom Bannion, Ruthledge’s assistant. The Greenman family, early characters: Eloise Kummer as Norma; Reese Taylor and Ken Griffin as Ed; Norma Jean Ross as Ronnie, their daughter. Transition from clergy to medical background, mid-1940s: John Barclay as Dr. Richard Gaylord. Jane Webb as Peggy Gaylord. Hugh Studebaker as Dr. Charles Matthews. Willard Waterman as Roger Barton (alias Ray Brandon). Betty Lou Gerson as Charlotte Wilson. Ned LeFevre as Ned Holden. Tom Holland as Eddie Bingham. Mary Lansing as Julie Collins. 1950s: Jone Allison as Meta Bauer. Lyle Sudrow as Bill Bauer. Charita Bauer as Bert, Bill’s wife, a role she would carry into television and play for three decades. Laurette Fillbrandt as Trudy Bauer. Glenn Walken as little Michael. Theo Goetz as Papa Bauer. James Lipton as Dr. Dick Grant. Lynn Rogers as Marie Wallace, the artist.

That Butch Fuller is a no-’count ditch hound, and no decent woman would be seen talkin’ to him. But Butch had a laugh like the edges of an April sunset—translucent and mystifying. You knew it couldn’t last forever, but you’d stand for hours, hoping for the chance to experience just a glimmer of it once again.

a child who loses his parents is an orphan, a man who loses his wife is a widower, a woman who loses her husband is a widow. But there is no name for a parent who loses a child, for there are no words to describe this pain.

Margaret Fuller, America’s first female public intellectual and a contemporary of Beecher, was her antithesis. In 1840, Fuller became editor of the era’s premier highbrow magazine, The Dial. She was then thirty years old.

Margaret was fortunate that the impulses of Romanticism had brought her together with James Clarke; the literature they explored was suffused with emotionality, suffering, and struggle. By their own example, Goethe, Schiller, and the others gave their male readers permission to be more expressive of their feelings and so to understand and accept a woman’s emotions more readily. Although they were not lovers, Margaret and James could still offer each other small gestures of physical comfort. On one occasion, “her kind pressure of my hand when I was in as miserable a mood” had “rejoiced” James, and he offered her the same one day when she had come to him “with tears glistening in her eyes

You have a boner,” she pointed out. Literally, she pointed it out. With her pointer finger. Now, if he wasn’t the son of Clinton Fuller and raised the way he was, perhaps that would’ve embarrassed him, but as it stood, he had to fight the urge to push her hand down so her pretty little black-painted nail poked said erection. He was trying to have manners. “It’s the biggest compliment a man can give a woman,” he said. “You could just say you think I’m pretty.” “Actions over words. Think about it,” he said

Even Margaret’s beloved Wordsworth fell short on the issue; for him, she quoted ruefully, the ideal woman should not be “Too bright and good / For Human nature’s daily food.” Margaret drew on examples from ancient myth, wherein “the idea of female perfection is as fully presented as that of male,” to show that women had been accorded greater respect in earlier times. In Egyptian mythology, “Isis is even more powerful than Osiris,” and “the Hindoo goddesses reign on the highest peaks of sanctification.” In Greek myth, “not only Beauty, Health and the Soul are represented under feminine attributes, but the Muses, the inspirers of all genius,” and “Wisdom itself . . . are feminine.” Margaret’s dream was to bring the dispirited “individual man” together with the disempowered woman—unite the two sides of the Great Hall’s classroom—and create, by merging the best attributes of each, “fully” perfected souls. Then, a nation of men and women will for the first time exist, she might have said, amending Waldo Emerson’s visionary claim.

Women need not be only sentimental, governed solely by feelings. Told that they are the docile and tender helpers of the men in their spheres. Women can think. Why, a woman has a right to judge. Each one of you in here has a right to consult not only your heart, but your mind, as well.

How, then, can we ever claim that to be passive and meek is the right path for a woman?

Vous ne pouvez pas le croire, vous les hommes, mais la seule raison pour laquelle les femmes assument ce qui vous convient le plus, c'est que vous les empêchez de découvrir ce qui leur convient à elles. Si elles avaient la liberté, si elles avaient la sagesse de pleinement développer leur force et leur beauté de femmes, elles ne souhaiteraient jamais être des hommes ou semblables à des hommes.

Among colleges, the evangelical feminist position is the dominant position at Wheaton College, Azusa Pacific University, and several other Christian colleges. Among seminaries, evangelical feminism is the only position allowed at Fuller Seminary, and it is strongly represented on the faculty at Denver Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Bethel Seminary, Asbury Seminary, and Regent College–Vancouver. Even among seminaries that are committed to a complementarian position, some have begun hiring women to teach Bible and theology classes to men, arguing that “we are not a church” (see discussion in chapter 11 above).2 But it seems to me that having a woman teach the Bible to men is doing just what Paul said not to do in 1 Timothy 2:12. And I don’t think such a position will remain stable for very long, but will lead to further movement in an egalitarian direction.

... beings, likely to be left alone, need to be fortified and furnished within themselves, and educationand thought have tended more and more to regard these beings as related to absolute being ...

it is usually assumed that in a room with a slender therapist and a fat patient, it is the patient who has a weight problem. That therapist, benefitting from thin privilege may well assume that the way she eats, what she eats and how she exercises are what make her different from her patient, what make her thin and her patient fat. She may believe that because she carefully monitors what she eats and faithfully exercises, that she has control over her body, control that the fat woman could have if only she tried harder and did as she does. There is nothing in the media or even the professional literature to contradict her assumptions.

Many stories of the Bible tell of a person who prayed multiple times. Jesus himself prayed three times in the Garden of Gethsemane (see Matthew 26:36–44). Paul asked three times for his “thorn in the flesh” to be removed (2 Corinthians 12:7–9 KJV). And Elijah prayed to God seven times for rain before the drops began to pour from the sky (see 1 Kings 18). Perseverance in prayer is never nagging. God loves to hear your voice.

Worrying doesn’t take away tomorrow’s grief,” said Corrie ten Boom. “It takes away today’s strength. It does not enable us to avoid evil, but it makes us incapable of dealing with it when it comes.”4

Is it so hard,” Gen said, “to believe I could make a woman feel . . . relaxed?” “Yes.” “Why? I have ample evidence to the contrary. Fenna, Mirelle, Marna, streets full of crazed, ravenous young women. Maybe it’s just you.” “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you.” “Actually, we were talking about your mother.

Strange people, these Eldephaere, castrating themselves so they wouldn’t be attracted to a woman they haven’t been allowed to guard for nearly a century. I know traditions tend to linger, but let’s face it—castration is a really poor choice of tradition. It seems a simple vote to end the practice could hardly fail. Quite a deterrent to recruiting, I would imagine.

Near midafternoon, Mena abruptly stumbled and fell face first to the ground. Everyone gathered around the stricken woman quickly, Gerand pulling her over onto his lap and wiping her sweating face with the inside of his cloak. “I’m glad she fell first,” Udan panted. “I won’t be far behind.

Six years earlier, as she commenced her Conversation classes, Margaret had written in her journal about the discomfort that her verbal superiority sometimes brought her, when “a woman of tact & brilliancy like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men.” Men “are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we get our knowledge, &, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, & fly, & dart hither & thither, & seize with ready eye all the weak points, like Saladin”—the legendary swordsman—“in the desert.” Back then in Boston, Margaret had failed to rouse her women students to spar with men in mixed conversation, and the men, tramping on in their pedantry, had held the group to an impasse.

once a woman is “able to stand alone”—as certainly the Tribune’s star, healed by Dr. Leger, could boast—“then she will not make an imperfect man her god . . . Then, if she finds what she needs in Man embodied, she will know how to love, and be worthy of being loved.

His woman. Part of her knew she should object to the wording. She wasn’t his woman. They weren’t together like that. But the heaviness between her legs was blooming into something much fuller and fuck it, she liked the way it sounded on his lips while he pinned her to the railing and publically groped her.

from a very early age . . . that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn.” In time she would become convinced that she was not meant to experience “more extended personal relations” and that “self-dependence,” as she called it, would have to suffice, making her a lone “pilgrim and sojourner on earth.” Her questing would never end, and she must learn to “be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife.” But for now, she felt only anxiety about the future.

The prompt and plausible manner in which her views were defended or explained, while on the stand,” Fuller later said, “tended to increase the probability of her sanity.

I bring up the idea of character, and how the choices that we make define our character, and therefore, our destiny. “How, then, can we ever claim that to be passive and meek is the right path for a woman?

And I will be a woman who is free to be not only a writer and a wife, but also a mother.

This year they plan to hold an inaugural meeting of what they are calling the National Woman’s Rights Convention, the first-ever gathering in America of this kind—and they wish for me to serve as their president. “You are the founding Mother of our movement, Miss Fuller, and thus it is our ardent wish to confide in you the leadership of this assembly.

The book that takes shape in my hands is in part a travel memoir, in part my journalistic accounting of the places I visited and the people I met. But it’s also much more. It’s a work of female adventure, written by a woman who went on her own into parts unknown. It’s a philosophical pondering of what we carry with us from our own natures, and what we take on from the society around us and the conditioning of our circumstances.

In short, why am I not regarded by the law as a soul, responsible for my acts to God and humanity, and not as a mere body, devoted to the unreasoning service of my husband?" The state gives no answer, and the champions of her policy evince wisdom in imitating her silence.

The life of woman must be outwardly a well-intentioned, cheerful dissimulation of her real life. —MARGARET FULLER

By the late 1830s and ’40s, when Margaret was a young single woman living in Providence, Boston, and Cambridge, New England had become the first region in the country with a shortage of men. The overcrowded job market and economic volatility that drove her lawyer father back to farming and her younger brothers to seek employment in the South and West created this imbalance, leaving one third of Boston’s female population unmarried. Little wonder that Margaret toyed for a while with the notion that only an unmarried woman could “represent the female world.” Her argument was theoretical: American wives belonged by law to their husbands and could not act independently. Yet she also spoke for a surging population of women, many of them single, who sought usefulness outside the home and who readily joined the political life of the nation by advocating causes from temperance to abolition long before they gained the right to vote.

took to heart the example of the French novelist George Sand, whom she met in Paris, a woman who effectively articulated her ideas through both conversation and published writing and who chose an independent path in life. She was impressed by the way Sand “takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her thoughts.” In a time when “self-reliance” was the watchword

over “second hand” representations of God by worn-out churchmen, and argued that religion should become “one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy,” the Universalist preacher Abner Kneeland had spent sixty days in a Boston jail for the crime of publishing a letter in his own newspaper, the Boston Investigator, declaring God to be “nature itself,” and any other deity to be “nothing more than a chimera.” Kneeland’s paper had frightened Boston with its promiscuous advocacy of controversial causes, from a woman’s right to keep her own bank account to interracial marriage, divorce, and birth control: he had been locked up for his politics as much as his pantheism. This was to be the last such incarceration in the state’s history, but no one knew that at the time. In scarcely over a decade there would be arrests of prominent Bostonians for their active opposition to the fugitive slave law;

and teeth ached, but could she trust a midwife’s assurance that this too was natural, common? “According to these women, one must think that this condition is really a martyrdom,” Margaret wrote to her young lover, a boy almost, who had never tended a baby, whose mother had died when he was six, leaving him, her youngest child, unfamiliar with the “ailment” of a woman’s pregnancy. Margaret cried after receiving letters from her family begging her to come home, knowing that she could provide only vague descriptions of her whereabouts, pretend to enjoy “hid[ing] thus in Italy,” like the “great Goethe.” She experienced “fits of deep longing to see persons and objects in America” and once again felt “I have no ‘home,’ no peaceful room to which I can return and repose in the love of my kindred from the friction of care and the world.

late transformed “the bosom of woman” from a “home of angelic pity” into “a shrine for offerings to moloch.

She pointed to a sundress with bright yellow lemons on it. "That's cute. I love lemons." Ay, Dios mio! Carolina cringed. She sounded like a fool. It was like Baby's "I carried a watermelon" line in Dirty Dancing. Why was she so awkward? "You'd look stunning in that." Enrique signaled to a woman who worked there. A saleswoman walked over to them from the back of the shop. She quickly and professionally assessed Carolina's body and then picked one of the bright dresses off the rack. "This should fit you. Shall I put it in a room for you, miss?" "Sure." Carolina followed her right to the dressing room. The dark hair on her arms stood at full attention and her heart raced. Nerves and anticipation swirled through her--- this whole day seemed like a fantasy, but it was tough for her to just live in the moment. She undressed and slipped the dress over her head. The soft fabric caressed her body, accentuating her curves. She stared at her figure in the mirror. She looked... sexy. Carolina had never seen herself as sensual, but in this dress, in the soft, warm glow of the dressing room lights, she was a knockout. The saleswoman had also placed some bright red pumps in the room. Carolina loved high heels and never had a problem walking in them, because she had spent so many years dancing with the Ballet Folklórico. Carolina's eyes practically bugged out of her head when she saw their bottoms, and she stroked the red soles--- they were Louboutins, an identifying detail she knew about from Blanca's endless fashion magazines. Blanca dreamed of owning a pair one day. She would be so jealous. Luckily, they were the same size, so Carolina would let Blanca borrow them. There was only one problem with Carolina's outfit--- her underwear didn't work with the dress. Her broad, wide bra elastics showed under the thin spaghetti straps, and her panties were too dark. She leaned out of the curtain. "Ma'am." The saleslady walked back over to her. "Can I get you something else?" "Yes. A bra and some panties." Carolina told the lady her sizes, and the lady went around the corner, returning later with an adorable matching yellow lace bra and thong. A thong. Her face crinkled. "Do you have anything with, uh, fuller coverage?" "Of course, dear. But not in the yellow. Do you want to match the bra?" Carolina did want to match the bra. It was such a cute set. She exhaled, stepping out of her comfort zone and into the lingerie. She again looked at herself in the mirror. She practically couldn't recognize herself--- a gorgeous young woman on a romantic day trip with a man whom she really liked.

There had been a girl standing near Ourpad creek, watching Mt. Varag in the distance. Then that wonderful girl turned into white smoke which faded away. Mihran's heart ached. The weak and delicate Nana had fallen, but the strong and earthy Nana had become the dream of his life: the only thing he would fight for, one he would strive for and not achieve, though the longer he tried, the fuller his life would be, the richer and happier his soul. Where did this Turkish woman come from to steal his soul, impoverish him, and leave him bankrupt and homeless? "Tidy yourself up," Mihran said, "it's already light." "What a short night that was," Nana yawned. "What was it - a solar eclipse?" "An eclipse of everything," he replied.

In that room, with his family, he would sometimes imagine a different room, a fuller family. He would imagine so hard that at times he thought he could see them. Sometimes in a hut in Africa, a patriarch holding a machete; sometimes outside in a forest of palm trees, a crowd watching a young woman carrying a bucket on her head; sometimes in a cramped apartment with too many kids, or a small, failing farm, around a burning tree or in a classroom. He would see these things while his grandmother prayed and sang, prayed and sang, and he would want so badly for all the people he made up in his head to be there in that room, with him.

Ojih Odutola’s radical visual reversals function like thought experiments that take us beyond the merely hierarchical. By positioning the unexpected figure of the black woman as master, as oppressor, she suspends, for a moment, our focus on the individual sins of people—the Mississippi overseer, the British slave merchant, the West African slave raider—and turns it back upon enabling systems. It was a racist global system of capital and exploitation—coupled with a perverse and asymmetric understanding of human resource and value—that allowed the trade in humans to occur, and although that trade no longer exists in its previous form, many of its habits of mind persist. In “A Countervailing Theory,” the habit of thought that recognizes some beings and ignores others is presented to us as an element of a physical landscape, the better to emphasize its all-encompassing nature. That system is the air Akanke and Aldo breathe, the bodies they’re in, the land they walk on. For Ojih Odutola, it is expressed by one unending, unfurling charcoal line: The purpose of beginning the story from the perspective of Aldo, one who is subjugated, is intentional: to show how easily one can be indoctrinated into a systemic predicament. Between Aldo and Akanke, there isn’t a clear demarcation of good or bad with regard to their respective worlds and who they are. The system in which they coexist is illustrated through the striated systems in place—with literal motifs of lines throughout the pictures—representing how the system is ever present and felt, but not explicitly stated. The system is fact. How can such systems be dismantled? Surely, as Audre Lorde knew, it is not by using the master’s tools. “A Countervailing Theory” offers some alternative possibilities. Here love is radical—between women, between men, between women and men, between human and nonhuman—because it forces us into a fuller recognition of the other. And cunnilingus is radical, and seeing is radical, and listening is radical, for the same reason. We know we don’t want to be victims of history. We know we refuse to be slaves. But do we want to be masters—to behave like masters? To expect as they expect? To be as tranquil and entitled as they are? To claim as righteous our decision not to include them in our human considerations? Are we content that all our attacks on them be ad hominem, as they once spoke of us? If our first response to these portraits of black, female masters is some variation on #bowdownbitches or #girlboss, well, no one can deny the profound pleasures of role reversal, of the flipped script, but when we speak thus we must acknowledge that we can make no simultaneous claim to having put down the master’s tools. Akanke is in these images—but so is Aldo. He must be recognized. The dream of Frantz Fanon was not the replacement of one unjust power with another unjust power; it was a revolutionary humanism, neither assimilationist nor supremacist, in which the Manichaean logic of dominant/submissive as it applies to people is finally and completely dismantled, and the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonization. - from "Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Visions of Power

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body,” Margaret Fuller wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845.

Marriage is the natural means of forming a sphere, of taking root on the earth: it requires strength to do this without such an opening, very many have failed to this, and their imperfections have been in every one's way.

The American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement … It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Unfortunately, though, even in our own time, the stigma that can attach to the cleverest person in the room sometimes intensifies if that person happens to be a woman. To imagine that Fuller could conduct herself as she did and never run afoul of gender prejudice is fanciful. To suppose that such biases were alone responsible for her troubles is equally so.

Listening and Answering Throughout most of the great Old Testament book that bears his name, Job cries out to God in agonized prayer. For all his complaints, Job never walks away from God or denies his existence—he processes all his pain and suffering through prayer. Yet he cannot accept the life God is calling him to live. Then the skies cloud over and God speaks to Job “out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1). The Lord recounts in vivid detail his creation and sustenance of the universe and of the natural world. Job is astonished and humbled by this deeper vision of God (Job 40:3–5) and has a breakthrough. He finally prays a mighty prayer of repentance and adoration (Job 42:1–6). The question of the book of Job is posed in its very beginning. Is it possible that a man or woman can come to love God for himself alone so that there is a fundamental contentment in life regardless of circumstances (Job 1:9)?97 By the end of the book we see the answer. Yes, this is possible, but only through prayer. What had happened? The more clearly Job saw who God was, the fuller his prayers became—moving from mere complaint to confession, appeal, and praise. In the end he broke through and was able to face anything in life. This new refinement and level of character came through the interaction of listening to God’s revealed Word and answering in prayer. The more true his knowledge of God, the more fruitful his prayers became, and the more sweeping the change in his life. The power of our prayers, then, lies not primarily in our effort and striving, or in any technique, but rather in our knowledge of God. You may respond, “But God spoke audible words to Job out of a storm. I wish God spoke to me like that.” The answer is—we have something better, an incalculably clearer expression of God’s character. “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son . . . the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb 1:1–3). Jesus Christ is the Word of God (John 1:1–14) because no more comprehensive, personal, and beautiful communication of God is possible. We cannot look directly at the sun with our eyes. The glory of it would immediately overwhelm and destroy our sight. We have to look at it through a filter, and then we can see the great flames and colors of it. When we look at Jesus Christ as he is shown to us in the Scriptures, we are looking at the glory of God through the filter of a human nature. That is one of the many reasons, as we shall see, that Christians pray “in Jesus’ name.” Through Christ, prayer becomes what Scottish Reformer John Knox called “an earnest and familiar talking with God,” and John Calvin called an “intimate conversation” of believers with God, or elsewhere “a communion of men with God”—a two-way communicative interaction.98 “For through [Christ] we . . . have access to the Father by one Spirit” (Eph 2:18).