The debate in women's studies: Contradictory role models in the nineteenth century—Margaret fuller and Elizabeth Peabody

Abstract

There are strong and distinct roots for existing ideological differences between autonomists and integrationists within the discipline of Women's Studies. Margaret Fuller, a 19th century proponent of the autonomous Women's Studies position, held Conversations in Boston for women between 1839–1844, and asked her circle, “‘What were we born to do? And how shall we do it?’” (Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. 1, p. 325, 1852, Philips, Sampson, & Co., Boston). She sought the individual and demanded woman's intellectual separation from man so that she might come to know herself. In contrast, her peer and near-contemporary, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, promoted the values and attitudes of today's integrationist Women's Studies historians in Reading Parties she held in the 1820s. Peabody looked for the seeds of community and found women to be organic sources of nurturing and human development. These two conflicting and necessary mainsprings of thought regarding the nature and function of woman, while not the invention of Fuller or Peabody in the mid-1840s, were nevertheless an intellectual springboard from which the modern university has been fashioned for both sexes. Understanding the origins of the philosophical confrontation between Fuller and Peabody may shed light on today's choices between autonomous and integrationist positions, in a debate that is current while it is also very old.