Sermon     “Margaret Fuller” The Rev. Rali Weaver

I wonder if any of us can really imagine what life was like for our grandmothers and great grandmothers in this country in the early 1800’s. Imagine being unable to continue your education beyond grammar school. Being trained for the express purpose of marrying a person your parents chose for you (sometimes the highest bidder) instead of choosing to marry whomever you love. Imagine not being legally allowed to own property or inherit it from your parents or husband. Imagine never being engaged in conversation about things that matter to you, being restricted to the employment as a housekeeper, a childcare provider, a teacher of young girls, a seamstress or a cook.

I daresay that at the time Alvan Lamson was called to be the minister here women were not invited to speak in this church. Not for the sermon, not for the reading of the scripture and not for the announcements. It was not until 1880 that the Dedham Branch of the Women’s Alliance was founded in some part to empower the women of this church to leadership positions of their own because there was no room for women to serve in the leadership of the church of their day. The benevolent funds of this church were endowed specifically to support women in need reflective of a time when there were very few resources for women in this parish.

We so often celebrate the names of our founding fathers. We talk with pride about the foundations of our church and parish. The interior of our sanctuary is hung with four paintings, all of white men. Where are the women of our history? We rarely acknowledge the deleterious effects that not being legally able to own property, or to sign a contract of any kind, or to get a decent education or to be able to vote had on women in this country. We might truly make sense at least intellectually of the losses to African Americans who were brought to our country as slaves but women, kept as indentured servants for generations, under the guise of being something weaker and less able, were interminably limited by the gender they were given at birth.

I bring all this up today because these are the injustices that Margaret Fuller spent the majority of her 40 years of life writing and arguing and speaking up about.

Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridge Massachusetts on the 23 of May 1810. Next Sunday marks the 200^th anniversary of her birth.

She was a remarkable individual who lived a singular life. From an early she age lived outside the constructs of societies ideal of what a woman should be and lived instead in accord with her own sense of what would make her happy.

It helped that she was born into a supportive family where she learned to read at the age of three and her father encouraged her to read everything she put her hands on and continued her education with private tutors beyond his own ability to educate her.

By the age of thirty Margaret Fuller was considered the best-read person (male or female) in the entire country. An avid feminist at the outset of the women’s suffrage movement, she strove to articulate the plight of women in political, professional and educational fields.

Fuller was one of the New England transcendentalists that met in Elizabeth Peabody’s Bookstore to share ideas. (Perhaps you remember Elizabeth Peabody as the Unitarian founder of the first Kindergarten) At Peabody’s shop Margaret began a series of “Conversations for Women” which encouraged women to talk more freely about subjects upon which they were not schooled.

It was out of that shop that Ralph Waldo Emerson founded the transcendentalist magazine called “The Dial” of which Fuller was its first editor and chief writer (an uncommon honor in her time when women were rarely engaged as writers.)

Horace Greeley noticed her impressive writing style and invited her to write for the New York Tribune where she was finally able to earn a living as a writer. At his request she wrote her most famous work, which we read in part this morning, Women in the Nineteenth Century. At thirty-five Fuller was asked to be the Italian News Correspondent for the Tribune and that is where she fell in with the Italian revolutionaries and felt at home for the first time in her life, surrounded by those who championed the causes of the disenfranchised.

Just five years later, at 40 years of age, Margaret and her chosen husband, Italian revolutionary Giovanni Ossoli and their young son, while traveling back to settle in the United States, where shipwrecked on sand bar off the coast of Long Island and the ship they were on broke apart and Fuller and her husband and young son died at sea.

Her friends were rightly shocked and dismayed at the news of her death. Ralph Waldo Emerson mourned that he had “lost her in his audience.”; Thoreau rushed to New York and spent five days scouring Fire Island in search of her remains and any scrap of the last book she was working on, to not avail. “Hers was a unique intellect”, Barrett Brown pointed out, uniquely poised for a “conversation that was vastly superior to her writing.” at the same time Thomas Carlyle described her with “such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or egg I have not before seen in any human soul.”

It occurs to me that even in this historic place things have changed quite dramatically since Margaret Fuller’s time. To begin with Women speaking on complex subjects is not (I hope) an unconventional experience for most of us.

And yet it occurs to me that there are women throughout the world who are still denied equal education. There are women in our country who continue to earn significantly less salary than their male counterparts. There are women even our society though well educated and hard working who cannot get ahead in their professional careers because of their gender, there are still women who are brought to this country to be married to strangers and sold as prostitutes. The gender discrimination though more subtle continues to exist.

Oppressions toward those who are other in our society does not end there, there are people targeted by the police because of their skin color, there are people denied civil rights because of their sexual orientation. Generations of oppression continue to disenfranchise the many while generations of privilege continue to enfranchise only a few.

What might happen if our entire world could truly embody the concept Margaret Fuller articulated in her writing the simple ideal: that we are all connected. If we understood with our senses that as long as any one of us male or female, black or white, rich or poor, responsible or irresponsible, gay or straight, optimistic or pessimistic, generous or greedy- as long as any part of the duality cannot “live freely and unimpeded” then none of us is free. What “arbitrary barriers” must be thrown down for all of us to work together for common purposes?

Over the past year we have strived to be in conversation about issues of welcoming.

What does it mean to really open to conversation with what is “other” to us now?

How might we be changed or opened by that dialogue. Where do our fears lie, where are the unconscious barriers? Where are the intentional ones?

By her life and through her actions Margaret Fuller embodied the way that conversations can open us to more possibility. She encouraged through her writing and conversation that we continually bring more voices to the table.

As we celebrate her life today I think it is important that we recognize all the conversations that aid us in speaking the truth to injustice.

Let us strive to find our voices.

Let us continually open our minds and hearts to more possibilities.

I hope we can look at our Annual Meeting this morning as a sort of conversation in the spirit of Margaret Fuller, a chance to engage in the ideas that will help us to live more fully as a community of faith. I know it may seem that most of this meeting is about routine things. But each year at our spring meeting we elect new officers. When you think about the fact that for hundreds of years this church was governed only by men, any way you look at it a slate of officers that invites a winder number of voices to the Parish Committee table is progress.

Whether it passes or not, when we think of adding a bylaw, to bylaws that haven’t been modified since the 1950’s, this denotes progress.

To have spent a year in conversations about becoming more welcoming and open our minds to intentionally inviting new and other voices to our table is part of the same conversation Margaret Fuller began over 200 years ago.

Passing a draft budget may not be all that exciting of an event in any organizations life cycle, but when we engage in conversations about money through the efforts of the Finance Committee and the Parish Committee and the Budget Hearings and the Annual meeting and we come up with a budget that reflects our collective values this too is progress.

Just as Margaret Fuller’s conversations in Elizabeth Peabody’s shop began a wider conversation that altered the lives of women in our country forever so may our efforts within the context of this church have the possibility to change the course of our history as a parish where more people are invited to the table and all voices are welcome.

And on this her near birthday let us thank all those who invited us to speak and made room our voices.