At Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop

Most histories situate the birth of feminism in the United States at the Seneca Falls Convention, held on 19-20 July 1848, in upstate New York. Yet as I researched and wrote Bright Circle: Five Extraordinary Women in the Age of Transcendentalism, I came to believe the movement had its roots almost a decade earlier and in a most unlikely place: the Boston bookshop owned and operated by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.

That bookshop, which never had a proper name, was an extraordinary place. As soon as it opened in 1840, New England intellectuals began frequenting the ground-floor shop to browse through its choice selection of European books and journals. In the evenings, men and women gathered to discuss a wide range of topics, including abolition, metaphysics, poetry, or the latest scheme to settle a utopian community. Peabody’s bookstore was a stock exchange for ideas, a gathering place for the nascent transcendentalist movement. And it was the location of Margaret Fuller’s legendary Conversations.

Fuller, often referred to at the time as the best-read woman in the United States, possessed a ferocious mind and a gift for conversation. Her talk was mesmerizing, improvisatory, brilliant. She had the rare ability to sum up what everyone was thinking in pithy, memorable phrases. Although she would die at age 40 in a tragic shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, she managed to cram a considerable amount of life into her brief, luminous existence. She wrote books and essays on a wide variety of subjects and was a member of the Transcendental Club. She wrote for a newspaper in New York, an occupation that eventually sent her to Italy, where she met and fell in love with a count named Giovanni Ossoli and gathered material for what was to have been her magnum opus, a history of the Italian Revolution in 1848.

Before all this, however, in the autumn of 1839, she came up with the plan for the Conversations. Keenly aware that women with intellectual interests had few outlets to discuss ideas, Fuller envisioned a group of some twenty-five women gathered each week to discuss Greek mythology, the arts and, most important of all, “to answer the great questions. What were we born to do? How shall we do it? which so few ever propose to themselves ‘till their best years are gone by.’” The Conversations began in November, and were initially held in an apartment, but they soon moved to Elizabeth Peabody’s new bookshop and included participants from as far away as Concord and New York.

It is difficult to recapture the substance of these talks. We know from the scattered testimony of its participants that many regarded the Conversations as life-changing. I took the title of my book from the comment of one woman whose identity remains unknown but whose appreciation for the gathering is obvious: “As I sat there, my heart overflowed with joy at the sight of the bright circle, . . . for I know not where to look for so much character, culture, and so much love of truth and beauty, in any other circle of women and girls.” That we know as much as we do about the Conversations can be attributed almost solely to Peabody, who diligently transcribed the talks for one season and then distributed them to friends who couldn’t attend. Those notes suggest that the women at her bookshop returned again and again to questions of female identity, to the unfair social arrangements that kept women from receiving the same education as men or of holding public positions, and to speculations about the way forward.

Ultimately, the Conversations yielded pathbreaking insights and writing. One of its members, Sophia Ripley, wrote an early feminist essay, “Woman,” which appeared in The Dial and argued, “In our present state of society woman possesses not; she is under possession. . . .Woman is educated with the tacit understanding, that she is only half a being, and an appendage.” But the most important byproduct of these remarkable exchanges was Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the first major work of feminist theory in America and a work still taught in American literature classes across the country. Fuller once again summed up and crystallized the ideas swirling around her, pushing them in new directions and formulating a powerful argument against unequal marriages and the restriction of women to the private sphere. The book concludes with a call for both sexes to engage in a program of mutual improvement and self-determination.

The Conversations lasted four years. By the time Fuller concluded them, she had already moved on to other commitments and concerns. Now less a transcendentalist than a cultural critic for a major newspaper, she turned her appraising eye to penal reform, the plight of immigrants, and the high art music of Beethoven, among many other topics. But by then, and from the unlikely platform of Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop, she had already left an indelible mark on the history of American feminism.

 _{Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash.}