Francesca Wade at the New York Times:
From 1840, Peabody’s became the meeting place for a motley group of women, aged between 13 and 60, who came together simply to talk. These “conversations” were the brainchild of Margaret Fuller, a free-spirited critic and editor widely considered the best-read woman in New England, who believed, writes the author (a very distant relation), that “the individual came into radiant being” through interaction. These women were hungry for knowledge; excluded from formal education, they had pursued their own courses — plying ministers with questions, devising reading programs, initiating correspondences — and the conversations provided them with much-desired structure, motivation and solidarity.
If sessions began with discussions of literature, Greek mythology and philosophy, it was Fuller who tended to bring the debates around to the topics of girls’ education, marriage and motherhood, and the unrealized potential she saw among her female peers. “What were we born to do?” she urgently asked the group. “How shall we do it?”
more here.
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