# Precarity, Then and Now: Margaret Fuller and Caroline Healey Dall as Editors of Periodicals

Alice de Galzain

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## To cite this version:

Alice de Galzain. Precarity, Then and Now: Margaret Fuller and Caroline Healey Dall as Editors of Periodicals. The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 2025, 2 (1), pp.1 - 17. 10.1353/dial.2025.a968779. hal-05243770

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# Precarity, Then and Now: Margaret Fuller and Caroline Healey Dall as Editors of Periodicals

Alice De Galzain

The Dial: A Journal of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, Volume 2, Issue 1, Summer 2025, pp. 1-17 (Article)

Published by Ralph Waldo Emerson Society

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dial.2025.a968779

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For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968779
# Precarity, Then and Now: Margaret Fuller and Caroline Healey Dall as Editors of Periodicals

ALICE DE GALZAIN

Writing was not just “writing” for Transcendentalist women. Because intellectual work was associated with (and reserved to) men for so long, when women in antebellum America started to carve out some space for themselves in the public sphere, it came at a high cost. For Margaret Fuller, who suffered from chronic pain all her life due to a “spinal curvature” that caused frequent and severe migraines, writing was inextricably linked with pain. In her letters, she noted that “writing is of all occupations, the very worst for my malady, and as I *must* do a great deal at any rate I abstain always when I can.”¹ Pain forced Fuller to dose her writing, and even when pain was absent, it was part of her experience: “Tis pity I should not write in straight lines. But I merely let my hand write. I feel delightfully indolent” (2: 133), she wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson in April 1840.

Caroline Healey Dall, who attended Fuller's famous Boston Conversations (1839-44) and who became, after the latter's death in 1850, a prominent women's rights activist and social scientist, also suffered from chronic fatigue and headaches. The already precarious state of Dall's health was aggravated by the fact that she was looking after her two children and that her husband, Charles Appleton Dall, whose income was unreliable or nonexistent while he lived with his family, moved permanently to India in 1855. Though Dall was a prolific writer (she kept a journal for more than seventy-three years²), precarity led her to distinguish between various types of writing and it forced her, in some cases, to write “for bread.” In July 1850, Dall noted in her journal: “Wrote an article for Huntington—wrote it for bread—Never in my life wrote for that object before, wept as I read it over—It has no glaring faults and little ability. It is a foundling and no real child of mine” (*Daughter* 129). This was an emotionally painful realization for Dall, and it likely contributed to the long-lasting depression she suffered from throughout the 1850s.

The pain of writing that these women passed on to us, by leaving traces of it in their archives, invites us to reflect on the physicality inherent in the act of writing, more often understood as an intellectual type of activity rather than a physical one. In her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” published during the second wave of feminism, Hélène Cixous describes feminist writing as “movement,” celebrating the kind of empowerment that comes from inscribing words onto the page: “Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her
own movement.”³ Fuller’s and Dall’s written stories of pain exhort us to think about the physical experience of intellectual labor more largely, and to interrogate the connections between intellectual production and our mental and physical health. In what ways did pain transcend their personal experiences and how was pain tied to their roles as women intellectuals in antebellum America?

Paying attention to the practical and day-to-day circumstances that surrounded women's intellectual production in the nineteenth century can help us reframe our understanding of the relation between intellectual production and precarity, a question of continuing relevance in today's academic world. The neoliberalization of higher education has turned academia into a highly precarious environment, exacerbating competition and intensifying inequality. With a combination of job insecurity and inequalities of race, gender, class, and disability concurrently affecting academics' lives, precarity is at an all-time high. And as the situation is rapidly getting worse, studies about the "academic precariat" are calling for new approaches, inviting us to consider precarity from a more holistic viewpoint. In an editorial entitled "The Academic Precariat: Understanding Life and Labour in the Neoliberal Academy," published in 2022, Sarah Burton and Benjamin Bowman argue for the need to "move the discussion of precarity from one centred on employment practices, institutional decisions, and career progression to a more holistic perspective on precarity as both a set of structures which (re)produce inequalities but also as a pervasive and dominating culture or atmosphere."⁴ Precarity as a "culture or atmosphere" shapes academics' lives and experiences, and as such it is a condition that is both *lived* and *felt*.

In this essay, I reflect on the corporeality of intellectual work by turning to Fuller's and Dall's experiences as editors of periodicals. Fuller, who edited *The Dial* from its inception in 1840 until 1842, and Dall, who co-edited *The Una* (1853-55), the first periodical of the women's rights movement, for ten months until its demise, both detailed, in their letters and journals, the great physical and mental suffering they endured while working as editors. The ubiquity of pain in their written accounts contrasts with the seemingly disembodied and elusive nature of editing. Editing, as Sarah Blackwood writes, is "a relatively undertheorized intellectual activity," which is hard to articulate precisely because "[e]xcellent editing erases itself."⁵ In *A Poetics of Editing*, Susan Greenberg similarly describes editing as something that is "everywhere and therefore nowhere" and explains that its "[e]lusiveness also results from the sheer variety of tasks involved in the practice."⁶ For Fuller and Dall, editorial work encompassed a wide range of duties—vast amounts of letter writing were required to secure and correspond with contributors, and to diplomatically reject submissions, but their editorial responsibilities also included copyediting, checking proofs before print, and contributing their own work (both by way of extended articles or by writing shorter pieces "to fill in the gaps"). The role also involved
working closely with male publishers and collaborators, as well as
navigating the challenges posed by being involved in experimental
projects. As editor of *The Dial*, Fuller was in charge of the first collective
publishing endeavor ever undertaken by the Transcendentalists, and as
such it was a work of trial and error. She was supported by George
Ripley, who managed the business side, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
assisted her by securing contributors, sifting through submissions, and
contributing work himself. *The Una*, on the other hand, was an
experiment of a different kind: launched in 1853 by Paulina Wright
Davis, it was the first publication entirely devoted, as its large-print
 subtitle indicated, "to the Elevation of Woman."

Pain, which features prominently in Fuller's and Dall's written
accounts of their experiences as editors, calls our attention to the
embodied nature of editorial labor. By foregrounding *editing pain*, which
encompasses *writing pain*, I seek to explore the corporeal dimensions of
editorial labor and challenge the idea that editing is disembodied or
meant to remain invisible. Building on Tobin Siebers' call in *Disability
Theory* for a "new realism of the body," this essay foregrounds what he
described as "the hard simple realism of the body" — a body that "is alive,
which means that it is capable of influencing and transforming social
languages as they are capable of influencing it and transforming it" (68).
Pain, in this framework, becomes a paradox: "something that is right
before [our] eyes and yet invisible to most."⁷ Applying this lens to the
editorial labor of Fuller and Dall opens new ways of thinking about how
pain is not only produced by editorial work—through exhaustion,
overwork, and isolation—but also how pain, as an embodied and
epistemic experience, shaped their editorships. Their narratives of
suffering compel us to recognize editorial labor not as abstract or
intellectual alone, but as bodily and affective—a site where meaning is
shaped in and through the body.

By focusing on the lived reality of Fuller's and Dall's editorships, this
essay aims to counter both the invisibility of women's labor as well as
what Darcy Cullen calls the "deleterious cliché" of the "invisible editor,"
i.e. "the myth of the invisible editor [which] persists because it is a
supporting structure for the image of the author as artist or *auteur*."⁸ By
rendering their pain legible, Fuller and Dall made editorial work visible
and, in so doing, exposed its toll: how unpaid labor and overwork
aggravated preexisting health conditions, but also how, as collective
endeavors, periodicals reproduced forms of oppression that were
ambient in nineteenth-century society. As Kenneth Price and Susan
Belasco Smith point out, the "periodical—far more than the book—was
a social text, involving complex relationships among writers, readers,
editors, publishers, printers and distributors."⁹ While Fuller and Dall
occupied positions of privilege as white, educated, middle-class women,
their testimonies nonetheless expose the profound gendered barriers
they confronted in the male-dominated periodical industry. These
challenges likely informed the socio-economic reflections that later
formed the basis of their published feminist works. While in *Woman in the Nineteenth Century* (1845), Fuller demanded a greater range of employment for women, famously declaring “let them be sea-captains, if you will,”¹⁰ and Dall, in *The College, The Market, and The Court* (1860), indicted the “common, habitual idea, that the wages of women must be kept down,”¹¹ such commentaries echoed the struggles they faced in their professional lives.

The trajectories of Fuller and Dall's editorships are strikingly similar in that both were marked by (and ultimately ended because of) low or nonexistent wages. After working as editor of *The Dial* for two years, Fuller had no choice but to resign in 1842, when she discovered that she was never going to be paid for her editorial work. *The Dial*'s publisher, Weeks, Jordan, and Company, had lied about the periodical's subscribers' list and gone bankrupt. Though Emerson indicated, in the posthumous biography *Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli* (1852), that “[a]s editor, she received a compensation for the first years, which was intended to be two hundred dollars per annum, but which, I fear, never reached even that amount,”¹² the truth is that “Fuller never received ‘a penny’ for ‘her time & toil.’”¹³ Weeks & Jordan, as Elizabeth Peabody and James Freeman Clarke later found out, “had overstated the paying subscribers to the magazine” and the “result was that Fuller could expect no payment for either past or future work for the *Dial*” (*Letters* 3: 53n1). In a letter written to Emerson in March 1842, Fuller described the extreme fatigue that resulted from years of overwork and declared it impossible for her to keep going in such precarious conditions:

> I could not do it, in future, if I have the same burden on me as I have had before . . . There is a perceptible diminution of my strength . . . if I could have received a maintenance from this Dial, I could have done my duties to it well . . . and my time might have been given to my pen, while now for more than three months I have been able to write no line except letters. But it cannot be helped. It has been a sad business. (*Letters* 3: 53-4)

Dall's work for *The Una* was similarly compromised by a fraudulent publisher. Simon Crosby Hewitt, who took over the periodical's ownership and publication at the beginning of 1855, lied to Dall and Paulina Wright Davis. According to Davis's letters, Hewitt did not consult her when he announced in January 1855 that Dall would become co-editor.¹⁴ Dall, who had been asked “to take the Editorship of the Una” at the beginning of that year, was equally blindsided when she found out she had been “announced as Editor” before she and Hewitt had reached an agreement.¹⁵ Though she “served as primary editor in the paper’s final year,”¹⁶ Dall’s work came to a crashing halt in October 1855 when, after months of bad bookkeeping, Hewitt abruptly ceased publication of *The Una*, leaving Dall heartbroken. In a journal entry written on 29 September 1855, she recorded her reaction to the publication’s collapse: “I was sitting this morning busily making up my phonographic report
when I received a letter from Mrs Davis, saying that she hoped I would
put the legal reports into this paper as Hewitt was unable to sustain it
and we might not have another. I was extremely startled —it seemed so
dishonorable to stop the paper before the end of the year" (Daughter 237).
Though she had been given twenty-five dollars at the beginning of her
editorship, Dall never received any of the additional compensation she
had initially been promised.

It is important to note that Dall and Fuller's similar stories were likely
not isolated cases. In her 1995 book about Sarah Hale, entitled *Our Sister
Editors*, Patricia Okker compiled the first list of female editors in the
nineteenth-century United States—a list made of over six hundred
names. As Ellen Gruber Garvey observes, knowing these women's
names is not enough and significant work remains to be done: "in spite
of the fact that the project of 'recovering' women authors that began in
the 1970s has extended to identifying women editors," the "work of
many women editors in both the commercial and non-commercial
magazine field has remained largely invisible" because other "writers,
often male, associated with some of the magazines women edited has
overshadowed the women's work."¹⁷ Fuller's experience as editor of *The
Dial* is a case in point: though she was the only editor and held full
responsibility for the publication for the first two years, Fuller's name
was not mentioned at all in certain initial advertisements. In April 1840,
as observed by Joel Myerson, the "*New-Yorker* announced that Weeks,
Jordan & Co. would soon publish a new 'theological and literary
magazine' under 'the Editorial direction of Ralph Waldo Emerson and
associates,'" and that same year, "the *Boston Courier* (in July) briefly
noted the *Dial* and mentioned Emerson and [George] Ripley as its
editors."¹⁸ Commenting on recent literary criticism, Larry J. Reynolds
remarks that *The Dial* has, more often than not, been attributed to
Emerson rather than Fuller. About this, Reynolds insists on the need for
"a new narrative about the emergence of the *Dial* itself," stressing that
"[e]arly commentary, as well as later scholarship, has consistently
regarded this periodical as a product of the Transcendental Club" and
that "[w]hat Myerson and others have failed to appreciate is that
although the idea of the *Dial* emerged from conversations that occurred
at meetings of the Transcendental Club, the journal itself grew out of the
coterie publishing practices of a small group of friends, the Fuller circle
if you will" which she created "on her own initiative."¹⁹ Turning our
attention to Fuller's editorship of *The Dial* (and to Dall's editorship of *The
Una*) is a way of reclaiming histories that remained hidden because they
were deemed unimportant.

1. Archives of Pain

In order to counter that sort of invisibility, we must first recognize, as
Cécile Gagnon and Marie-Anne Casselot highlight in their recent book
on feminist phenomenology, *Existantes*, that "oppression marks and shapes the body" and that "the intimate is political."²⁰ For Gagnon and Casselot, adopting a feminist posture that counteracts traditional dichotomies such as *mind over body* and *spirit over matter* "allows us to see existences that are invisible in classical phenomenology."²¹ Describing their "approach as feminist phenomenologists," they explain that it all "starts from our guts, our bellies, which tell us 'what matters.'"²² This broader understanding of intimacy—riven with political implications—applies well to Fuller's and Dall's written accounts about their experiences as editors, whose written narratives of exhaustion are both deeply personal and eminently political.

Fuller and Dall's journal entries and correspondence reveal how their editorial duties and responsibilities came in addition to (and aggravated the negative impact of) the duties and responsibilities they held as women. In the letters Fuller wrote between 1840 and 1842, she continuously lamented a sense of fatigue caused by overwork. To her mother, she confessed that "this mode of life tires my spirits" while confessing "I am in a state of extreme fatigue" (*Letters* 2: 260, 261). To her brother Richard, she wrote: "the tax on my mind is such from my employments that I don't take pleasure in writing to any one. I give eight or nine lessons a week, beside the Dial and my class" (*Letters* 2: 252). Not receiving any compensation for her work for *The Dial* forced Fuller to take on many jobs: she was giving private lessons, hosting her conversations for women in Boston, and editing and contributing to *The Dial*. As she explained to her mother, "Giving so many lessons makes more serious work impossible . . . After next week I shall not be so busy, as the Dial will be all in print" (*Letters* 2: 260). Fuller also noted, "I really ought to be out in the open air all the time I am not doing these things" (*Letters* 2: 252), showing she was aware that overwork was endangering her already fragile health.

It is interesting to note that Fuller details her pain with the hardships of editing and overwork in the letters she writes to her mother, Margarett Crane. She itemizes the tasks before her and expresses mounting frustration over the relentless demands of her workload: "this is the last week of the Dial and as often happens, the 'copy' did not hold out, and I have had to write in every gap of time. Marianne J.²³ and Jane have been writing for me extracts and &c, but I have barely scrambled through, and am now quite unfit to hold a pen. Tomorrow I mean to spend all the morning at the bath and in the open air, and see if I cannot get revived" (*Letters* 2: 261). This fascinating entry, which amongst many other things, reveals that Fuller had enlisted two of her pupils to help her deal with an overwhelming amount of editorial duties, details the "cause and effect" link between Fuller's editorship of *The Dial*, the pressures and constraints of time ("I have had to write in every gap of time") and the physical inability to write ("I have barely scrambled through").

Just like Fuller's, Dall's writings during the years when she worked for *The Una* convey a similar sense of exhaustion. In September 1855, she
wrote in her journal: “We went back and had a very full house for the evening—I was in the chair and introduced Lucy Stone. She & Wendell were the only speakers—I went home with Mrs Beatty—excessively tired” (Daughter 233). A few days later, that same month, she added: “Just as I had made up my mind that I was too tired to eat, and had ordered a bowl of cocoa, Elizabeth Peabody appeared” (Daughter 235). In Dall’s journal, intellectual work is described next to private matters such as childcare, household chores, and notes about her health—“I have been sick all the week, but I have finished my article for the Una and begun to make shirts for Willie [her son]” (Selected 453). It is as though the text, intended as space, and the cramped space of the sentence, had become a metaphor for her busy day.

## 2. Editing and Carework: Challenging the Invisibility of Labor

The written stories of pain that pervade Fuller and Dall's letters and journals are not just intimate accounts of psychological and physical hardships, they are also the reflection of the kinds of pressures and oppressions that were ambient in the antebellum publishing world. In *Writing Pain*, Thomas Constantinesco states that “[t]he figuration of pain on the page . . . entails the simultaneous configuration of self and world.”²⁴ In a section titled “The Politics of Pain” in *The Cultural Politics of Emotion*, Sara Ahmed similarly comments on the contingency of pain, defining it as an “encounter” and “collision”: pain, she writes, “‘surfaces’ in relation to others, who bear witness to pain and authenticate its existence.”²⁵ By chronicling their pain—the toll of laboring under the weight of patriarchal expectations—Fuller and Dall not only gave voice to their own exhaustion, but actively challenged the cultural erasure of women’s work. Their testimonies shed light on the invisible care responsibilities they navigated alongside their editorial work—tasks that shaped their experiences as editors and yet that are rarely acknowledged as part of their professional burden.

The entanglement of care work and intellectual labor is one that continues to resonate in today's world, where women disproportionately shoulder the burdens of invisible labor. Care responsibilities weigh heavily on women across disciplines and countries: according to the International Labour Organization, “globally, women perform 76.2% of all unpaid care work, spending 3.2 times more time on these tasks than men.”²⁶ In academia more particularly, as Rebecca Miles writes, women “are less likely to have children than their male counterparts, (Baker 2012; see also Brooks, 1997; Bassett, 2005), and where they do have children women are more likely to be single parents than men. Further, the careers of women who have children ‘tend to lag behind those of childfree women and fathers.’”²⁷ The editors of *Glass Ceilings and Ivory Towers*, a 2024 study about gender inequality in the Canadian academe, similarly note that for “women in academia who have young children, or are considering starting a family, the need to balance work and family
life is a significant barrier to entering the professorate and thriving once there.” The “baby gap” affects women at all career stages: “Added care responsibilities and expected norms around motherhood, coupled with a lack of support and an environment of high competition (Pedersen and Minnotte 2017), often leave women faculty stressed (Wilton and Ross 2017), prompting more women than men to leave academia.”²⁸

As a woman and mother in antebellum America, Dall faced heavy challenges. Because she had no legal and economic identity of her own due to coverture, she was effectively dependent on the men in her life. And yet both her husband and father were unable to support her. As Deese explains, none of Charles Dall’s positions as preacher “paid well or promptly, there were long periods of unemployment, and the family was in nearly constant financial straits.”²⁹ Dall’s father, on the other hand, though his business affairs were going well in the 1850s, blackmailed her and refused to help her unless she abandoned her abolitionist work. Looking for new avenues to make money, Dall “appealed for advice to several influential friends, men of letters” who “suggested that she translate George Sand’s novel *Spiridion*” (*Selected* 495). Dall’s efforts to try to market her translation to a publisher proved unsuccessful, and, in July 1855, she announced that it would instead appear in instalments in *The Una*. Though Fuller was no longer alive when Dall translated Sand’s work, it is a choice which she most definitely would have approved. In 1845, commenting on Francis “Frank” Shaw’s translation of *Consuelo* for *The Harbinger*, she had written: “I am glad [Frank] is translating Consuelo; it will be a gift to the world,” “It is very right for Frank to translate Consuelo when he has so many Daughters” (*Letters* 4: 127).

Sadly, only a few months after Dall's translation of *Spiridion* began appearing in *The Una*, the periodical ceased to be published. Dall was devastated when she found out and wrote, that same day, in her journal: "I had made up my mind to print Spiridion through even if I had to borrow the money to do so." (*Daughter* 237). A few days later, she added: "I was confused & worried by fatigue & anxiety . . . I came home very sad, and after writing several necessary letters read George Sand with an aching head" (*Daughter* 239). While her translation never made it into book form, it did appear, several years later, in the Boston *Saturday Evening Express*. Dall pasted those clippings in one of the scrapbooks she donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society and noted: "It is probable this is the only copy in existence."³⁰
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The full note, inscribed on the inside of the front cover of Dall's scrapbook, reads: "This translation was made at the suggestion of the Rev. C.[harles] C. Shackford at a time when I was very poor and anxiously seeking a good education for my children. He believed the Ms. would be readily accepted. No publisher could be found to take it-but the work kept me from despair for one winter and I afterward gave it to Henry G Parker without compensation." Intellectual work was disempowering and humiliating when it was not compensated, something to which Dall would return in *The College, The Market, and The Court*. Writing about "the overworked and ill-paid woman," she argued: "a want of respect for labor, and a want of respect for woman, lies at the bottom of all our difficulties, low wages included."³¹

In 1855, the year the *The Una's* publication stopped, Dall experienced another heartbreaking event: her husband Charles decided to leave for India, where he would spend the rest of his life, coming back to see his wife and children only a couple of times. In January 1855, she recorded: "Charles came home unexpectedly—preaches for nothing at Needham tomorrow—Is talking about going out West or to Madras!" and less than a month later, the complete entry reads, "Mr. Dall came home it is decided he is to go to Calcutta" (*Daughter* 228, 229). Dall was now effectively a single mother, bearing the burden of childcare completely on her own, without any financial or legal autonomy. This explains why, in November 1855, when Elizabeth Peabody tried to help her deal with *The Una's* crisis, Dall stated unequivocally that she was not going to continue in those conditions: "I worked nearly all the morning & then was about to rest, when Elizabeth Peabody came full of a new plan. She believes she has persuaded Mrs Davis to print the two remaining nos of
the Una—& wishes me to take charge of it next year. God knows I will not, unless he sends a fresh North wind to blow away clouds" (Daughter 240). Now effectively a single mother, Dall's precarity had become a lot worse.

### 3. The Gendered Politics of Editorial Communication

Although Fuller did not have children while working as editor of *The Dial*, she did nonetheless shoulder care-like responsibilities while editing the journal. In a letter to Frederick Henry Hedge written in March 1840, she compared herself to a "father," merging the notions of responsibility and care inherent in parenthood with the authority and control typically held by fathers in antebellum society. While Hedge had offered his large family and low income as reasons for refusing to write for *The Dial*, Fuller replied: "I know you are plagued and it is hard to write, just so is it with me, for I also am a father. But you can help, and become a godfather!" (Letters 2: 124-5) Fuller was looking after her brother James Lloyd in those years, but she was also metaphorically parenting the journal she was editing. And it was exhausting. Trying to get authors to contribute pieces for *The Dial* was among the most strenuous facets of the job. In a letter to her friend William Henry Channing, she begged him to send her something for the first issue: "Henry, I adjure you, in the name of all the Genii, Muses, Pegasus, Apollo, Pollio, Apollyon . . . to send me something good for this journal before the 1st May. . . . write, my friend, write, and paint not for me fine plans on the clouds to be achieved at some future time, as others do who have had many years to be thinking of immortality" (Letters 2: 102). Though some aspects of this passage are undeniably funny—the exaggerated listing of gods and godly entities at the beginning, the ironic way in which Fuller is calling Channing's bluff out before he even writes back—the desperate tone of her request *sounds* serious. This desperation, though comedic in its delivery, is a poignant reflection of the impact that hefty editorial responsibilities were having on her mental health.

When she became editor in 1840, Fuller was under immense pressure to deliver as editor of the first Transcendentalist publication. A sense of responsibility, pride, and excitement all transpire in her writing. In 1840, Fuller envisioned *The Dial* as a periodical that would stimulate "each man to think for himself, to think more deeply and more nobly" (126) and called it an "experiment [that] is well worth trying" (Letters 2: 131). The nether side of this kind of excitement was the pressure to which she was subjected: as she wrote in a letter to Channing on 19 April 1840, "Things go on pretty well, but I dare say people will be disappointed, for they seem to be looking for the gospel of transcendentalism" (Letters 2: 131).

Her writings show that her mental health was being greatly impacted by her work for *The Dial* and the requests she sent to potential
contributors were often accompanied by admissions of insecurity about her own writing. To Channing, she wrote: "I pray you heed my request, for with this first number we want room for choice. I have myself a great deal written but as I read it over scarce a word seems pertinent to the place or time" (Letters 2: 124-5). The following year, in another letter to him, she stated: "It is very difficult to me to resolve on publishing any of my own writing; it never seems worth it" (Letters 2: 201). To Emerson, she confessed: "When I look at my papers I feel as if I had never had a thought that was worthy the attention of any but myself" (Letters 2: 127). In *Memoirs*, he would return to this, stating, "her pen was a non-conductor" (1: 294).

In addition to feeling unsettled by insecurities, Fuller also had to deal with a crisis in her friendship with Emerson, a relationship put to test by a number of factors including their disagreements about *The Dial*. In a letter written after the publication of the first issue, which ended on "a prose fragment whose last sentence was "Wise man, you never knew what it is to love" (Letters 2: 148n3), Fuller expressed regret for not consulting Emerson about the size and font of the title page and the poetry. On July 2nd, 1840, Emerson had sent her a list of rather specific instructions about formatting: "In the next number pray let them print the word Dial in strong black letters that can be seen in the sunshine," "for our poetry can we not print it a little large &e glorious, & let the types betray some slight consciousness of what they carry? Why not print all the verse in the same type as the prose: If I were compositor, I think I should print it in larger?" (Letters 2: 311). In response to Emerson's micromanagement, Fuller stood her ground: "I like the poetry better in small type myself and thought the title page neat and unpretending" (Letters 2: 145). After reading Fuller's response, in which she once again expressed her mounting exhaustion, Emerson sent her a letter of apology, on July 8th: "I am sorry if I have pestered you with criticism on trifles whilst you were already in low spirits and out of health. It is not my wish to magnify print & paper beyond the sun & moon" (Rusk 2: 313). Sometime in 1840, at the onset of their *Dial* adventure, Fuller had warned him: "I do not wish to talk to you of my ill-health, except that I like you should know when it makes me do anything badly, since I wish you to excuse and esteem me" (Letters 2: 110-1). This was a formative period in their friendship,³² and these exchanges reveal how Fuller's health had become part of the ongoing negotiations—both emotional and intellectual—that shaped their relationship.

While editorial duties did not break Fuller and Emerson's friendship, they continued to test it, intermittently, through the years. In 1841, she sent him another apologetic letter, which she signed "Magdalen", in which tensions appear once again to have risen: "I think I was very ill-natured, perverse, and unreasonable . . . I wanted this afternoon as soon as you were really out of the house to run after you and call as little children do kiss and be friends; that would not be decorous really for two Editors, but it shall be so in thought shall it not?" (Letters 2: 212-3).³³ In
1843, when Emerson had taken over the editorship of *The Dial*, tensions arose between them again—this time, it had to do with him rejecting Fuller's work. In the fall, she had sent him a translation of a French piece, but he was unsure about it and showed it to Henry David Thoreau and Ellery Channing. Emerson then shared the feedback with Fuller: "I set your enemy H[enry] also to read it, he found nothing. That was nothing, you will say. So last week, I gave it to Ellery [Channing], & he decided against it."³⁴ Fuller was crossed: she "scold[ed]" Emerson for this "discourteous act" and told him she was offended that he had put the opinion of "some other person" (that of two men, in fact) above hers. The pain of rejection was worsened by the feeling of having been overstepped: "But if you are going to take any other person's judgment, beside your own, why should you not take mine?" (*Letters* 3: 160). What's more, she disagreed with Emerson's editorial principles: "When I had the care of the Dial, I put in what those connected with me liked, even when it did not well please myself, on this principle that I considered a magazine was meant to suit more than one class of minds" (*Letters* 3: 160). In previous years, Fuller had been clear about her democratic views for the journal: she wanted to allow "all kinds of people have freedom to say their say, for better, for worse" (*Letters* 2: 57). *The Dial*, to her, was a project for the public good: "It is for dear New England that I wanted this review" (*Letters* 2: 131). Now that Emerson was the editor, his was a "different principle" and she did not think it a good one: "you would have every thing in it good according to your taste, which is in my opinion, though admirable as far as it goes, far too narrow in its range" (*Letters* 3: 160). At the end of her letter, Fuller added that she was fine with disagreeing on editorial strategies and was "prepared for consequences, but this setting some other person to read and judge is quite another thing" (*Letters* 3: 161).

In addition to the pain caused by rejection, Fuller also experienced the pain of rejecting. She famously turned down a number of Thoreau's works and, in December 1840, when she sent him back "The Service," she described the experience of having to reject the piece as painful: "The essay is rich in thoughts, and I should be *pained* not to meet it again. But then the thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without *pain*" (*Letters* 3: 185, emphasis orig.). Though Emerson had tried to intervene, stating "that essays not to be compared with this have found their way into the Dial," Fuller was convinced that "those [other essays] are more unassuming in their tone, and have an air of quiet good-breeding which induces us to permit their presence. Yours," i.e. Thoreau's, "is so rugged that it ought to be commanding" (*Letters* 3: 185). The gendered politics of these editorial dynamics reveal the ongoing pressures inherent in the status of editor that Fuller and Dall both occupied. These positions of authority, combined with the prolonged strain of precarity, put both women under enormous strain, which is evident in how frequently they referred to pain in their writings.
4. The Pain of Precarity, Then and Now

The written accounts of Fuller and Dall's experiences as editors reveal the profound struggles they faced while trying to establish themselves as women intellectuals in antebellum America. Their letters and journals, in which they vividly depicted the literal and figurative pain they endured, allow us to gain a better understanding of the precarity (both psychological and physical) they experienced and a better appreciation of the resilience they demonstrated. But resilience is a slippery road, often used, in our current neoliberal systems, to draw our attention away from oppressive and unfair work environments. Indeed, it might be better to ask ourselves: what do we do when pain can't be transcended?

In an article entitled "Editing as Carework: The Gendered Labor of Public Intellectuals," Blackwood, Professor of English at Pace University, suggests that we should keep writing through precarity:

> My editorial and writing work for *Avidly* is entirely unpaid, a whole new exciting development in the history of capitalism that many writers have urged us to resist. ... And yet the solution: demand pay, stop editing and publishing work that you cannot pay for, basically: STOP LANGUAGE-ING seems to me far more desperate and dispiriting. As if attempting to cure a disease by ceasing to feed the body it ravages.³⁵

I think Fuller and Dall would have agreed with Blackwood's call about the importance of continuing to write, because, after all, that is what they did—they continued to make the pain of precarity visible. Fuller, in *Woman*, denounced "bad institutions," which "prevent individuals from forming good character, therefore we must remove them. Agreed, yet keep steadily the higher aim in view. Could you clear away all the bad forms of society, it is vain, unless the individual begin to be ready for better."³⁶ For Dall, the experience of precarity acted as fuel for her feminist activism, leading to the publication of a long list of works on the subject of woman's right to labor. She died in 1912, aged ninety, still an avid writer: in the early twentieth-century, when the loss of sight from her right eye and other health problems would not allow her to write, she continued to correspond and share details about her life by "us[ing] the hand of a friend."³⁷

Writing as a positive, and not a painful, practice, is at the heart of a number of recent publications that center on gender and academia. Writing and the power of inspiring others by sharing our stories is presented as one of the solutions, or at least one of the coping mechanisms, for dealing with the challenges of today's neoliberal academic world. In *Presumed Incompetent*, for instance, Harris and González observe that "Within academic culture with its masculine bent, there is no easy way to articulate or deal with the emotional, the psychic, or the spiritual.³⁸ MacLeod similarly writes that "one of the greatest obstacles to women's full-bodied flourishing within the academy is a
most *insidious* one – the obstacle ‘in-side-us.’”³⁹ (133). González and Harris therefore argue for the importance of finding and/or creating a space for one’s emotions and point out that “many of the authors in this collection ... have developed resources for naming their wounds and healing them, including friendship, alliances, and poetry.”⁴⁰ In short, Fuller’s and Dall’s important testimonies are valuable to us both as scholars and as individuals. Their stories deserve to be told and still have much to teach us.

NOTES

<footnote n="1">¹ See *The Letters of Margaret Fuller*, 6 vols. Robert Hudspeth, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), 2: 195. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically and include volume and page number.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Helen Deese, who has edited three volumes of Dall’s journals, calls it “the longest-running diary of which I am aware.” See Deese, ed., *Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-Century Woman* (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), xix. Subsequent references to this edition are made parenthetically as *Daughter*.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” *Signs* 1:4 (1976), 875.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Sarah Burton and Benjamin Bowman. “The Academic Precariat: Understanding Life and Labour in the Neoliberal Academy,” *British Journal of Sociology of Education* 43: 4 (2022), 499.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Sarah Blackwood, “Editing as Carework: The Gendered Labor of Public Intellectuals,” *Avidly*, 6 June 2014, https://avidly.org/2014/06/06/editing-as-carework-the-gendered-labor-of-public-intellectuals/. Accessed 1 June 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Susan L. Greenberg, *A Poetics of Editing* (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Tobin Siebers, *Disability Theory* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 65.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Darcy Cullen, “Introduction,” *Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 7.</footnote>
<footnote n="9">⁹ Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, eds., "Introduction," *Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America* (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1995), 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Margaret Fuller, *Woman in the Nineteenth Century: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism*, Larry J. Reynolds, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 102.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Caroline Healey Dall, *The College, The Market, and The Court: or, Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law* (Boston: Lee and Shephard, 1867), 29.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Ralph Waldo Emerson, et al. *Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli*, 2 vols. (Boston, Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1852), 2: 323.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Joel Myerson, *The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial* (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 74.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Tiffany K. Wayne, *Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America* (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 78n102.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ See *Selected Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, 1838-1855*, ed. Helen Deese (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2006), 509, 510. Subsequent references to this edition are made parenthetically as *Selected*.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Wayne, 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Garvey, Ellen Gruber, "Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Periodical Editors," *Histoire de Livres* (Paris: Université Paris VII, 2002) 85-86.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Myerson, 50.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Larry Reynolds, "From *Dial* Essay to New York Book: The Making of *Woman in the Nineteenth Century*" *Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America*, Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith, eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 19-20.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Cécile Gagnon and Marie-Anne Casselot, *Existantes: Pour une philosophie féministe incarnée* (Montréal: Les éditions du remue-ménage, 2024), 32, my translation.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Marianne Jackson was Fuller's former student—she attended her Conversations in Boston but also took private classes at her house. Jane Tuckerman Francis was a mutual friend of Fuller and Caroline Sturgis—the daughter of Gustavus Tuckerman of Boston, she was also Fuller's private pupil. See *The Letters of Margaret Fuller*, 6 vols. Robert Hudspeth, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983), 2: 36.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Thomas Constantinesco, *Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 3.</footnote>
<footnote n="25">25 Sara Ahmed, *The Cultural Politics of Emotion*, second edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 31.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 “Moving Towards Equality: The Role of Care Work in the Latin American Labour Market.” *International Labour Organization* (ILO), 7 March 2024, https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/moving-towards-equality-role-care-work-latin-american-labour-market. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 CH NOTE: NOT SURE WHICH OF THE TEXTS IN PRIOR WORKS CITED “MILES” REFERS TO—PROVIDE HERE IN CHICAGO STYLE? (P. 83) Rebecca Miles, “Mum (Ph.D.),” *Being “In and Out”: Providing Voice to Early Career Women in Academia*, Narelle Lemon and Susan Garvis, eds. (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2014), 83.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 See Rachael Johnstone and Bessma Momani, *Glass Ceilings and Ivory Towers: Gender Inequality in the Canadian Academy* (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2024), 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 See *Daughter*, xv.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 Dall, “Scrapbook, undated.” Caroline Wells Healey Dall papers (microfilm), Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. 11 July 2024. Dall’s statement, as Deese specifies, “is likely accurate.” See *Selected*, xxv.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 See Dall, *The College, The Market, and The Court*, 71, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 It was at this period that Emerson was composing his essay on “Friendship,” based largely on his relationship with Fuller. In the same July 8th letter, he asked Fuller to return some of his earlier correspondence: “Do you happen to possess unto this day, — as I have heard you say, you keep letters, — an old one from me dated 12 Oct, 1838” (See *The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson*, 10 vols., ed. Ralph Rusk [New York, Columbia UP, 1939], 2: 314).</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 As indicated by Ralph Rusk, “Emerson and Fuller had had words over the second part of ‘Woodnotes,’ which he had just completed and which he thought was to be published in the July *Dial*. Fuller, however, had already sent the entire manuscript to the printer, so the poem had to wait for the October issue” (see *The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson* 2: 213n1).</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 See *The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson*, 3:222.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 See Blackwood, “Editing as Carework,” Accessed 1 June 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 See Fuller, *Woman in the Nineteenth Century*, 45.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 See Fuller, Edith Davenport: “Unspecified: Fuller, Edith Davenport. Papers concerning Margaret Fuller: Manuscript, Undated.” MS Am 1086, Box 2, 128, Houghton Library, Harvard, Boston, MA. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 See Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., editors, *Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia* (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012), 7.</footnote>
<footnote n="39">³⁹ Rena MacLeod, “Embracing the Power of the Self as a Female Scholar,” *Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir*, A. L. Black and S. Garvis, eds. (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 133.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ See Muhs et al., 7.</footnote>