{"id":169730,"date":"2020-10-26T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=169730"},"modified":"2020-10-01T08:14:49","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T07:14:49","slug":"the-body-politic-electric-walt-whitman-on-womens-centrality-to-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/10\/the-body-politic-electric-walt-whitman-on-womens-centrality-to-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Body Politic Electric: Walt Whitman on Women\u2019s Centrality to Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cHave I not said that womanhood involves all? Have I not told how the universe has nothing better than the best womanhood?\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI can conceive of no better service,\u201d Walt Whitman<\/strong> (May 31, 1819\u2013March 26, 1892) wrote in contemplating the mightiest force of resistance<\/a> in times far more troubled than ours, \u201cthan boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.\u201d To Whitman, who declared himself \u201cthe poet of the woman the same as the man,\u201d<\/a> the gravest weakness of democracy was the artificial, culturally manufactured inequality of the genders, which he recognized not only as a corruption of democracy but as a corruption of nature. Equality for him, be it of the genders or the races, was never a matter of politics \u2014 that plaything of the human animal \u2014 but a matter of naturalness. Because he saw how thickly interleaved our individual dignities are, how interdependent our flourishing \u2014 saw that \u201cevery atom belonging to me as good belongs to you\u201d<\/a> \u2014 he took it upon himself, a century and a half before his society did, to save democracy from politics, standing up for the rightful balance of dignity and power. Anne Gilchrist \u2014 the unheralded genius<\/a> whom Whitman admired as \u201ca sort of human miracle\u201d belonging \u201cto the times yet to come\u201d \u2014 spoke for the epochs when she asked: \u201cWho but he could put at last the right meaning into that word \u2018democracy,\u2019 which has been made to bear such a burthen of incongruous notions?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

poetryfoundation<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Whitman threw himself at righting \u2014 naturalizing \u2014 the gender imbalance of democracy not despite his maleness but precisely because of it. At the heart of his devotion to equality was an astute insight into the paradox of power: the understanding that no socially and politically marginalized group \u2014 not even a biological majority \u2014 moves to the center solely by its own efforts; it takes a gravitational pull by those kindred to the cause who are already in relative positions of power or privilege. It was a countercultural understanding in his time, and remains a countercultural understanding in ours, its negation ahistorical: Citizens helped us immigrants obtain legal rights and protections; white women like astronomer Maria Mitchell<\/a> and literary titan Margaret Fuller<\/a> were on the ideological front-lines of abolition, some even on the literal front-lines of the Civil War<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Long before the term feminism<\/em> wove itself into the modern lexicon, America\u2019s most celebrated poet (though perhaps the second-greatest<\/a>) became an outspoken feminist. In his 1888 poem \u201cAmerica\u201d \u2014 a reading of which is the only surviving recording of his voice<\/a> \u2014 Whitman eulogized his homeland as a \u201ccentre of equal daughters, equal sons.\u201d He added this poem to his continually revised and expanded Leaves of Grass<\/em><\/a> in the final years of his life, but coursing through it was the pulse-beat of a longtime conviction: As a young man, Whitman was greatly influenced by Margaret Fuller \u2014 one of the central figures Figuring<\/em><\/a> \u2014 whose epoch-making book Woman in the Nineteenth Century<\/em><\/a> catalyzed American women\u2019s emancipation movement. Clippings of Fuller\u2019s columns for the New-York Tribune<\/em>, where she became the first female editor of a major American newspaper and America\u2019s first foreign war correspondent, were found among Whitman\u2019s papers after his death.<\/p>\n

Nearly two decades after Fuller radicalized society, but long before her legacy helped women win the right to vote, Whitman composed a remarkably prescient essay on the obstacles to democracy<\/a>, included in the indispensable Library of America volume Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (free ebook<\/em><\/a> | public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

Insisting that no democratic society could exist in which women are not afforded the same rights as men, he wrote:<\/p>\n

I have sometimes thought\u2026 that the sole avenue and means of a reconstructed sociology depended, primarily, on a new birth, elevation, expansion, invigoration of woman\u2026 Great, great, indeed, far greater than they know, is the sphere of women.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn \u2014 they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A century before Adrienne Rich argued for literature as a force of women\u2019s empowerment<\/a> and a form of resistance to male capitalist society, Whitman called for the creation of a new American literature that would be as much an original art form as a tool of social change. Among \u201cthe most precious of its results,\u201d Whitman envisioned, would be \u201cachieving the entire redemption of woman\u2026 and thus insuring to the States a strong and sweet Female Race.\u201d Art, he resolutely believed, was the ultimate catalyst for social transformation and betterment:<\/p>\n

The literature, songs, esthetics, &c., of a country are of importance principally because they furnish the materials and suggestions of personality for the women and men of that country, and enforce them in a thousand effective ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whitman\u2019s first serious biographer, the great nature writer John Burroughs, notes in his exquisitely beautiful and loving<\/a> portrait of the poet, Whitman: A Study<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a> | free ebook<\/em><\/a>), that Whitman always heralded woman as man\u2019s equal and never his plaything, property, or unpaid domestic servant, always as capable of embodying the qualities Whitman most celebrated in human nature. Burroughs wrote:<\/p>\n

I sometimes meet women whom I say are of the Whitman type \u2014 the kind of woman he invoked and predicted\u2026 They are cheerful, tolerant, friendly, think no evil, meet high and low on equal terms; they walk, row, climb mountains; they reach forth into the actual world of questions and events, open-minded, sympathetic, frank, natural, good-natured\u2026 in short, the large, fresh, wholesome open-air natures whose ideal so completely possessed Walt Whitman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Burroughs placed the equality of men and women as the crowning achievement of a more Whitmanesque society \u2014 the more democratic society of the future:<\/p>\n

The more democratic we become, the more we are prepared for Whitman; the more tolerant, fraternal, sympathetic we become, the more we are ready for Whitman; the more we inure ourselves to the open air and to real things, the more we value and understand our own bodies, the more the woman becomes the mate and equal of the man, the more social equality prevails, \u2014 the sooner will come to Whitman fullness and fruition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Whitman himself had written in Leaves of Grass<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The race is never separated \u2014 nor man nor woman
\nescapes;
\nAll is inextricable \u2014 things, spirits, nature, nations,
\nyou too \u2014 from precedents you come.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

The creation is womanhood;
\nHave I not said that womanhood involves all?
\nHave I not told how the universe has nothing better
\nthan the best womanhood?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Lia Halloran for The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a>. Available as a print<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Complement with Nikola Tesla\u2019s feminist vision for humanity<\/a>, then revisit Whitman on optimism as a mighty force of resistance<\/a>, what it takes to be an agent of change<\/a>, how to keep criticism from sinking your soul<\/a>, and what makes life worth living<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired UK and<\/em> The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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