A more glorious revolution: Women's antebellum reading circles and the pursuit of public influence

N the summer of 1839, Margaret Fuller initiated what has long been heralded as a brilliant experiment, her Conversations. Fuller introduced her project, designed to engage enrollees in a discussion of some of the day's most pressing issues, with two provocative questions: "What were we born to do? How shall we do it?" Such were the foundational questions upon which members were expected to establish the Conversations' objective-"building up the life of thought upon the life of action"-an enterprise with no little significance for women's relation to public life. The degree to which gender shaped an individual's "life of thought" was manifest almost immediately. At one of the early meetings, Fuller suggested that participants compare the circumstances in which men and women acquired learning. Men, she insisted, were "called on from a very early period to reproduce all that they learn-First their college exercises-their political duties-the exercises of professional