Fuller: "Our City Charities"

         For this week's blog, I have chosen to analyze "Our City Charities" by Margaret Fuller, simply because I admire her poised writing style.  Fuller's writing reminded me of a modern day female activist.  Her descriptions and propositions for change really intrigued me and I also believe she is a true female role model; Fuller set a precedent for women activists and authors to come.  
        Even though there is a stigma held against people who are incarcerated, Fuller breaks that stigma and explains that those people have needs just like everyone else.  This was an abstract idea at the time because equal education was not yet a proposed idea.  Fuller states: 

Every establishment in aid of the poor should be planned with a view to their education.  There should be instruction, both practical and in the use of books, opening to a better intercourse than they can obtain from their miserable homes, correct notions as to cleanliness, diet, and fresh air(738).

Fuller had the idea to educate those who have not received education to better themselves.  If this idea was still present now, I strongly believe we would have less crimes.  By educating someone who is incarcerated or poor, we are giving them an opportunity to better themselves that they might have never received before.  By doing this, they can learn tasks and possibly enter themselves into the working world.  Fuller was very adamant about the living conditions at the Penitentiary: 

...we entered one of the gloomiest scenes that deforms this great metropolis.  Here are the twelve hundred, who receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest.  And under what circumstances! Never was punishment treated more simply as a social convenience, without regard to pure right, or a hope of reformation(740-741).

    As one can tell, Fuller is extremely passionate about her reports at the Bellevue Alms, the Farm School, and the Asylum for the Insane.  She reports on these places with a tone of hope for the future, as she recommends what she thinks is best for the places with her suggestions about education and cleanliness.  I not only find Fuller brave for her visiting these places, which were stigmatized, but also quite poised in her descriptions and suggestions of these places.