A Soapbox of Her Own : FANNY FERN; An Independent Woman, <i> By Joyce W. Warren (Rutgers University Press: $29.95; 362 pp.)</i>

Chances are, you’ve never heard of Fanny Fern, although she was among the most celebrated American women of her time.

Born in 1811, she was the nation’s first female newspaper columnist, its most highly-paid journalist and a best-selling author. Nathaniel Hawthorne praised her novel, “Ruth Hall,” much as he deplored the “damned mob of scribbling women” who wrote like “emasculated men,” except with “greater feebleness and folly.” Fern was different, she “writes like the devil was in her.”

History has been less discerning than Hawthorne, consigning Fern to oblivion along with her sentimentalist contemporaries. Joyce W. Warren’s fine biography resurrects this fascinating figure and explains her obscurity as an outcome of society’s resistance “to the aggressive assertions of the female voice.”

Fern’s voice is remarkable; wise, pungent and astoundingly contemporary. She originated the saying, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” which typifies the pith, wit and accuracy of her pronouncements, many of them less ladylike.

In the course of her 21-year career as a weekly columnist, Fern wrote about prostitution, venereal disease, prison reform, birth control and divorce. Though her opinions were unpopular, her column for the New York Ledger boosted the paper’s circulation. She was sought after by several publications distributed nationally, and even by English publishers.

By 1856, Fern was a “celebrity journalist.” Strangers pointed her out in the streets, sent fan mail and gossiped about her. She encouraged the progressive and the shocking, supporting children’s rights and the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose “Leaves of Grass” she lauded in print. Happily married to a man 11 years her junior, she moved in a social circle that included Harriett Beecher Stowe and Horace Greeley.

Despite her success, Fern never forgot that she’d been despised, powerless and threatened with the loss of her daughters.

Fanny Fern began life as Sarah Payson Willis, one of nine children of a newspaper editor and strict Calvinist who kept his spunky daughter in school for 20 years, in order, she later wrote, “to curb her imagination, demolish her airy castles . . . convert her into a plain, sober, matter of fact damsel.” It didn’t work.

Sarah spent the next 20 years “bread-making and button-hole-stitching,” first for her father and brothers, later for her beloved husband and their two children. When he died, leaving the family penniless, she was forced to remarry to avoid starvation. The marriage was a disaster and ended when Sarah left her second husband, which simply wasn’t done at the time. He retaliated by slandering her.

This scandal won her the enmity of her male relatives--an economic catastrophe in an age when women had no independent property. Her father, a man so thrifty he had removed and sold his dead wife’s false teeth, refused to give his unruly daughter a penny. Her brother, an editor, heartlessly declined his impoverished sister’s request for an assignment, suggesting that she lacked sufficient talent.

Fortunately, his was a minority opinion. Other editors encouraged Sarah, buying as much as she could write. Partly because of her personal notoriety, she began using the nom de plume Fanny Fern. Within a few years she was successful enough to support herself and her daughters, and to be alliteratively aped by other columnists, including a man who called himself Harry Honeysuckle.

Fern’s own descent into poverty convinced her that women should be economically independent, a radical idea for 19th-Century America. In that capitalist society, it was generally admitted that a man’s wealth affected his worth. Women, however, were outside the money economy, reflections of the status of their male protectors and intrinsically valuable for their womanly virtues.

A woman wasn’t supposed to be economically capable, Fern observed: “No matter how isolated or destitute her condition, the majority would consider it more “feminine” would she unobtrusively gather up her thimble and, retiring into some out-of-the-way place, gradually scoop out her coffin with it, than to develop that smart turn for business which would lift her at once out of her troubles, and which, in a man so situated, would be applauded as exceedingly praiseworthy.”

Fern’s life taught her that without money of their own, women lacked self-determination, and she believed they deserved no less. This theme underlies all of her work:

“Why a woman has not a right to love and hate persons and things as well and as strongly as a man; and why she has not a right, like him, to resent a manifest injustice, and why her individualism in matters of opinion and everything else should not be respected equally with his, I have yet to learn.”

Fanny Fern is a dazzler, a character suitable for the young Katharine Hepburn to have played. Feisty and charming, she successfully combined motherhood and career before electricity. An unforgettable inspiration to us all.