Margaret Fuller was unusual among American travelers in the late 1840s in her decision to remain in Rome throughout the revolutionary period of 1847–9, in the depth of her personal and political immersion in Rome, and in her ability, honed in her U.S. writings, to function as a transnational public intellectual, as Charles Capper has argued, whose dialectical and cosmopolitan approach to culture and politics shaped her dispatches to the New-York Tribune. Her equally dialectical work as a gender theorist in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), to return to Christina Zwarg's point, led Fuller to understand the power of cultural binaries and to develop strategies for deconstructing such mutually constitutive ideological categories as male/female or United States/Italy. In his reading of Fuller's intellectual and psychological development, Jeffrey Steele connects her gender analysis with her ability to theorize the reclaiming of political power. Noting Fuller's use of the language of idolatry in her discussion of the ways in which “indoctrination within an ideology of white male supremacy” led women to inhabit “idolatrous relationships” with fathers, husbands, and other male figures, Steele defines this idolatry as the incorporation of images of patriarchal power (“male idols”) within female psyches, an incorporation which leads to passivity, abjection, and melancholy.