Margaret Fuller

Sarah Margaret Fuller, sometimes called Margaret Fuller Ossoli, was born on May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. She became an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and advocate for women’s rights, closely associated with the American transcendentalism movement. In a time when women were largely shut out of higher education and public intellectual life, Fuller forced open space for herself through reading, teaching, writing, and argument.

Her education began at home under her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer and congressman. He taught her to read and write when she was three and a half, gave her a course of study as rigorous as any boy’s, and introduced Latin early. She later translated passages from Virgil, studied classics, trained herself in modern languages, and read world literature. Fuller later connected her father’s exacting standards with childhood nightmares and sleepwalking, but that same demanding education helped shape her unusual confidence and range.

Fuller became known as an avid reader and as a translator of German literature, helping bring German Romanticism to the United States. By her 30s, she had a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. She taught, gave private lessons, and in 1839 began her “Conversations” series, classes for women designed to make up for their lack of access to higher education.

Her public writing career gathered force in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1840 she became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial. In 1844 she joined Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, where she became the first full-time female book reviewer in American journalism. Her best-known book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, appeared in 1845 and is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. A year later, the Tribune sent her to Europe as its first female correspondent, and she became the first American female war correspondent.

In Europe, Fuller became involved with the revolutions in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. She also had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. In 1850, Fuller, Ossoli, and their child died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, while traveling to the United States. Fuller’s body was never recovered. After her death, editors preparing her letters for publication censored or altered much of her work, believing her fame would be brief.

Fuller argued for women’s education and the right to employment, and she also supported prison reform and the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States. Not all of her contemporaries approved of her, and Harriet Martineau dismissed her as a talker rather than an activist. Yet later women’s rights advocates, including Susan B. Anthony, cited Fuller as a source of inspiration. Her words remain alive because they came from a mind trained to question limits, especially the limits placed on women’s learning, work, and public voice.