Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller (b. 1810–d. 1850), an early advocate of women’s rights, a key participant in the Transcendentalist movement, and a pioneering woman journalist, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated rigorously in languages and the classics by her father Timothy Fuller, an attorney, state senator, and four-term US congressman. A precocious learner, Fuller came later to believe that her father had brought her forward too early, damaging her health in the process. Growing up in Cambridge, she befriended James Freeman Clarke, an aspiring Unitarian minister who joined her in the study of German and shared her deep interest in modern German authors. The unexpected death of her father in 1835 stunned Fuller and left her family in a precarious financial situation, upsetting her plans to launch a literary career with a biography of Goethe. With European travel impossible, she focused instead on translation and connected herself with the Transcendentalist movement, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Working with Emerson and other Transcendentalists, Fuller became the editor of the Dial, a fledgling Transcendentalist journal, in 1840. This put her in working contact with aspiring authors and provided a venue for her own work, spurring a remarkable outpouring of essays, reviews, and poems in the early 1840s. These included a forceful defense of Goethe, then under attack in the United States on religious grounds, a group of experimental prose narratives connected with female power and spirituality, and a compelling essay on women’s rights, which she expanded into Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Fuller published the book just as she had become a columnist for the New-York Tribune, a move that awakened her to urban social problems and the importance of mass education and democratic reform. She traveled to Europe in 1846, visiting Great Britain, France, and eventually Italy, where she married Giovanni Ossoli, a supporter of the 1848 nationalist uprising in Rome. Fuller observed and reported on the revolution and supported it actively. When the new republic was put down by French intervention, Fuller returned to America with her husband and son, planning a history of the revolution. But she died with her family in a shipwreck on her return. Her premature death at age forty was an overwhelming loss to American culture and to the emerging women’s movement, only two years after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on Women’s Rights.