Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), American social reformer and author, who espoused transcendentalism and fought for equal rights for women.

Fuller was born on May 23, 1810, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and educated chiefly by her father, the American lawyer and legislator Timothy Fuller. At an early age she displayed remarkable intellectual powers, becoming, while a young woman, a member of the group of distinguished writers and philosophers who met frequently in the Boston area and who espoused the doctrines of transcendentalism. From 1835 to 1837 she taught languages in Boston, and in the latter year she became principal teacher at the Green Street School, Providence, Rhode Island, where she served for two years. In 1839 her translation of Conversations with Goethe by the German writer Johann Peter Eckermann was published. In the following year she founded, with the aid of the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the critic and reformer George Ripley, The Dial, a periodical dedicated to publishing the verse and philosophical writings of the transcendentalists.

For about five years beginning in 1839, Fuller organized gatherings of women in Boston for the intellectual and social development of the participants. These meetings provided her with much of the material used in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), in which she expounded the doctrine of equal rights for women. From 1844 to 1846 she was literary critic for the New York Tribune and gained recognition as one of the foremost critics in the United States.

In 1846 Fuller travelled to Europe, where she dispatched letters to the Tribune describing her experiences. While visiting Rome, in 1847, she met and married Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a follower of the nationalist revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. Fuller remained in Rome after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848, and when the city was besieged by French forces in 1849, she assumed the direction of one of its hospitals while her husband took part in the fighting. They escaped when the city fell and in 1850, with their infant son, embarked for the United States. Their ship was wrecked off Fire Island, New York, on July 19, and all three were drowned.