Margaret Fuller 1810 – 1850

Margaret Fuller was a 19th-century American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate, the first major figure of American feminist political thought and a central figure of the Transcendentalist movement. She edited The Dial, the principal Transcendentalist journal, from 1840 to 1842, and served as the literary critic of the New-York Tribune from 1844, becoming the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism. Her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is the foundational text of American feminism and one of the major intellectual achievements of antebellum America. She traveled to Europe as the Tribune's foreign correspondent, became involved in the Roman revolution of 1848-1849, and died with her husband and infant son in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850 while returning to the United States. Her influence on American intellectual life shaped Emerson, Thoreau, and a long line of subsequent feminist writers.

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was the most original American Transcendentalist philosopher after Emerson and the most consequential single figure of nineteenth-century American philosophical feminism. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was given an unusually rigorous classical education by her father, served as the editor of The Dial — the Transcendentalist journal — from 1840 to 1842, and was the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism.

Fuller's most important philosophical work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), develops the Transcendentalist account of self-cultivation into a sustained argument for women's equality. Drawing on Mary Wollstonecraft and on the broader European philosophical inheritance, Fuller argues that the cultivated self-development the Transcendentalists prize is impossible for women under existing social arrangements; the political and educational reforms required to make it possible follow.

Fuller's series of Conversations for Women in Boston (1839–1844) — philosophical seminars she led for educated women — was the institutional prototype for women's higher education in America. She traveled to Europe in 1846 as the foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, met Mazzini, supported the Roman Republic in the Revolutions of 1848, and married the Italian revolutionary Giovanni Ossoli. She drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island in 1850 returning to America, a loss that Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist circle never fully recovered from.