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.