Margaret Fuller

Who Was She?

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in 1810 in Massachusetts. In 1836, Fuller began applying Transcendentalist ideas to women in a number of discussions with her contemporaries, including Lydian Emerson, Sarah Ripley, Lydia Maria Child, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, demonstrating that women could engage with philosophy just as well as men. In 1840, Fuller partnered with Ralph Waldo Emerson to create and edit The Dial, a transcendentalist periodical, before joining the New York Tribune. Five years later, she published her own book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which is considered the first feminist work in American literature. She then travelled to Rome and served as a foreign correspondent for The Tribune during the Italian Unification.