American Feminism Margaret Fuller House 71 Cherry Street

Margaret Fuller was one of the most influential and innovative people of the 19th century. She was the first American to write a book on women's equality, and the first woman to be allowed access to Harvard’s Library. She was the first woman journalist at the New York Tribune and the first full-time book reviewer in journalism. She was the first female foreign war correspondent and first to serve under combat conditions. She was the first female literary critic whose work was important enough to set the literary standards of her time. While her life was tragically cut short, her impact both during her lifetime and today, makes her an undeniably important 19th-century Americans. She was an outspoken advocate of women's rights, education, prison reform, the abolition of slavery, and a model for female leadership and innovative thinking.

Sarah Margaret Fuller, known to all as Margaret, was born on May 23, 1810 in Cambridge. She was the eldest child of Margaret Fuller (nee Crane) a former schoolteacher and the well-known lawyer and future U.S. Congressman Timothy Fuller. Fuller's parents insisted on a rigorous education for all of their children and, as a result, Margaret could read by the age of three. By the time she was seven she knew Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and the Latin historians. As an adult she would be a successful scholar in German, French, Italian, Greek, and Latin and would come to be known in her thirties as the best read person, male or female, in all of New England.

Fuller's formal education continued at Cambridgeport Private Grammar School (known as “The Port School”), the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies, and finally the School for Young Ladies in Groton, Mass. She made her first challenge to the gender roles of mid-19th century society when she was granted access to the previously male-only library at Harvard in order to pursue her academic studies.

As a young woman, Fuller made a living writing minor contributions to various periodicals and literary reviews. After the sudden death of her father, she realized the need to take up a more permanent position to financially assist her widowed mother and younger siblings. Fuller accepted a position at the Temple School in Boston, an experimental, progressive school run by Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott) which lasted only a year. From Boston she moved to Providence, Rhode Island to teach at the Green Street School. Here she met and began to interact with the developing Transcendentalist club.

Teaching fell by the wayside and was replaced with in-depth meetings and discussions with the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Bronson Alcott. Fuller moved back with her family in Massachusetts, but continued her involvement with the Transcendentalist movement. In her family home, Fuller began to host meetings of prominent Boston women, including educators, authors, the wives of politicians, and future leaders of the women’s rights movement, in what she called “Conversations.” Together, the women discussed fine arts, history, mythology, literature, nature and also addressed the major concerns of their society on subjects such as politics, morality, philosophy, and theories of social justice—topics previously excluded from women's contemplations.

For five years Fuller continued these Conversations, for a time she did so while serving as the editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial first published in 1840 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Appointed by Emerson, Fuller served as The Dial's editor for the first two years of publication, followed by Emerson himself in 1842. In 1843 she used The Dial as a platform from which to publish her essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women” in which she called for women's equality. When The Dial ceased publication in 1844, Fuller took a trip West which resulted in her publishing the book Summer on the Lakes. The success of this book led to two important developments in her life. First, Horace Greeley had enjoyed her writing and asked her to join his New York Tribune as a book editor. She accepted, moved to New York, and became so successful she soon wrote art and cultural reviews as well. The second opportunity was to publish her second and most famous work. Women in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845, was the continuation of her earlier essay in The Dial, is considered the first major feminist work in the United States, and remains a classic text of feminist thought.

With her success at the New York Tribune Fuller became a foreign correspondent in 1846, toured England and France, and settled in Rome the following year. In Rome, she became entrenched in the revolutionary Italian Unification Movement after meeting the cause's leader Guiseppe Mazzini. She fell in love with the revolutionary Giovanni Angelo, Marches d’Ossoli, with whom she had a son in 1848 and married in 1849. While Fuller was in Rome a Proclamation of the Roman Republic was made which led to battle with the French in April 1849. Fuller's husband was mobilized to defend Rome and Margaret worked in the hospital during the siege. By July, the nascent Republic was overthrown and Margaret, her husband, and her son fled to Florence. From here she sought to return to writing and draft a history of the Roman revolution, but, under police surveillance, struggled to have her work published. Her family decided to move to the United States, and they set sail for New York City on May 17, 1850 on board the ship Elizabeth. The well-known family had chose a smaller sailing ship over a faster steamship to avoid attention on their journey.

The Elizabeth, carrying five passengers and fourteen crew, was doomed to a tragic fate. After only a week at sea the Captain died of smallpox. The ship anchored off of Gibraltar and was quarantined. After a week of no further signs of the disease, they again set sail for New York. Two days back out to sea, Fuller's son came down with the disease. After more than a week of caring for him, his parents were overjoyed to be approaching the coast of America on July 18th. That night they all went to bed expecting to reach land in the morning, but, amidst a storm, the inexperienced captain ran aground on a sandbar at 3:30 A.M.

Stuck on the bar and being pummeled by waves, a crewman decided to swim the 200 yards to shore to seek help. The crewman reached shore, but the men there were unable to launch a boat during the storm to try and reach the wreck. By 3 P.M. that afternoon the wreck was breaking into pieces. Passengers and crew were thrown into the sea, and in total eight people were drowned. Among the dead were 40-year old Margaret Fuller, 31-year old Ossoli , and their two-year old son Angelo. The boy's body was later found, but Margaret and Ossoli’s bodies and the draft of her last book were never recovered from the wreck. Local lore has it that a boatman discovered two unidentifiable bodies near where the wreck occurred. One was said to be a woman and the other had gold fillings. Margaret was the only woman who died and her husband the only man wealthy enough to have gold fillings. Everyone knew Fuller's friend Horace Greeley had been searching for the bodies, but when he met with the boatman he thought it had been too long for any bodies to have been recovered and that the story could not possibly be true.

Today, Margaret Fuller is remembered as a seminal figure in the feminist movement and brilliant thinker and writer. A memorial to her stands in Cambridge's Mount Auburn Cemetery. A plaque at the site, on Pyrola Path, reads: “"By birth a child of New England; by adoption a citizen of Rome; by genius belonging to the world. In youth an insatiable student seeking the highest culture; in riper years teacher, writer, critic of literature and art; in maturer age companion and helper of many earnest reformers in America and Europe."

For further reading:
Dickenson, Donna. Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman’s Life.
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Von Mehren, Joan. Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller.