Sarah
Margaret Fuller was a journalist, critic and women's rights activist.
Fuller was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The house in which
she was born is still standing and now occupied by an active community
outreach program.) Her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer, gave her
a vigorous classical education which was testing enough to have
a lasting effect on her health. In 1836 she taught at the Temple
School in Boston and from 1837 to 1839 taught in Providence, Rhode
Island.
Fuller
became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and was subsequently associated
with transcendentalism. She edited the transcendentalist journal,
The Dial for the first two years of its existence from 1840 to
1842. When she joined Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as literary
critic in 1844, she became the first female journalist to work
on the staff of a major newspaper.
In
the mid-1840s she organized discussion groups of women in which
a variety of subjects, such as art, education and women's rights,
were debated. A number of significant figures in the women's rights
movement attended these "conversations". Ideas brought
up in these discussions were developed in Fuller's major work,
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which argues for the independence
of women.
She
was sent to Europe by the New York Tribune as a foreign correspondent,
and there interviewed many prominent writers including George
Sand and Thomas Carlyle—whom she found disappointing, due
to his reactionary politics amongst other things. In Italy she
met the Italian revolutionary Giovanni Ossoli, marrying in 1847;
she later had a son by him. The couple supported Giuseppe Mazzini's
revolution for the establishment of a Roman Republic in 1849 -
he fought in the struggle while she volunteered to work in a supporting
hospital.
Fuller,
her husband, and her son all died when a boat transporting them
back to America from Italy sank off Fire Island, New York. Henry
David Thoreau traveled to New York in an effort to recover her
body and writings, but neither were found. Among the articles
lost was Fuller's manuscript on the history of the Roman Republic.
Many of her writings were collected together by her brother Arthur
as At Home and Abroad (1856) and Life Without and Life Within
(1858). Her memorial is in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fuller
is said to have been the model for Zenobia, the heroine of Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852).
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