Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller

Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate. She was the first American female war correspondent, writing for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. She had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, as they were traveling to the U.S. in 1850. Fuller’s body was never recovered.

About Margaret Fuller in brief

Summary Margaret FullerSarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate. She was the first American female war correspondent, writing for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. She had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, as they were traveling to the U.S. in 1850. Fuller was an advocate of women’s rights and, in particular, women’s education and the right to employment. She revolted against Boston-Cambridge’s learned professions because she was barred from entering as a girl. She also encouraged many other reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves. Many other advocates for women’srights and feminism, including Susan B. Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration. Many of her contemporaries, however, were not supportive, including her former friend Harriet Martineau, who said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist. Fuller’s body was never recovered. She is buried in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in the Margaret Fuller House, in which she was born, is still standing. Her father taught her to read and write at the age of three and a half, shortly after the couple’s second daughter, Julia Adelaide, died at 14 months old.

At age ten, Fuller wrote a cryptic note which her father saved for her and others to have mis misfortunes at age 23 May 1810. In 1822, she was sent to the Young Ladies School for Young Ladies in Groton, Massachusetts. On June 17, 1825, Fuller attended the ceremony at the Marquis de Lafayette, which laid the cornerstone for the American Revolutionary hero John Quincy Adams. While she was there, Timothy Fuller did not run for re-election, though she resisted the idea at first. She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher before, in 1839, she began overseeing her Conversations series: classes for women meant to compensate for their lack of access to higher education. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. She soon became involved with the revolutions in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. A year later, she became sent to Europe for the Tribune as its first female correspondent. She was named after her paternal grandmother and her mother, but by age nine she dropped ‘Sarah’ and insisted on being called ‘Margaret’ She was married to Italian-born Italian-American Giovanni Ossolio in 1845. She died in 1850, and her remains were found in New York City, along with her husband and their son Eugene, who had been born in 1815.