Fuller, Margaret (1810-1850), was an American journalist and reformer. She became a leader of a philosophical movement called transcendentalism (see Transcendentalism).
Sarah Margaret Fuller was born on May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, near Boston. She began her journalistic career by serving from 1840 to 1842 as editor in chief of the transcendentalist magazine The Dial. Under her guidance, The Dial became one of the most important periodicals in American literary history. From 1844 to 1846, she wrote literary criticism for the New York Tribune. Her book Papers on Literature and Art (1846) grew out of her contributions to the Tribune.
As a reformer, Fuller campaigned for women’s rights. Her most important book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), explores the political, economic, social, and intellectual status of women. She was far ahead of her time in her criticism of discrimination against women because of their sex.
Fuller went to Europe in 1846. In 1848, she gave birth to a child and claimed that she had secretly married the Marchese Angelo Ossoli, a follower of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. The couple participated in the Italian revolution of 1848 and 1849. During a voyage to the United States, they and their son drowned on July 19, 1850, when their ship sank.
