Women's rights => war reporting, education, transcendental philosophy.

Margaret Fuller was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement

Sarah Margaret Fuller (sometimes referred to as Margaret Fuller Ossoli,) was born on May 23, 1810 in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Her early education was by her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer who died in 1835 due to cholera

She later had more formal schooling, including at the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies, 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.

In October 1839, Ralph Waldo Emerson was seeking an editor for his transcendentalist journal The Dial. He offered it to Fuller, referring to her as my vivacious friend, and so Fuller became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840.

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.

Fuller left The Dial in 1844 (disappointed by the low subscription numbers) and joined the staff of the New-York Tribune under Horace Greeley

She arranged Conversations , group sessions for women, held in Elizabeth Peabody’s Boston bookstore (1839–1844) which form the basis for Fuller’s feminist manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). This argues for gender equality and the balance of masculine and feminine traits within all individuals is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.

Later in life, Margaret blamed her father’s exacting love and his valuation of accuracy and precision for her childhood nightmares and sleepwalking.

In 1846 she was sent to Europe for the Tribune as its first female correspondent. She was the first American female war correspondent and full-time book reviewer in journalism.

While in Europe, she became involved with the revolutions in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini, a major leader of the Italian revolutionary movement. In Italy citizens where shot and killed for reading Mazzini’s journals.

She had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child.

Sarah Fuller died at the age of just 40 on July 19, 1850 in an accident. Ossoli, her child and herself drowned in a shipwreck less than 100 yards off Fire Island, NY as they were traveling from Europe to the United States by ship. Fuller’s body was never recovered. Fuller’s manuscript on the rise and fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, which she described as what is most valuable to me if I live of any thing, was lost because of the shipwreck.