Margaret Fuller

A noted journalist, critic, and women’s right’s activist, Margaret Fuller began her career in 1836 as a teacher at Bronson Alcott’s vanguard Temple School in Boston, where she taught language classes for women and served as Alcott’s assistant. As a result of her friendship with poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, she began attending meetings of the Transcendentalist circle in 1838 and served as editor of their journal, The Dial, for nearly three years, writing much of the content herself, including her groundbreaking essay, “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men and Woman vs. Women,” for the July 1843 issue. She became the first female journalist to hold a staff position on a major newspaper when she joined Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune as a literary critic in 1844. She organized a series of seminar discussions for women in the mid-1840s and incorporated many of the issues raised at these “Conversations” into her major work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a manifesto for the women’s rights movement. After her death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, her brother collected and published her writings as At Home and Abroad (1856) and Life Without and Life Within (1858).