COUNCIL 2010

90 YEARS MAKING DIFFERENCE

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Winslow Academic Center, Lasell College, Newton, MA

 

Margaret Fuller Biography and Accomplishments

Author, editor, journalist, literary critic, educator, Transcendentalist, and women’s rights advocate....

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first child of Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane Fuller. She was named after her paternal grandmother and her mother; however, by the age of nine,  she dropped "Sarah" and insisted on being called "Margaret." The Margaret Fuller House, in which she was born, is still standing. Her father taught Fuller to read and write at the age of three and a half, shortly after the couple's second daughter, Julia Adelaide, had died at the age of fourteen months. He offered her an education as rigorous as any boy's at the time and forbade her from reading the typical feminine fare such as etiquette books and sentimental novels. He incorporated Latin into his teaching shortly after the birth of the couple's son, Eugene, in May 1815, and soon she was translating simple passages from Virgil.

During the day, young Margaret spent time with her mother, who taught her household chores and sewing. In 1817, her brother William Henry Fuller was born and her father was elected as a representative in the United States Congress. For the next eight years, he would spend four to six months of the year in Washington, D.C. At the age of 10, Fuller wrote a cryptic note which her father saved: "On the 23rd of May, 1810, was born one foredoomed to sorrow and pain, and like others to have misfortunes."

Today we consider Margaret Fuller one of the guiding lights of the first-wave of feminism. She helped educate the women of her day by leading a series of Conversations in which women were empowered to read, think and discuss important issues of the day. She empowered generations to follow through her ground-breaking writings, especially her landmark book Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Among her accomplishments

• First American to write a book about equality for women

• First woman foreign correspondent and war correspondent to serve under combat conditions

• First woman journalist on Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune

• First editor of The Dial, foremost Transcendentalist journal, appointed by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• First woman literary critic who also set literary standards

• First woman to enter Harvard Library to pursue research

Refererences--

http://www.margaretfuller.org

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