“her writings and the conduct of her life served as an inspiration to later advocates for women’s rights.”

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, on May 23, 1810. As an adult, she worked as a teacher, and felt the need to give public

lectures. As there were local laws against women giving public addresses, she billed her lectures as “Conversations,” and in 1839, at the age of 29, began offering them at a bookshop in Boston. . For two years in the early 1840s

Fuller was the editor of The Dial, the magazine of the transcendentalists. It was in the pages of The Dial that she published one of her significant early feminist works, “The Great Lawsuit: Man vs. Men, Woman vs. Women.” The title was a reference to individuals and society-imposed gender roles. She

would later rework the essay and expand it into a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In early 1847 Fuller and her friends traveled to Italy, and she settled in Rome. In the spring of 1847 Fuller had met a younger man, a 26-year-old Italian nobleman, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli. They fell in love and

Fuller became pregnant with their child. Throughout 1848, Italy was in the middle of revolution. She took pride in the fact that the revolutionaries in Italy drew inspiration from the American Revolution and what they regarded as the democratic ideals of the United States. In 1849 the rebellion was suppressed, Fuller and Ossoli married and decided to relocate to the United States with

their son. While they were nearing the shore line they were in the middle of a severe storm and the waves were too great, the ship wrecked. Hearing the

news, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau went to the shipwreck site on Long Island in hopes of retrieving Margaret Fuller’s body. The bodies of Fuller and

her husband were never located. In the years after her death, Greeley, Emerson, and others edited collections of Fuller's writings. Literary scholars contend that Nathanial Hawthorne used her as a model for strong women in

his writings.

BIOGRAPHY

Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early

nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism first arose

among the liberal New England Congregationalists, who departed from orthodox Calvinism in

two respects: they believed in the importance and efficacy of human striving, as opposed to

the bleaker Puritan picture of complete and inescapable human depravity; and they

emphasized the unity rather than the “Trinity” of God.

Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos

Bronson Alcott. Stimulated by English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of

Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume, the transcendentalists operated

with the sense that a new era was at hand. They were critics of their contemporary society for

its unthinking conformity, and urged that each individual find, in Emerson's words, “an

original relation to the universe”. By the 1840s Emerson and Thoreau, along with other

transcendentalists, were engaged in the social experiments of Brook Farm, Fruitland’s, and

Walden; and, by the 1850's in an increasingly urgent critique of American slavery.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

In 1850 she was in danger of arrest by the authorities because of their participation in the Italian freedom struggle.

 In 1847, she visited Italy, and during her residence there was secretly and romantically married to the Marquis Ossoli.

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.

INTRESTING FACTS ABOUT MARGRET FULLER

Common themes in Fuller works were mainly about women suffrage and the equality for women.

Also how she felt belittle and betrayed by the so call “man.”

COMMON THEMES

  There are those who separate the eternal lightIn forms of man and woman, day and night;They cannot bear that God be essence quite.

 Existence is as deep a verity:

Without the dual, where is unity?And the ‘I am’ cannot forbear to be;

 But from its primal nature forced to frame

Mysteries, destinies of various name,Is forced to give what it has taught to claim.

 Thus love must answer to its own unrest;The bad commands us to expect the best,And hope of its own prospects is the test.

 And dost thou seek to find the one in two?

Only upon the old can build the new;The symbol which you seek is found in you.

  

The heart and mind, the wisdom and the will,The man and woman, must be severed still,And Christ must reconcile the good and ill.

 There are to whom each symbol is a mask;

The life of love is a mysterious task;They want no answer, for they would not ask.

It may well be an Anti-Slavery party that pleads for Woman, if we consider merely that she does not hold property on equal

terms with men; so that, if a husband dies without making a will, the wife, instead of

taking at once his place as head of the family, inherits only a part of his fortune,

often brought him by herself, as if she were a child, or ward only, not an equal partner.

We will not speak of the innumerable instances in which profligate and idle men

live upon the earnings of industrious wives; or if the wives leave them, and take with them the children, to perform the double

duty of mother and father, follow from place to place, and threaten to rob them of the

children, if deprived of the rights of a husband, as they call them, planting themselves in their poor lodgings,

frightening them into paying tribute by taking from them the children, running into debt at the expense of these otherwise so...

The One in All   WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1845)

PASSAGES OR EXCERPTS FROM MARGRET FULLER