Born in 1810, Margaret Fuller Was Labeled a Child Prodigy. She Later Used Her Intellect to Ask Important Questions About Women's Role in America

A portrait of Fuller, inspired by her 1845 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which argued for equality of the sexes. The book s opening illustration featured mystical symbols of harmonizing opposites, including the Ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. Illustration by Gaby D’Alessandro The New England writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are household names today, credited with originating the American ideal Emerson termed “self-reliance.” Less remembered is their friend Margaret Fuller, who was every bit their intellectual equal. Yet of the three, Fuller is the easiest to imagine in contemporary America. Her breakthroughs in journalism, social reform and female self-determination have become part of the fabric of modern life. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1810, Fuller was the first child of an ambitious lawyer-politician who experimented with offering a boy’s college preparatory curriculum to his very bright daughter. She read fluently at age 4, translated Latin at 6, and excelled in oral argument and persuasive writing, earning a reputation as a prodigy. By 15 she was “determined on distinction,” she wrote to a teacher. But how? Although Fuller’s capabilities matched those of highly educated men, she couldn’t attend college or enter a profession. Her close friend James Freeman Clarke wondered in his journal, “Why was she a woman?”

Fuller pondered the question, too. What did it mean to be a woman? Or, as she asked a group of Boston women during one of her famous weekly conversation circles: “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?”

By then she’d joined the group of spiritual reformers known as transcendentalists. The men in the group honored Fuller by making her the first editor of their influential journal, the Dial. Fuller shaped its contents, favoring literature, the arts and matters of the spirit over theological dispute. She introduced her own vision of the exemplary individual in a July 1843 essay titled “The Great Lawsuit: Man Versus Men. Woman Versus Women.”