July 1840: The first issue of Margaret Fuller’s Transcendentalist journal, The Dial, is published.

You are there: Margaret Fuller is born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts in 1810 to a Harvard College father determined to see that her education rivals that of her male cohorts. By six she is reading Latin and then comes a full dose of classical literature, languages, history, philosophy and the arts.

But the times limit her career choices, and she teaches school, and is working on the family farm in 1835 when her father dies of cholera. The following year, fate has it that her translation of Goethe’s play, Torquato Tasso, reaches Ralph Waldo Emerson, and brings her into his Boston circle of influential Transcendentalists.

In 1839 Emerson asks her to become editor of The Dial, a house organ that she oversees through eight issues during the next two years, before resigning in response to never being paid!

In need of money and a new career, Fuller arrives at what she calls Conversations, thirteen week lecture series featuring her in a theatrical-like spotlight. She orchestrates her topics with an eye to her enduring theme of gender equality. With female audiences, she encourages them to speak up with confidence. With men she challenges the stereotypes, noting “They do not see where we got our knowledge…and tramp on in their clumsy way…while we fly and dart hither and thither.”

In 1844 the famous editor of The New York Tribune and political king-maker, Horace Greeley, hires Fuller as a reporter, perhaps the first female to hold that position in a major newspaper. During her two years there she writes her 258 page book, Women in the Nineteenth Century, which Greeley publishes. It covers the role of women in society and in marriage, and is applauded by contemporaries including Thoreau, Bryant and even Edgar Allan Poe. She then broadens her scope, with muckraking-like articles on insane asylums, prisons, and the fate of Blacks and Native Americans whose enslavement she suggests in some ways runs parallel to females.

In 1846 she is drawn to Europe where, as she says, “the cauldron simmers” between traditional monarchs and the people seeking freedom and political power. Once in Rome, she strikes up a romance with a decade younger Giovanni Ossoli, and gives birth to a son. Her reporting turns to coverage of the local war, before the couple is forced to leave under duress.

They board a cargo ship bound for the States in 1850 and makes it all the way to Fire Island, New York before it breaks up in a storm. While her son’s body eventually washes ashore, the remains of Margaret Fuller and Giovanni are never found. She is 40 years old at the time of her death.