Female Social Reformers: Sarah Margaret Fuller - Assignment Example

The rigorous education was initiated by her father even before she started formal schooling (1819), resulting in her being much superior to her classmates. Mistakenly considered to be arrogant by her peers, she became a loner and a socially awkward person. This changed dramatically after adulthood. Her outlook, intellect, and charm eventually gained the appraisal of such famous personalities as Emerson, Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, James Freeman Clark, Mary Channing, and Theodore Parker (among others) as her friends and associates.

Her Unitarian upbringing and later association with the Transcendentalists, to a large extent, were instrumental for this recognition. Fuller’s life was marked by distinct but related phases. Her career began as a teacher but was troubled by the financial problems after her father’s death when she was just twenty-five. Fuller also had to devote a lot of time in bringing up her younger siblings. She began to write prolifically at this stage in her life. The next stage began after her introduction to Emerson which led to the editorship of the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial.

Fuller later joined the Tribune and eventually was sent to Europe as its foreign correspondent. She found Italy extremely appealing with regard to her open views on feminism and made it her home till 1850. Fuller became actively involved in the Italian Unification Movement. She was attracted to Marchese Giovanni Ossoli, one of its active participants and bore him a child out of wedlock illustrating a strong romantic streak in her personality. The failure of the movement forced the three of them to leave Italy and return to the United States.

Tragically, the whole family (along with many others)was drowned when the ship sank off the coast of Fire Island. Fuller is most widely known and appreciated for her work called the ‘Women in the Eighteenth Century’, which is essentially an expanded compilation of her earlier writings. James Freeman Clark’s statement about her personality clearly illustrates her attitude and intellect and can be considered to be a fitting tribute to this remarkable lady. According to Clark, Fuller "could not merely entertain and inform, but make an epoch in one's life" (Goodwin, 2009).