Margaret Fuller House

This is the location of Margaret’s childhood home, where the Fuller family lived and learned for many years during the 1800s. During the Industrial Revolution it was repurposed as a women’s shelter, a cause Margaret Fuller would have wholeheartedly supported. Today it is a community center and food pantry for the Cambridge community.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was known as the most educated woman in America during her lifetime. She was the first woman to be permitted into the Harvard library and the first woman to be editor and war correspondent for a major newspaper, the New York Tribune. She is known as the first feminist for her books, The Great Lawsuit: Man Versus Woman- Woman Versus Man and Woman In The Nineteenth Century. Ms. Fuller taught at a variety of schools in the Boston area as a young woman, but began her training in education in her childhood home as she taught her younger brothers, who went on to attend Harvard. Timothy Fuller, her father, educated her as if she were to one day attend the all-male Harvard from a very young age. She was able to translate Latin and read German with little to no hesitation from her elementary years, and excelled against her female and male peers in many other classical education skills. Her education did not go to waste, as in her adult years Margaret Fuller hosted “Conversations”, which were lectures and discussions on these topics for prominent Boston women. These Conversations were the places were Ms. Fuller first planted the seeds on feminism in the minds of American women.

Cogan, Frances B. 2010. All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Marshall, Megan. 2014. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. 1. Mariner books ed. Mariner Books. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.