With writing that burned brightly with passionate knowledge, transcendentalist Sarah Margaret Fuller Osoli (1810–1850) was born on this day in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts and was a pioneering advocate for women's rights.

"Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow," she observed wisely.

A teacher who held conversations with such New England intellectuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott, Fuller was also a foreign correspondent and founding editor of The Dial (1840–1842), perhaps America's first independent journal of literature, religion, and philosophy.

Her poetry, reviews, and criticisms caught the eye of publisher Horace Greeley, who hired her as a critic for the New York Tribune. He once said she was “the most remarkable, and in some respects, the greatest woman America has yet known.”

"I accept the universe!" she declared. Writer Susan Cheever described the bold Fuller as “a Dorothy Parker woman in a Jane Austen world.”

Fuller’s groundbreaking book, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845), looked at world history from a woman's point of view and influenced feminist leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

"Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism," Fuller believed. "There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman."

A total firebrand with intellect and soul to spare, Margaret Fuller didn’t just spark conversations—she ignited movements. The way she challenged gender norms, shaped transcendental thought, and carved space in journalism was decades ahead of her time. She lived out her own quote: “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.”