An independent but influential branch of freethought flourished in Boston under the auspices of the transcendentalists. Transcendentalism was a literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition. It emphasized spiritual rather than religious concerns. It was also an idea that found fertile ground in Boston. Boston of the 1830s and 40s was in the midst of what historian Charles Madison calls a “seething cultural upsurge.”12 “Discarding old Puritan mores and rejecting ineffectual Unitarianism, young people were ready for a change, he suggests. “Not religion but philosophy, not salvation but reform, became the goals of young men and women who tasted of European Romanticism and found it good.” It was into this milieu that Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped with their new ideas.

Fuller, a brilliant writer with a keen intellect and larger‐​than‐​life personality, was much admired by the intelligentsia. Though not a fan of hers, Edgar Allen Poe, her contemporary, once remarked that “humanity can be divided into three categories: men, women, and Margaret Fuller.”13 She became the editor of Emerson’s transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1839. Though neither an agnostic nor atheist—her views were more of a spiritualist nature—she was a critical thinker who questioned the traditional religious views of the day.

In1844, she left The Dial because of ill health and disappointment in the publication’s dwindling subscriptions. She then moved to New York City where she joined Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune as a literary critic, becoming the first full‐​time book reviewer in journalismand, by 1846, was the publication’s first female editor. Her essays ranged from philanthropy to feminism, from literature to human rights. She wrote the most widely‐​read commentary on feminism in the first half of the century, Women in the 19th Century . Though Sarah Grimke’s exposition was the first book‐​length feminist treatment, Fuller’s was wider‐​ranging and more systematic.