tivated women with entire ease and freedom, and gave
many of them an impulse toward an intellectual career which nothing else
at that time could have done.

Here was the real beginning of what may be called the woman question in
this country. Before Margaret Fuller's day the agitation regarding
woman's career and work in the world was practically unknown here; and
all the ideas which have now become incorporated into the platform of
the woman's party found in her their first and perhaps their best
exponent. Very little that is new has since been urged upon this
question. Her powerful mind seemed to have grasped the whole subject,
and to have given it the best expression of which it was capable. She
embodied her ideas after a time in her book, "Woman in the Nineteenth
Century;" and although the literature of the subject is now voluminous,
that book is still read and referred to.

Finding it necessary to support herself and to care for her mother and
brothers after her father's death, she at first taught school, at one
time in Mr. Alcott's famous school in Boston and afterwards in
Providence, and then took a position upon the "New York Tribune," kindly
offered her by Mr. Greeley. She supported her brothers in college, and
aided her mother for some years, putting by her own ambitions with a
cheerful outward appearance, though oftentimes with a heavy heart. She
had many and very ambitious literary projects, few of which were ever
destined to be carried out. For a woman who occupied so much the minds
of the men of her day and of a succeeding generation, she really left
little upon which to base their admiration. What she was, rather than
what she did, seems to have made its impression upon her time. That her
vocation was to speak rather than to write, there seems little doubt.
She had the rare but much-prized gift of eloquence, and in these latter
days would no doubt have made a very large success as a speaker. Some
who listened to her think that she might have been the peer of Wendell
Phillips in oratory, had she bent her powers entirely in that direction.
As it is, her genius has become almost wholly a tradition. There are
many to-day who cannot guess the secret of the continued interest the
world feels in her. That secret lies largely in the impression she made
upon many of the famous men of her time. They have transmitted her name
to posterity along with their own. Horace Greeley at first determined
not to like her pers