Margaret Fuller Holds the First of Her "Conversations," Considered the First Book Club in the U.S.

On November 6, 1839, American journalist, editor, critic, and translator Margaret Fuller held the first of her Conversations, a series of discussions among local women who met in the Boston home of educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her sisters. Through the Conversations Fuller intended to compensate for the lack of women's education with discussions and debates focused on subjects including the fine arts, history, mythology, literature, and nature. By serving as the "nucleus of conversation", Fuller intended to answer the "great questions" facing women and encourage women "to question, to define, to state and examine their opinions". She asked her participants, "What were we born to do? How shall we do it? Which so few ever propose to themselves 'till their best years are gone by". These gatherings have been called the first woman's book club in the U.S.

A number of significant figures in the women's rights movement attended these gatherings, including Sophia Dana Ripley, Caroline Sturgis, and Maria White Lowell. Margaret Fuller was also known for her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. (Boston: Greeley & McElrath, 1845). This work, which was "a reproduction, modified and expanded, of an article published in 'The Dial, Boston, July, 1843', under the title of 'The great Lawsuit. Man versus Men: and Woman versus Women' ," has been called  "the first major women's rights work since Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)."