Welcome to Concord Patch’s newest feature, Object of the Week. Each week we will present an artifact from the Concord Museum collection that speaks to Concord’s storied history. We welcome comments, memories and suggestions for future items.

In honor of Women’s History Month, we present an image of Margaret Fuller.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a groundbreaking author, educator, literary critic, journalist, Transcendentalist, human rights activist, and feminist. 

This rare image of a young Margaret Fuller was taken before 1830 by Henry Williams, a machine-aided profilist whose studio was in Boston.  Fuller met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 and became a frequent guest at his Concord home.

The silhouette, a gift to the Concord Museum in 1935, is currently on exhibit in Crowdsourcing a Collection.  The silhouette was chosen for inclusion in the exhibition by Guest Curator Senator John Kerry, who wrote of his reason for choosing this particular object:

“I have been blessed with a very loving and supportive family—including a wife and two daughters. I admire their compassion, their dedication, and their visible love of life. And I’m incredibly proud of them for being vitally involved in the world. I often think of the countless women who helped pave the way for them to get where they are today—women like Ms. Fuller, who was an early advocate for women’s rights, especially a woman’s right to an education and employment.”

To learn more about Margaret Fuller, read the new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Matteson, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography, available at the Concord Bookshop.