Quote by Margaret Fuller: “A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.”

A place where only physical needs are met is not truly a home. Human beings need intellectual nourishment — books, ideas, conversation, stimulation — as urgently as they need food and warmth. Fuller is arguing that denying women intellectual life is a form of homelessness.

Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1845, the same decade that saw the first women's rights conventions in the United States. She was living in New York and working at the Tribune as the revolutions of 1848 across Europe were beginning to stir.

American journalist, critic, and feminist whose 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a foundational text of American feminism. She was the first female foreign correspondent for an American newspaper, reporting from Italy on the 1848 revolutions for the New York Tribune.