Frances Wright (1795-1852), Scottish-American socialist, feminist, and reformer, was the first woman to speak publicly in America.

Frances Wright was born in Dundee, Scotland, on Sept. 6, 1795. Orphaned at the age of two, she inherited substantial means, which enabled her to escape from England and her strict relatives upon coming of age. She went to the United States in 1818, and her play about the struggle for republicanism in Switzerland was performed in 1819 in New York City.

Wright was distinguished for her personal courage, amounting at times to foolhardiness, and for the liberality of her views on public questions. She was especially influenced by the social reformer Robert Dale Owen, and in 1825 she visited New Harmony, Ind., an ambitious experiment in communitarian socialism that his father, Robert Owen, had just founded. There she absorbed the multitude of radical ideas on every conceivable question that flourished in the community. The following year she established her own community at Nashoba on the Tennessee frontier.

Unlike New Harmony, which was founded to demonstrate the superior merits of socialism, Nashoba was aimed directly at the problem of slavery. Wright believed that the most practical way to free the slaves was by establishing facilities where they could work off the costs of their emancipation while acquiring useful skills and the habits appropriate to free men. In some ways this was a farsighted plan. However, like most communal experiments, Nashoba was under financed and badly run. Wright further complicated the enterprise by working into it her own ideas on sex and religion. She came to believe that miscegenation was the ultimate solution of the racial question and that marriage was a limiting and discriminatory institution. Her advocacy of free love and her assistant's public admission that he was living with one of the slave women had a fatal effect on Nashoba's fortunes. In 1830 Wright and Robert Dale Owen arranged for her wards to be sent to the black republic of Haiti.

In 1828-1829 Wright lectured widely in the United States with sensational effect. She spoke on behalf of public education in general and women's education in particular, and she actively supported the Workingman's (Loco-Foco) party of New York, earning the sobriquet of "the great she-Loco-Foco." She also wrote several books, none of which proved very durable. She returned to Europe in 1830, remaining there until 1835. In later years her lectures attracted little attention. She died on Dec. 13, 1852, in Cincinnati.

Further Reading

Biographies of Frances Wright are William R. Waterman, Frances Wright (1924), and A. J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, Frances Wright, Free Enquirer (1939). Among the many works touching on various phases of her career, Arthur E. Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829 (1950), is especially useful.

Additional Sources

Morris, Celia, Fanny Wright: rebel in America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

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(1795-1852), reformer. A freethinker, editor, orator, and lifelong rebel, Wright was one of the boldest radical reformers of her time. Born in Scotland to a prosperous family of democratic views, she was orphaned as a child and raised in London by rigid Tory relatives, whom she grew to despise. In 1813, she ran off to live with her uncle, James Mylne, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Wright read widely in classical philosophy and began writing. At eighteen, she composed a competent treatise on philosophical materialism (published as A Few Days in Athens in 1822). But political ideas also gripped her, especially the egalitarian principles of the American Revolution. In 1818, she set sail for New York to learn more.

Accompanied by her sister Camilla, Wright mingled easily with Manhattan's intelligentsia before journeying through the northern and eastern states. After returning to Great Britain, she published her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), the first serious study of the United States by a British woman. Openly sympathetic toward the new Republic, the book won Wright the admiration of several British luminaries (including Jeremy Bentham) and sparked a friendship with the Marquis de Lafayette.

In 1824, Wright joined Lafayette on his celebrated tour of the United States; he introduced her to James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, with whom she discussed the greatest anomaly in republican America, slavery. Influenced by the writings of the utopian socialist Robert Owen, she developed a communitarian emancipation scheme. Instead of returning with Lafayette, she used a large portion of her inheritance to purchase land in Tennessee, where she implemented her plan.

Wright's interracial community, Nashoba, made her notorious. Her original objective was to have slaves earn their freedom by working the land for five years and then moving to another country. Some of her recruits, however, also advanced the idea of free sexual unions within the community. Wright's defense of absolute racial and sexual equality outraged conventional (and even liberal) opinion. Although she eventually managed to resettle a handful of ex-slaves in Haiti, the Nashoba experiment collapsed, a victim of disastrous finances and Wright's own paternalist misperceptions.

Undaunted, Wright joined with Owen's son, Robert Dale Owen, in 1828 to edit a newspaper at the Owenite community at New Harmony, Indiana, and defied the limits on women by appearing widely as a public lecturer. She addressed the touchiest themes, attacking slavery, revealed religion, the rising influence of evangelical clerics, and existing forms of schooling. Above all, she railed against traditional marriage and the subjugation of women. An electrifying speaker and a hero to fellow freethinkers, Wright became the object of vitriolic abuse.

In 1829, Wright and Owen relocated their newspaper to New York City, where they established a new headquarters. They increasingly focused on the plight of urban workers and promoted a system of state-sponsored free education as the key to abolishing class inequality. Their ideas proved influential among some of the artisan radicals within New York's short-lived Workingman's party.

The rest of Wright's life tested her cruelly. In 1831, her beloved sister suddenly died. That same year, to the malicious amusement of her critics, Wright married a longtime political associate, William Phiquepal D'Arusmont, and moved to France, but the marriage proved emotionally empty. Wright returned to the United States in 1835 to resume her writing and lecturing, but her radical edge had dulled. Her ideas about gradual emancipation and colonization now seemed almost moderate amid the rise of immediatist abolitionism. And in 1836, she found herself oddly close to the political mainstream, campaigning on behalf of Martin Van Buren and the Jacksonians' banking policies. (The Jacksonian press, wishing no link to "the Red Harlot of Infidelity," ignored her.) She remained a champion of women's rights and published some powerful statements about the universality of women's oppression. Through the 1840s, though, her writings and speeches got tangled in abstract theorizing and self-justifications. In January 1852, having endured a bitter divorce battle with D'Arusmont, she slipped on ice and broke her thigh. After a year of pain, she died.

Wright formed an important transatlantic bridge between the drawing-room radicalism of the rationalist Enlightenment and the secularist reform and radical movements of the nineteenth century. Her main legacy has been to the causes of women's equality and sexual emancipation. More broadly, her life testifies to the radical potential of American egalitarian ideals--and to the difficulties confronting those who try to realize that potential in words and deeds.

Bibliography:

Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (1984).

Author:

Sean Wilentz

See also Feminist Movement; Radicalism; Utopian Communities.

(Fanny Wright), 1795–1852, Scottish-American reformer, later known as Mme Darusmont, b. Dundee, Scotland. After her first tour (1818–20) of the United States she wrote an enthusiastic account of her travels, Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). In 1824 she returned to the United States. Influenced by Robert Dale Owen, she founded Nashoba, a colony for free blacks, near Memphis, Tenn. After its failure she devoted herself to lecturing and publishing. She advocated equal rights for women, universal education, religious freedom, abolition, and birth control. In 1831 she married William P. Darusmont (or D'Arusmont); the marriage was dissolved in 1835.

Bibliography

See biographies by W. R. Waterman (1924) and A. J. G. Perkins and T. Wolfson (1939).

(1795-1852)

1819	Altorf, a Tragedy. Produced soon after the arrival in the United States of the Scottish-born freethinker and future founder of the Nashoba community, the play concerns the war of independence in fourteenth-century Switzerland. Although warmly received at its opening, the play loses its audience to General Andrew Jackson, who arrives in New York the day after its opening. It is revived with success in Philadelphia and again in New York in 1829.
1821	Views of Society and Manners in America. A collection of correspondence written during travels with her sister on the Hudson River, in the Mohawk Valley, around New England, and in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. The book sells well and is soon translated into French and Dutch. Literary historians consider Wright's book to be one of the first important travel books about the United States. Free of the critical tone of other British travel accounts during the period, it praises Americans' openness and friendliness and what Wright sees as their enlightened views on women.
1822	A Few Days in Athens. Wright's novel about a young disciple of Epicurus would later be called by Walt Whitman his "daily food."

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