Frances Wright

Biography

 

Frances "Fanny" Wright spoke openly about ideas that few Americans of her time would discuss in public. She called for an end to slavery and for equal education for girls and boys. She argued that women should control their own property and marriages. She also questioned organized religion. These views made her famous, and they also made her a target of harsh criticism.

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Early Life

Wright was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1795. Both of her parents died before she turned three. She and her younger sister, Camilla, inherited money and were raised by relatives in London and Glasgow. Wright read widely and became interested in the United States and its promise of liberty.

 

Coming to America

In 1818 Wright and her sister traveled to America. Her play Altorf was performed in New York. Her book Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) praised the new nation. The book caught the attention of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution. The two became close friends, and Wright joined him on his famous tour of the United States in 1824–25.

 

Nashoba

During her travels, Wright saw slavery in the South firsthand. She believed it went against everything the nation claimed to stand for. In 1825 she published a plan to end slavery gradually. She then bought land near Memphis, Tennessee, to test it. At Nashoba, enslaved people whom Wright purchased were supposed to earn their freedom through their work while also receiving an education. 

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The experiment failed. The land was poor, and Wright was often sick or away. The people at Nashoba remained enslaved while the white managers argued about how to run the community. Reports that some residents lived together without marrying caused a public scandal. In 1830 Wright took the thirty-one people still held at Nashoba to Haiti, where she freed them. Historians still debate Nashoba's legacy. Wright meant well, but her plan kept people in slavery for years in the name of reform.

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New Harmony and the Gazette

Wright first visited New Harmony in 1825. Robert Owen's ideas about education and community shaped her plans for Nashoba. In 1828 she returned and joined Robert Dale Owen as an editor of the town's newspaper, The New-Harmony and Nashoba Gazette, or the Free Enquirer. That July she gave a Fourth of July speech in New Harmony. It was the start of a speaking career that made her nationally famous.

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Later that year, Wright lectured in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, and other cities. Large crowds came to hear her. Many people came out of curiosity, and some came to argue. Newspapers attacked her in harsh terms, while supporters praised her courage. In 1829 Wright and Robert Dale Owen moved the newspaper to New York and renamed it the Free Enquirer. Wright bought an old church there and turned it into a "Hall of Science" for lectures and reading. She also called for a national system of free public boarding schools.

 

Marriage and Later Life

In 1831 Wright married William Phiquepal d'Arusmont, a French teacher who had come to New Harmony aboard the "Boatload of Knowledge." Their daughter, Frances Sylva, was born in Paris. That same year, Wright's sister, Camilla, died. The marriage was unhappy. Under the laws of the time, a husband controlled his wife's property, and Wright spent years in court trying to regain hers. She later returned to lecturing in America, but she never again drew the crowds she had in 1828 and 1829.

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Final Years and Legacy

Wright died in Cincinnati in 1852 after a fall. She is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery. Many of the causes she supported later became law, including free public education, women's property rights, and the end of slavery. Her views on marriage and religion, however, kept her out of many history books for years. Later women's rights leaders, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, recognized her as a pioneer. In New Harmony, she is remembered as one of the most outspoken voices of the Owen era.