Frances Wright
Frances Wright was a Scottish-American social reformer born in the late 18th century, known for her progressive views on women's rights and abolition. After losing her parents at a young age, she grew up in a strict household but later found inspiration in the ideals of the American Revolution, which she encountered through her reading. In the early 1800s, Wright traveled to the United States, where she became an influential voice advocating for public education, particularly for women, whom she believed had greater freedoms in America compared to Europe. She established the Nashoba colony in Tennessee to promote the education and emancipation of enslaved individuals, though her efforts faced numerous challenges. Throughout her life, she published works and delivered lectures that promoted radical ideas such as free love, liberal divorce laws, and the political organization of working classes. Despite facing criticism and controversy for her beliefs, Wright’s contributions laid groundwork for future social movements and discussions around education and human rights. She passed away in 1852, leaving a legacy as a pioneering advocate for human improvement and social reform.
Frances Wright
Lecturer
- Born: September 6, 1795
- Birthplace: Dundee, Scotland
- Died: December 13, 1852
- Place of death: Cincinnati, Ohio
Scottish-born American social reformer
Wright was the first American woman to speak publicly against the institution of slavery and in favor of women’s rights. She also championed the cause of organized labor, was a pioneer of social reform, and paved the way for others to follow and to fight for the rights of the traditionally marginalized members of society.
Areas of achievement Social reform, women’s rights
Early Life
Frances Wright was the second of three children born to James and Camilla Campbell Wright. When she was two years old, both her parents died, and she and her sister Camilla were sent to live with their mother’s sister, Frances Campbell. In her aunt’s aristocratic home, Frances was exposed to a conservative and rigid upbringing. Nevertheless, in spite of her aunt’s strict tutelage, she became fascinated with and inspired by the ideals of the American Revolution after stumbling upon a book on the subject.
For reasons that are not now entirely clear, Frances and her sister abruptly left their aunt’s home after only a few years and settled with Professor James Milne, their father’s maternal uncle and a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow College. In her uncle’s home, Frances had access to a vast library and spent her days reading books on Epicurean philosophy and American revolutionary ideals. She also began doing her first writing, which included a play she titled Altorf. She also wrote A Few Days in Athens, a novelistic sketch modeled on Plato’s dialogues that outlined the materialistic philosophy to which she adhered throughout her life.
Life’s Work
During her years in Glasgow, Wright befriended Mrs. Craig Millar, a woman who had lived for two years in the United States during George Washington’s presidency. Mrs. Millar served not only as a mother figure for the young and impressionable Wright but also as a crucial source of information about the United States. With letters of introduction from the Millars to several important people in New York, Frances and Camilla set sail for a long visit to the United States in August, 1818. During their two-year stay there, Wright managed to get her play Altorf produced in New York City. By traveling extensively throughout New York State and Pennsylvania, she also was able to gather keen observations of American life, which she developed in her first major work, Views of Society and Manners in America (1820).
Views of Society and Manners in America was sharply critical of England and highly laudatory about most aspects of the United States. One of Wright’s central themes was education, which she found to be exemplary in America. Recognizing that education was the key to individual liberty and freedom, she especially praised the public school system in New England, which she claimed provided a common education to every young citizen regardless of sex or race. She was particularly enthusiastic about the opportunities for female education in America. In contrast to European women, she claimed that women in the United States did not waste time studying such frivolous subjects as language and literature, but instead concentrated on philosophy, history, economics, and science. Therefore, she argued, American women seemed to enjoy more freedom than their European counterparts.
Wright’s book won her widespread critical praise, most notably from the marquis de Lafayette, whom she later befriended during a visit to his French country estate in 1821. She timed her second trip to the United States to coincide with Lafayette’s tour of the nation on a personal invitation from U.S. president James Monroe. The highlight of her second trip was a two-week visit with former president Thomas Jefferson at his Monticello home that was arranged by Lafayette.
While she was at Monticello, Wright had the opportunity to discuss with Jefferson the issue of slavery, which she had come to believe was a glaring contradiction to the freedoms and liberties of the America she loved. Influenced by Jefferson’s views on gradual emancipation and Robert Owen’s utopian cooperatives, she conceived of a plan to purchase, educate, and then emancipate slaves and to help them start colonies outside the United States. In December, 1825, she put her plan into practice by personally purchasing eight slaves and a 640-acre plot of land in western Tennessee that she called Nashoba.
After leaving her sister and a director to handle the day-to-day operations of Nashoba, Wright embarked on a series of lectures in which she greatly exaggerated the success of her experimental colony, criticized organized religion, and argued in favor of women’s rights, miscegenation, and free love. She also criticized the widespread poverty and ignorance of urban America and fought for limited working hours and free education for American workers.
During this period, Wright helped to edit Robert Owen’sNew Harmony Gazette. In 1829, she settled with Owen in New York City. There, they published a radical newspaper called the Free Enquirer, which called for liberalized divorce laws, birth control, state-funded public education, and the political organization of the working classes. Wright’s public lectures and writings eventually resulted in widespread public criticism and accusations that Nashoba was nothing more than a free-love colony. On her return to Nashoba, Wright was shocked to find her sister Camilla both pregnant and ill and her experimental colony in ruins. In 1830, she finally arranged for the emancipation of the Nashoba slaves and had them sent to the black-ruled island nation of Haiti. A year later, Camilla died in England at the age of thirty.
Deeply grieved over her sister’s death, Wright turned for comfort to Guillaume Sylvan Casimir Phiquepal d’Arusmont, a physician whom she had first met at New Harmony. After living with d’Arusmont in Paris, she married him in 1831 after she had become pregnant. Her first child died shortly after it was born, and she had a second child, Frances Sylva, in 1832.
Through the next decade, Wright supported her family by going on lecture tours in the United States and England, while d’Arusmont assumed most of the domestic and child-rearing responsibilities. Around 1835, she and her family settled in Philadelphia, where she began to publish a new paper, Manual of American Principles. In 1844, she learned that she had inherited the sizeable Wright holdings in Scotland. However, her desire to retain sole control over her newfound wealth led to an irreconcilable split with her husband and a bitter divorce in 1850.
On December 13, 1852, Frances Wright died in Cincinnati, Ohio, from complications resulting from a broken hip. She left all of her possessions to her only daughter, Frances Sylva d’Arusmont. The headstone on her grave reads, “I have wedded the cause of human improvement, staked on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.”
Significance
Frances Wright was a woman ahead of her time. Throughout her very public life, she was both praised and criticized for her radical positions on a number of contested issues. Twenty years before women began speaking publicly about women’s rights and before the advent of the organized abolitionist movement, Wright was calling for female liberation through education and free love and the freeing of slaves through gradual emancipation and colonization. In her ideas, one can see the forerunners of community action programs, free public education, and labor laws that emerged years after her death.
Bibliography
Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. Liberty, Equality, Sorority: The Origins and Interpretation of American Feminist Thought: Frances Wright, Sarah Grimké, and Margaret Fuller. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishers, 1994. This work traces the origins of feminism in the writings of three notable American women.
Eckhardt, Celia Morris. Fanny Wright: Rebel in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. This work remains the definitive biography of Wright.
Perkins, A. J., and Theresa Wolfson. Frances Wright: Free Enquirer—A Study of a Temperament. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939. One of the first scholarly studies of Frances Wright, this book remains one of the best and most insightful examinations of her private life.
Wright, Frances. Reason, Religion, and Morals. Foreword by Susan S. Adams. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004. Most of Wright’s public lectures make up this volume.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Views of Society and Manners in America, in a Series of Letters from That Country to a Friend in England, During the Years 1818, 1819, 1820. London: Longman, 1821. Wright’s first major publication, this work resulted from her first visit to the United States. In it, Wright is very critical of English society and highly laudatory of most aspects of American life.
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