Frances Wright
Lecturer & Travel Writer | 1795-1852
Frances Wright (1795-1852) might have identified herself primarily as a social reformer and only secondarily as a writer, but her lectures and travel writing contributed significantly to debates on the abolition of slavery, women’s right to own property, and other pressing issues of the early nineteenth century. Born in Dundee to a wealthy linen manufacturer who was also a political radical, Wright was orphaned at the age of two. She and her sister Camilla were raised by their maternal aunt in England, and during their teenage years by a great-uncle in Glasgow.
From 1818 to 1820, the Wright sisters visited the United States, and their travels provided the material for Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), which brought Frances to the attention of social reformers and political philosophers including Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The book also won praise from the Marquis de Lafayette, whom Wright visited in Paris in 1821, and to whom she remained close until his death in 1827.
Wright and her sister returned to the United States with Lafayette in 1824, and in 1825 Wright made life-changing visits to Harmonie, a utopian community in Pennsylvania, and to New Harmony, a utopian community in Indiana founded by the Scottish industrialist Robert Owen. The ideals of equality espoused by these communities inspired Wright to found her own social experiment in Nashoba, Tennessee, where she hoped to put into action the ideas she had just published under the title Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South (1825). She purchased 30 slaves and 32o acres of land near Memphis, intending that the slaves would pay off their purchase price and earn their freedom by working the land while also receiving an education that would prepare them to support themselves. The experiment foundered for practical reasons—the land was poor and mosquito infested—but also for ideological reasons, drawing criticism for its tolerance of interracial relationships.
In 1828, recognizing that Nashoba was on the verge of collapse, Wright freed her slaves and chartered a ship to take them to Haiti. She settled in New York in 1829, where she edited the Free Enquirer and the New York Sentinel and Working Man’s Advocate. At this time Wright also began to lecture publicly in support of woman’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Her views were controversial, and the published version of her speeches, Course of Popular Lectures (1829), drew criticism for its irreverent remarks on religion.
Despite her reputation as an advocate for “free love,” Wright married French physician Guillaume D'Arusmont, a former teacher at New Harmony, in 1831 and gave birth to a daughter the following year. They settled in Cinncinati, where Wright resumed lecturing and published Political Letters, or, Observations on Religion and Civilization in1844 and England the Civilizer: Her History Developed in Its Principles in 1848. She initiated a divorce from D'Arusmont in 1850, but was entangled in legal complications at the time of her death two years later.
Bibliography
Gail Bederman, “Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818–1826,” American Literary History 17.3 (2005): 438–59.
Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).