Biography

Frances Wright was a writer and feminist born in Scotland in 1795. 

"She was the first woman in America to act publicly against slavery: in 1825 she bought a tract of land twenty miles outside a little  Mississippi River trading post named Memphis, and there she established a commune she called Nashoba.  Its purpose was to discover and then to demonstrate how slaves could be responsibly educated and then freed without undue cost to their owners.  (To impose a disproportionate burden on one part of the nation when the institution of slavery plagued and disgraced us all seemed to Fanny Wright both unfair and politically unwise. Her political sense, such as it was, deserted her, however, when she published an article about Nashoba claiming that sexual passion was “the strongest and…the noblest of the human passions,” the basis of “the best joys of our existence,” and “the best source of human happiness.”  This at a time when allowing an ankle to show in public doomed a woman’s reputation.)

When Nashoba failed in 1828, Wright moved on to New Harmony, Indiana, where Robert Owen's attempt to establish a "new moral world" had captured her attention and sympathy.  There, on July 4, she became the first woman in America to speak publicly to a large secular audience of men and women, and for the next two years she traveled the country lecturing to packed houses about how to realize in practice the principles on which the country was founded.  "