Frances Wright

From Philosopedia

Wright, Frances [d’Arusmont] (1795–1858)

"Franny," the first woman to publicly lecture in the United States, was born an heiress in Scotland. An arresting five feet, ten inches as an adult, Wright influenced fashion of her day with her liberating style of ringlets and, later, her adoption of "Turkish trousers." When eighteen years of age, she wrote about "Epicureanism in A Few Days in Athens."

In 1818, she traveled with her younger sister Camilla to America. Her play, Altorf, was staged to acclaim in New York in 1819, where she shocked society by using her byline as a female author. Her travel book, Views of Society and Manners in America (1820), caused a sensation in Great Britain and abroad.

Freethinker Jeremy Bentham became her mentor and General Lafayette her confidante.

Returning when 29 to America, Frances became a U.S. citizen. As an early and passionate abolitionist, she began a noble but ill-fated model communal plantation to educate slaves for freedom at Nashoba, Tennessee. They would have no religion but "kind feeling and kind action," Wright decreed. Her plan was entitled "A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South." With Robert Owen, she had founded in 1825 the publishing concern of Wright & Owen. Wright bought 2000 acres near Memphis, Tennessee, peopling it with slave families she had purchased and redeemed, calling it Nashoba. The experiment of helping thirty or forty slaves proved a failure, so “Fanny” as she became known, gave her slaves freedom, sending them to Hayti, where they were placed under the protection of the President and were given an amount of money in order to begin a life of freedom. She assisted in the founding of the Boston Investigator. Although she did not live to see the emancipation of black slaves and better education for women, her courage in defying the conventions about female propriety in order to speak on behalf of both was recognized in later years. The experiment unraveled for lack of money.

In Divisions of Knowledge (1828), she wrote,

• I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and the against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.

At 34, Wright launched her speaking career on July 4, 1828, in Cincinnati, seeking to "destroy the slavery of the mind," and counteract the effects of a religious revival on women, as well as the Christian Party in Politics movement. Wright called for the education of women and the rejection of religion. Her historic speaking tour won her adoration from progressives, such as the young Walt Whitman [[1]], who recalled how "we all loved her: fell down about her." In fact, he wrote of one of her radical deist works, “I kept it about me for years.”

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who also came to believe that the clergy were responsible for restricting women to a narrow sphere of home and church, lauded Wright as the first woman to lecture in public on behalf of women. Frances Trollope, the English author, was a friend and supporter, writing that she had accompanied her to an 1830 lecture in Philadelphia at which a bodyguard of Quaker ladies dressed in the peculiar costume of that sect applauded her strong anti-slavery stand. Mrs. Trollope, the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope, after attending one of “Fanny” Wright’s lectures in Cincinnati, commented:

• That a lady of fortune, family, and education, whose youth had been passed in the most refined circles of private life, should present herself as a public lecturer, would naturally create surprise anywhere. But in America, where women are guarded by a sevenfold shield of habitual insignificance, it caused an effect that can hardly be described. I shared the surprise but not the wonder.

The clergy, however, called her the “high priestess of Beelzebub,” “infidel,” and “dog,” whereas General Lafayette called her “daughter.”

Wright urged: "Turn your churches into halls of science, exchange your teachers of faith for expounders of nature . . . Fill the vacuum of your mind!" Practicing what she preached, she purchased an old church in New York City for $7,000 and renamed it the "Hall of Science." It opened its doors in April 1829 for lectures, a radical bookstore and, at one time, offered a health clinic. She and Owen she co-edited the Free Enquirer, which changed its name to the Free Enquirer. And she was in on the forming of the Working Men's Party, advocating a ten-hour workday, for which she was dubbed a "female Tom Paine" by the mayor of New York.

In 1838, according to Sara A. Underwood, Wright

• took what seems to have proved a most disastrous step for her happiness, in marrying her old-time friend, M. Phiquepal d’Arusmont, whose acquaintance she first formed at New Harmony, where he was a teacher of some new system of education, and of whom in her fragmentary autobiography she speaks in the most enthusiastic and laudatory manner. How long they lived happily together I do not know, but they did so at least until 1844.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith quoted Mrs. d’Arusmont’s lawyer as saying she had been treated in an ungenerous and unmanly way and tried to wrest her property from her. The marriage was dissolved in 1845.

“Halfhours with Freethinkers” contains an account of Wright’s death:

• Madame d’Arusmont died suddenly in Cincinnati, on Tuesday, December 14, 1852. She had been for some time unwell, in consequence of a fall upon the ice, the previous winter, which broke her thigh, and probably hastened her decease, but the immediate cause of her death was the rupture of a blood-vessel. She was aware of her situation, knew when she was dying, and met her last hour with perfect composure.

Wright is buried in the Cincinnati Spring Grove Cemetery. In 1997, in a joint venture by Freedom From Religion Foundation, the American Humanist Association Feminist Cause, and the Free Inquiry Group of Cincinnati, the cemetery monument was cleaned with fine sand and treated to retard future deterioration. Whereas formerly it appeared dark, after 150 years of exposure to the weather its white marble stands out.

{BDF; EU; Fred Whitehead, “An Expedition to Ohio,” Freethought History, #23, 1997, is a thorough article about Cincinnati’s Freethought heritage; FUS; JM; Phyllis Palmer, Free Inquiry, Fall, 1990; RE; SAU; TRI; RAT; VI; WWS}