Concept

Frances Wright

Overview

Frances Wright (September 6, 1795 – December 13, 1852), widely known as Fanny Wright, was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, utopian socialist, abolitionist, social reformer, and Epicurean philosopher, who became a US citizen in 1825. The same year, she founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee as a utopian community to demonstrate how to prepare slaves for eventual emancipation, but the project lasted only five years.

In the late 1820s, Wright was among the first women in America to speak publicly about politics and social reform before gatherings of both men and women. She advocated universal education, the emancipation of slaves, birth control, equal rights, sexual freedom, legal rights for married women, and liberal divorce laws. Wright was also vocal in her opposition to organized religion and capital punishment. The clergy and the press harshly criticized Wright's radical views. Her public lectures in the United States led to the establishment of Fanny Wright societies. Her association with the Working Men's Party, organized in New York City in 1829, became so intense that its opponents called the party's slate of candidates the Fanny Wright ticket.

Wright was also a writer. Her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), a travel memoir that included observations on the political and social institutions of the United States, was very successful. She also authored “A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South” (1825), a description of her planned utopian community at Nashoba Plantation. In addition, Wright co-edited The New Harmony and Nashoba Gazette with Robert Dale Owen in New Harmony, Indiana, as well as other periodicals.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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A revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness, was in this manner brought about by two different orders of people, who had not the least intention to serve the public. To gratify the most childish vanity was the sole motive of the great proprietors. The merchants and artificers, much less ridiculous, acted merely from a view to their own interest, and in pursuit of their own pedlar principle of…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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"There is somewhat of hardship in this matter of certificates," says the same very intelligent author, in his History of the Poor Laws, "by putting it in the power of a parish officer to imprison a man as it were for life, however inconvenient it may be for him to continue at that place where he has had the misfortune to acquire what is called a settlement, or whatever advantage he may propose to himself by living…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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Democracy, as a theory, arose among a handful of men in Cromwell’s army; by them, after the Restoration, it was carried to America, where it came to fruition in the War of Independence. From America, Lafayette and the other Frenchmen who fought by the side of Washington brought the theory of democracy to France, where it united itself with the teaching of Rousseau and inspired the Revolution. Socialism, whatever we…
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Epicureanism.

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