Tweet-a-Week: Frances Wright

Frances Wright was Scottish, but she was also so much more than that. She was a lecturer, feminist, abolitionist, social reformist,. She believed in many things like: freeing the slaves, birth control, and sexual freedom for women; she didn’t much care for other things like: organized religion, and capitalism. She became an American citizen in 1825 when she also, like many other Americans, founded a communion. This commune was not purely about the ideas of shared marriages and the adoption of new religious ideas, like some other ones we learned, but was instead designed educate and emancipate slaves. It was known as the Nashoba Commune centered in Germantown, Tennessee which in many ways makes sense, it wouldn’t do much good if it were in New York. Her ideal would have been the complete freedom of the society within the commune. This would have included the idea of “inter-racial” marriage as she was a believer of equality and, sexual and romantic freedom. This was, however, one of the reasons the commune was abandoned. Sadly Ms. Wright had to return to Europe after contracting malaria. The people she left in charge were very strict about everything particularly “inter-racial” marriage as they claimed it affected their funding. A tie in with Whitman is their shared interest of the written word. Wright herself was an essayist and co-founder of a newspaper the Free Inquirer. Here you have another rather amazing believer of freedom of education, freedom, social reform, feminism, and sexual freedom who also happens to be a writer and critical thinker. And in her publication Views of Society and Manners in America Wright addresses the topics of humanitarian ideas in the context of the democratic world.