Frances Wright

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Frances Wright about 1825

Frances Wright , also called Fanny Wright (born September 6, 1795 in Dundee , Scotland, † December 13, 1852 in Cincinnati , Ohio ), was a well-known social reformer of her time and one of the earliest and most fearless women's rights activists. The brilliant speaker and journalist grew up in Great Britain, but spent most of her adult life in the United States, where she fought against slavery , among other things .

Live and act

The father, a cloth merchant, was friends with Adam Smith , William Cullen, and other prominent liberal-minded intellectuals. Frances was orphaned at the age of three and grew up with a strict aunt. At 18, she was taken care of by an uncle who was a professor of moral philosophy in Glasgow . Through him and a widow named Craig Millar from the USA, she was spiritually encouraged in the spirit of the French Enlightenment , and also interested in America. Accompanied by her younger sister Camilla, she made trips to Europe in 1818-20 and again in 1824. Her book about America, published in 1921, met with a positive response. It explained and justified the revolutionary aspirations there.

Nashoba Community

Wright met some English "radicals", including Jeremy Bentham , and General Lafayette , a French veteran of the French and North American revolutions , who soon loved her like a daughter. Wright had romances with several younger men. She made her second visit to America with Lafayette. She also met Thomas Jefferson and James Madison . From this trip onwards, Lafayette and Wright diverged from each other because the young, “impulsive” Scottish woman warmed herself for Robert Owen and his cooperative ideas, and also for reform clothing . She promptly acquired land in Tennessee in 1825 , on which she founded the Nashoba Community , a settlement for slaves whom they intended to release and move to suitable lands as soon as they had processed their purchase price. The company soon failed (dissolution in 1828) due to organizational, financial, hygienic and moral problems. The white overseer James Richardson tied up with a slave while Wright was absent due to illness and spoke out for free love in newspapers, which was quite detrimental to the reputation of the project, especially in Victorian England.

A first class speaker

In 1828 Wright became a co-owner of the New Harmony Gazette , a freethinking paper by Owen's son Robert Dale Owen , and began teaching and teaching in New York on issues of women's rights, birth control, free education, trade unions, against banking power, slavery, religion. The encouragement left nothing to be desired; Wright was considered a "first-class" speaker who, of course, also earned a lot of hostility. In 1829, together with Owen junior, she started a new newspaper called The Free Enquirer and at the same time set up a kind of community college.

In the same year she accompanied the slaves of the now dissolved colony in Tennessee by ship to Haiti , where they should be settled. One of them was William Phiquepal D'Arusmont, a physicist and teacher from the Owen Community in New Harmony . After the death of her sister Camilla (1831), Wright married the 60-year-old who had cared for her. Their first child together died; the second, daughter Sylvia, was born in 1832.

Marriage shipwreck

The marriage did not last long. After some back and forth, Wright and D'Arusmont lived essentially separately from 1835 onwards. Later there were inheritance disputes. While Sylvia stayed with her father in France, Wright continued to speak in New York, Boston, and other North American cities. She now also wrote for the Boston Investigator and edited the Manual of American Principles . In 1851, the 56-year-old fell on an icy staircase and broke her hip. She died of the consequences a year later. It is said that, in accordance with her wishes, her tombstone in Cincinnati said that the woman resting there had married the cause of human rights and built her happiness, her reputation and her life on it.

Contradictions

The fight against slavery was the top priority of their commitment, followed by education. Nonetheless, she must be counted among the earliest advocates of women's liberation. Even more than her writings, her courageous demeanor spurred many women on in the struggle for emancipation. In addition, the slim activist was described as "strikingly pretty". She was fluent in French and Italian and was always up to date on political and literary matters. As a highly gifted author and speaker, however, she tended to overestimate herself and even too stubbornly to cling to judgments once made. Helpful and easily inflammable, she often lacked discipline and caution. She gave a lot to independence, adventure, excitement - admittedly also to security, as her relationships with Lafayette and D'Arusmont testify, which were probably behind her unhappy childhood. These contradictions moved her restless life.

Works

  • Altdorf , drama, 1819 (about the Swiss struggle for independence)
  • Views of Society and Manners in America , 1821; German social life and customs in the United States of America. Depicted in a collection of letters to a friend in England during 1818, 1819 and 1820 from Miss Franziska Wright. Translated from the English by Constantia von B. , first and second volume, Berlin 1824 (digitized from Google Books )
  • A Few Days in Athens , Historical Novel, 1822 (on Epicurus , highly praised by Walt Whitman )
  • Course often Popular Lectures , two volumes of their lectures, New York 1829 and 1836

literature

  • John Windt: Biography, Notes and Political Letters of Fanny Wright D'Arusmont , New York 1844
  • Amos Gilbert: Memoir of Fanny Wright, the Pioneer Woman in the Cause of Women's Rights , Cincinnati 1855
  • AJG Perkins and Theresa Wolfson: Frances Wright. Free Enquirer , New York and London 1939
  • Edd Winfield Parks: Nashoba: A novel about Frances Wrights gallant utopian experiment to emancipate the slaves , New York 1963 (novel)
  • Margaret Lane: Frances Wright and the "Great Experiment" , Manchester 1972
  • Alice S. Rossi (Ed.): The Feminist Papers , New York 1974, pp. 70–72 (excerpts from Wright's writings)
  • Susan S. Kissel: In Common Cause: the "conservative" Frances Trollope and the "radical" Frances Wright , Bowling Green, 1983
  • Celia Morris Eckhardt: Fanny Wright: Rebel in America , Cambridge / Massachusetts 1984
  • Olive Banks: The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists , Volume I 1800-1930, New York 1985
  • Helen Horowitz: Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America , Alfred A. Knopf, 2002
  • Edmund White: Fanny: A Fiction , Hamilton, 2003 (novel)
  • Victor Grossman : Rebel Girls: Portraits of 34 American Women , Cologne: Papyrossa, 2012, pp. 21–29

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Apletons' Cyclopaedia of America biography , Volume 6, 1888
  2. ↑ a b c d e Olive Banks New York 1985
  3. ^ A b c Jacob Piatt Dunn: Indiana: a Redemption from Slavery , 1919, pp. 358-361, with illustrations
  4. ↑ a b James D. Hart: Oxford companion to American literature , 1941
  5. ↑ a b Jennifer Uglow (Ed.): The Macmillan dictionary of women's biography , 3rd edition 1998
  6. ↑ spartacus , accessed July 31, 2011
  7. ↑ First performance at the Park Theater New York in 1917 according to Peter Ross, The Scot in America , 1896
personal data
SURNAME Wright, Frances
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wright, Fanny
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British and American social reformer and suffragette
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1795
PLACE OF BIRTH Dundee , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH December 13, 1852
Place of death Cincinnati , Ohio