Fanny Wright: Rebel and Communitarian Reformer

FRANCES WRIGHT DARED to take Thomas Jefferson seriously when he wrote "All men are created equal," and to assume that "men" meant "women" as well.John Stuart Mill, accordingly, called her one of the most important women of her day.Jeremy Bentham said she had "the sweetest and strongest mind that ever was lodged in a female body."The Marquis de Lafayette called her his beloved Fanny and paid court so openly he scandalized his circle of friends and even his own family.But other contemporaries labeled her the "Red Harlot of Infidelity" and a "voluptuous preacher of licentiousness."She was a woman profoundly at odds with the conventions of her time, and she was loved and hated with equal extravagance.Born in Scotland in 1795, Wright came to the United States in 1818 and spent half her adult life here.She died in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1852, after a lifetime devoted to promoting equality among the races and between the sexes.In 1825 she became the first woman in America to act publicly to oppose slavery.Twenty miles outside Memphis, Tennessee, she established the commune she called Nashoba.Its purpose was to discover and then to show others how slaves might be educated and responsibly freed.Like Robert Owen's New Harmony, it would be a model on which a free society could be built.On July 4, 1828, Fanny Wright became the first woman in America to speak in public to a large secular audience of men and women, and subsequently the first to argue that women were men's equals and must be Celia Morris Eckhardt is the author of Fanny Wright, Rebel in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).Active in feminist causes, Dr. Eckhardt is presently engaged in promoting voter registration as director of Texas Women for the Eighties (Austin).Full documentation for the above article may be found in the above-cited biography.She originally delivered this paper in New Harmony in May 1984, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the New Harmony Historical Society.