Wright, Frances (D'Arusmont)

WRIGHT, FRANCES (D’ARUSMONT) (1795-1852). A native of Dundee, Wright was a remarkable daughter of the Scottish Enlightenment, which emphasized the importance of reason above authority. She grew up to play roles in major reform and political movements in the United States, after becoming a citizen in 1825. Known popularly as Fanny Wright, she excelled in speaking to working-class assemblies and in promoting abolitionism, woman’s rights, and utopian socialism.

Orphaned at an early age and in possession of a sizable inheritance, Wright joined her mother’s relatives in England, where she resided until she reached her teens. Steeped in French materialist philosophy and transatlantic republicanism, she spent two years in America, where she staged a play on the struggle for Swiss independence. After returning to England in 1820, Wright became more closely involved with internationalists and freethinkers. In 1824, she eagerly accepted the invitation of the aged Marquis de Lafayette to accompany him to the United States and see first-hand the new republic. Lafayette, revered for his military role in the American Revolution, introduced her to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. Wright’s political maturation began, however, after she left Lafayette to explore two utopian colonies, George Rapp’s communities in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

In Indiana, Wright met Robert Owen, the Welsh textile manufacturer, philanthropist and critic of capitalism, who had recently purchased Rapp’s community and renamed it New Harmony. Owen had gained international fame with his model factory town of New Lanark south of Glasgow, and his fearless “Declaration of Mental Independence”—against religion, private property and marriage—inspired Wright. With Owen’s son, the future Congressional representative Robert Dale Owen, Wright edited the official organ of the community, the New Harmony Gazette, which later became the Free Enquirer.

Inspired by Owen’s work, Wright devoted a large part of her inheritance to establish her own interracial community at Nashoba in the wooded countryside outside Memphis, Tennessee. The project was premised on the oft-repeated and already outdated Jeffersonian yearnings of the Southern elite to find a peaceful way to eliminate slavery without massive cost to themselves. She proposed a cooperative process by which slaves interested obtaining freedom could be purchased and work in a setting where they would develop skills and earn what they needed to buy their manumission. She also believed that interracial sexual unions between Blacks and whites would promote equality. If all went well, she expected the Nashoba Commune to replicate itself across the South and remove African Americans from slavery.

For all its shortcomings, Nashoba represented a unique utopian experiment. The press issued overtly hostile reports, and Wright responded with blistering defenses attacking slavery, the economic injustices of capitalism, and conventional marriage. Nashoba failed, but from financial shortcomings rather than public outrage. Wright moved many of the Black residents to Haiti, where slavery no longer existed and manumitted the rest.

Resettling in New York, Wright joined the younger Owen to establish a Hall of Science, and resume publication of the Free Enquirer. They became the voice of a small but influential circle of freethinkers that had persisted since the days of Tom Paine. They sponsored lectures and published articles attempting to formulate a social and political perspective untrammeled by superstition and religion. Wright continued to promote abolitionism as well as woman’s rights, including the right of married women to control their property. She also took a strong position against military laurels. Fanny Wright Societies organized across the Midwest and northeastern states.

This phase of Wright’s career coincided with the state-by-state elimination of the property requirement for voting across the North. In response, newly-enfranchised skilled white workingmen, who had been organizing trade unions for years, began to take their grievances to the polls, starting in Philadelphia in 1828. By the following year, Wright found herself a leading spokeswoman of a radical new Workingmen’s Party. She most famously described the political strife in New York City at the time as “a war of classes.”

As at Nashoba, Wright sought a gradual means of promoting radical change. When the local party adopted the radical resolutions of Thomas Skidmore calling for the expropriation and redistribution of property, she and Owen forged a more gradualist platform focused on various democratic changes and a “state guardianship” over the education of all children. They also had electoral affinities with Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party. By 1830, there were three Workingmen’s Parties in the city: Skidmore’s “original Workingmen”; a pro-Democratic state guardianship party; and an anti-Jackson party, favorable to what would become the Whigs. The Owen-Wright faction remained the largest, but the presidential election of 1832 shattered what was left of it.

Wright had wed her lover Guillaume D’Arusmont, a French physician who had taught at New Harmony and fathered their newborn daughter. An outspoken critic of the institution of marriage, her adversaries dubbed her “The Great Red Harlot.” The couple continued nevertheless to advocate radical social reform and crossed the Atlantic regularly. Wright’s name cropped up through the meetings and conferences of the 1830s, though she still identified herself closely with the Democratic party.

With her health failing, Wright and D’Arusmont acquired land at Mount Healthy, outside Cincinnati in 1844. She periodically attempted to revive her career as a social critic and reform lecturer. In part, her appeals to rational discourse as a means of reform rang hollow in the growing conflict over slavery. She and D’Arusmont divorced in 1850 and she died from the effects of falling on ice in December 1852. She was buried at Spring Grove Cemetery, designed by the Fourierist landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted. Wright requested the inscription on her tombstone: “I have wedded the cause of human improvement, stakes on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.”

Though subtle, Wright’s influence on American radicalism was immense. Her fearless criticisms of religion and marriage and her advocacy of women’s rights would long be remembered. Moreover, as a woman lecturing on such issues, she blazed a trail for another generation of radical women, such as Ernestine Rose and Victoria Woodhull. Her former printers at New York, George Henry Evans and John Windt led the persistent efforts of the “Fanny Wright men,” formulating a land reform radicalism that remained influential for decades. One of her closest friends in her old age, Joel Brown, a veteran Owenite carpenter himself, corresponded with the anarchist Alarm and carried the living memory of Wright’s politics into the twentieth century.

Eckhardt, Celia Morris. Fanny Wright: Rebel in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1984.

Gilbert, Amos. Memoir of Frances Wright, The Pioneer Woman in the Cause of Human Rights. Cincinnati, Ohio: Longley Brothers 1955.

Perkins, Alice J. G. & Theresa Wolfson. Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study of a Temperament. Chatham MI: Porcupine Press, 1972.