Wright, Frances (redirected from Fanny Wright)

Wright, Frances (Fanny Wright), 1795–1852, Scottish-American reformer, later known as Mme Darusmont, b. Dundee, Scotland. After her first tour (1818–20) of the United States she wrote an enthusiastic account of her travels, Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). In 1824 she returned to the United States. Influenced by Robert Dale Owen, she founded Nashoba, a colony for free blacks, near Memphis, Tenn. After its failure she devoted herself to lecturing and publishing. She advocated equal rights for women, universal education, religious freedom, abolition, and birth control. In 1831 she married William P. Darusmont (or D'Arusmont); the marriage was dissolved in 1835.

Bibliography

See biographies by W. R. Waterman (1924) and A. J. G. Perkins and T. Wolfson (1939).

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Wright, Frances

 known as Fanny Wright

(born Sept. 6, 1795, Dundee, Angus, Scot.—died Dec. 13, 1852, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.) Scottish-born American social reformer. After travels in the U.S., she published Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), which was widely read and praised. Returning to the U.S. in 1824, she bought and freed slaves and settled them at Nashoba, a socialist, interracial community she established in Tennessee (1825–28). She worked with Robert Dale Owen in New York (1829) and defied convention by lecturing widely, attacking slavery, religion, traditional marriage, and the unequal treatment of women. She was a co-leader of the Workingmen's Party. After marrying and living in France (1831–35), she returned to the U.S. and became a supporter of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party.

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Wright, Frances (“Fanny”) (1795–1852) abolitionist, social activist, author; born in Dundee, Scotland. Having lost both parents while a child, she was raised by relatives; she read on her own and by her twenties was writing romantic poetry and plays with progressive themes. She came to the U.S.A. in 1818 with a younger sister and had her play Altorf produced in New York City; when it failed, she traveled throughout the Northeast and then returned to Britain (1820). Her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) became one of the best-known traveler's accounts of the day, distinguished by its almost embarrassing praise for everything in the New World. She went over to France in 1821 and began a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the aging Marquis de Lafayette, almost 40 years her senior; when he made his famous "farewell tour" of America in 1824–25, she followed him around. She stayed on in the U.S.A. and took on the cause of abolishing slavery; she purchased 640 acres near Memphis, Tenn., and set up a plantation, Nashoba, on which she intended to demonstrate a method for liberating slaves; her scheme ended in scandal, but through highly controversial lectures, she continued attacking not only slavery but also organized religion and laws forbidding marriage between the races; although she thus antagonized most Americans, the freethinking, bold-talking "Fanny Wright" gained the respect of others such as the young Walt Whitman. By 1829 she was settling in New York City; she had by this time linked up with Robert Dale Owen of the utopian community at New Harmony, Ind., and she joined him in publishing the Free Enquirer in which she promulgated her increasingly more radical views about religion, education, and other social issues. She went off to Paris in 1830, married a French doctor and reformer (1831), and in 1835 returned to the U.S.A. with him and their child, settling this time in Cincinnati, Ohio, but continuing to lecture until 1839. In her last book, England, the Civilizer (1848), she called for a sort of united nations that would impose peace on the world; in its vague theorizing, it was an instance of the idealism and impracticality that characterized so much of her life and work.