United States
Wright traveled to the United States in 1818 at the age of 23, and with her younger sister toured the country for two years before returning to Scotland. She believed in universal equality in education, and feminism. She attacked organized religion, greed, and capitalism. Along with Robert Owen, Wright demanded that the government offer free boarding schools. She was "a fighter for the emancipation of slaves and for birth control and sexual freedom for women. She wanted free public education for all children over two years of age in state-supported boarding schools. She expressed through her projects in America what the utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said in France, "that the progress of civilization depended on the progress of women."
Wright was the co-founder of the Free Inquirer newspaper. She wrote Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) and A Few Days in Athens (1822). Her publication of Views of Society and Manners in America was a major turning point, as it brought her new acquaintances, and led to her return to the United States, where she became established as a social reformer. It is a significant example of the Eighteenth-century humanitarian outlook confronting the new democratic world. It was translated into several languages and widely read in Great Britain, the United States and Europe.
In 1824 and 1825, Wright again visited the United States, accompanying the Marquis de Lafayette during much of his famous tour of the United States. As Lafayette headed South in February, Wright headed west towards Robert Owen & the community he had established at New Harmony, Indiana. They met back up in New Orleans in April 1825, and traveled north along the Mississippi River.
In the Fall of 1825, Wright returned to Memphis and founded the Nashoba Commune near Memphis, Tennessee, where she planned to educate slaves to prepare them for freedom. Wright hoped to build a self-sustaining multi-racial community composed of slaves, free blacks, and whites. Nashoba was partially based on Owen's New Harmony settlement, where Wright spent a significant amount of time. Nashoba lasted about three years until Wright became ill with malaria and moved back to Europe to recover. The interim managers of Nashoba took a more strict approach in terms of work requirements. In addition, they were worried about rumors of inter-racial marriage, which damaged financial support for the community. By Wright's return in 1828, the community had collapsed financially. In 1830, Wright freed the Commune's 30 slaves and arranged for their transport, accompanying them to Haiti, which had achieved independence in 1804. There they could live their lives as free men and women. The modern-day city of Germantown, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, is located on the land of Nashoba.
Wright's opposition to slavery contrasted with many other Democrats of the era, especially those of the South. At the same time, her activism on behalf of workingmen distanced her from the leading abolitionists of the day.)
Wright married a French physician, Guillayme D'Arusmont, with whom she had one child: Frances Silva D'Arusmont. The daughter married William Eugene Guthrie, a member of an old established Forfarshire family in Scotland. Wright and D'Arusmont later divorced.
As an activist in the American Popular Health Movement between 1830 and 1840, Wright advocated for women being involved in health and medicine. In 1836 she published her last book, Course of Popular Lectures.
After the mid-term political campaign of 1838, Wright suffered from a variety of health problems. She died in 1852 in Cincinnati, Ohio, from complications resulting from a fall on an icy staircase.
Read more about this topic: Frances Wright
Famous quotes related to united states:
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds ... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)