Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical

Over this series, we’ve learned how famous Frances Wright was in her lifetime: influential, well-connected, notorious, scandalous. So how could her star fade so quickly? Where are the Broadway shows, biopics, and bestsellers about her? In this episode, we trace Frances Wright’s later years, her death and burial in Cincinnati, Ohio, and what happened to her legacy. Some of the people closest to Wri...

Frances Wright’s public speaking caused riots, raised hackles, and won over fans across the country. We’d call it going viral: reaching a level of fame that gets everyone talking, whether they react with revulsion or adoration.  In this episode, we ask Ashley Rattner (Jacksonville State University) to dig into the American media landscape in the 1830s: how could someone go viral for giving public...

Who (or even what) is a woman and who gets to say? What are women supposed to do in society? How should we as individuals and as a society relate to sex? We’re asking many of the same questions folks in Fanny’s day asked about the nature of womanhood, femininity, sexuality, and mothering. Our answers may differ, but one thing’s clear: Motherhood (or cat-loving lack thereof) and sexuality are still...

Nashoba, Frances Wright’s intentional community designed to end slavery, went sideways for reasons we’ll cover in this episode. The physical abuse of the enslaved there might be what we find most upsetting nowadays, but what really got people worked up about Nashoba at the time? It’s something called “amalgamation,” the mixing of people of different racial backgrounds. Frances Wright openly advoca...

One of Frances Wright’s most famous? notorious? undertakings was founding an intentional community of her own inspired by New Harmony (for more about New Harmony, listen to Episode 3). Located in what was then the wilds of Western Tennessee, Wright called her community Nashoba and crafted a plan that would use the economic power of cooperation to prove that slavery could be undone step by step. En...

Frances Wright imagined a community system that would accomplish the seemingly impossible, and she was a product of her times in this. Communities like the one Wright tried to establish at Nashoba were all the rage in the early 19th century. What did Frances Wright learn from the Harmony Society and Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana? What did Wright learn from her friend and supporter George Fl...

It’s easy to forget the limitations put on women’s basic intellectual development in Wright’s era, and how women experienced these limits. How did women write and speak publicly when this was very much discouraged—yet often practiced? Reflecting on educational literature of Wright’s time that articulated limited ambitions for girl’s intellects, how did real women navigate the tensions, contradicti...

If you visit Frances Wright’s grave in Cincinnati's gracious Spring Grove cemetery, you’d never know that Wright set the tone for an era. Even in a decade filled with mavericks and firebrands, she broke boundaries unlike anyone else and inspired some of the most powerful political and literary figures of her times. Feminist, abolitionist, and one of the first female newspaper editors in the US...

How did America forget about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool, feminist long before the word existed? Find out from scholars, history researchers, and the writings of her friends and enemies. We’re historians who love America’s overlooked firebrands. Join Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust as we explore the life and time of a Forgotten American...