Women in History of Scots Descent - Frances Wright, Woman's Advocate

Frances Wright was born in 1795 in Scotland but had an early interest in America. After educating
herself from a college library, she visited the United States when she was 23. During her travels, she wrote Views of Society and Manners in America. This travelogue hails American life as progressive in contrast to the backwardness of the Old World.

In later travels, her enthusiasm faded as did her naiveté. While traveling down the Mississippi, Wright was appalled by the practice of slavery and began to theorize about ways that slavery could be abolished. In addition to writing a treatise, Wright decided to establish a settlement in which slaves could be emancipated. In 1825 she established such a community, Nashoba, which focused on communal living with the help of soon-to-be emancipated slaves. This venture did not fare well despite her persistent efforts. She tried a more mainstream approach by stating her views in the Memphis Advocate with attacks on racially segregated schools, organized religion, racial taboos in sex relations, and marriage.

After the settlement collapsed altogether, she emancipated the slaves and paid for their transportation to Haiti as she promised. Her outspoken political rhetoric and her attempt at such a progressive community left Wright on the fringes of mainstream society. She then focused her social reform on the urban areas. Wright condemned capital punishment and demanded improvements in the status of women, including equal education, legal rights for married women, liberal divorce laws, and birth control. After allying with Robert Owen, founder of another utopian community called New Harmony, she focused these concerns on education reform. They advocated a system of free state boarding schools in which children would be educated without religious doctrine but receive training in traditional subjects as well as industrial skills. Fanny Wright saw this system as relieving families of the "burden" of raising children.

From her desire to see these educational proposals enacted, Frances Wright moved in the political
sphere and became a central figure in the workingmen's movement. She differed in some technical
aspects from the workingmen's movement, which consisted of activism by small farmers, artisans,
and workers in early factories, Wright became synonymous with their protests. Those opposing the workingmen¹s movement referred to the movement as the Fanny Wright party.

After marrying a French physician, Guillayme D¹Arusmont, Frances Wright moved to France and spent time out of the public eye. When she returned to the states she resumed a political platform with a historical perspective narrating the ills of contemporary society. After the midterm campaign of 1838, Frances Wright suffered from a variety of health problems. She died in 1852.

Dubbed "The Great Red Harlot" for her personal life, which included several illicit romances, as well as her progressive views on sexual relations, Fanny Wright was a political figure in the workingmen¹s movement and espoused ideas critical to the women's movement. Wright's champion for universal education helped give a voice to those women who wanted more education for themselves as well as their children. This aided the women's movement as well as women's role as medical providers. The workingmen's struggle was one about the gulf between the classes and the capitalistic system itself. Women were particularly affected by this increased emphasis on the market as they became more confined to home duties as industry shifted away from the home into the city. Fanny Wright sought to give women a larger role. Both Fanny Wright's ideology and the workingmen's movement and the women's movement, converged in the Popular Health Movement of the 1830s. Since the workingmen's movement was in reaction to an increasingly aristocratic culture in which the "professionals" controlled the system as well as the information, doctors were included in her target. Similarly by advocating the woman's voice, Wright gave credence to women being involved in health and medicine.

Wright did not achieve much individual success; after a lifetime of struggling for high ideals, she spent the last years of her life trying to settle financial affairs and a complicated divorce. Perhaps her life struggles are what are the greatest model for the women's movement. She stood out of her own time tackling issues of the 1990s from birth control to affirming sexuality as "the noblest of passions". She helped break down a rigid structure and paved the way for other women to make changes regarding women's health and place of society.