Although Free Inquiry has often recognized Robert G. Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other famous nineteenth-century atheists, only once—in a 1990 tribute to her feminism (FI, Fall 1990)—have readers seen the name of Frances “Fanny” Wright. Free Inquiry is hardly alone: In 1999, Robert Connors wrote twenty-eight pages trying to explain why Wright is so unknown today.¹

Yet, after the War of Independence, Wright—who arrived in America from Scotland in 1819—became not only the first female orator but the first to advocate a rationalist, secular philosophy before large, often hostile, American audiences. She was also the first, in 1823, to write a well-received play advocating materialist, secular values. In 1825, Wright was the first woman to act publicly against slavery. During the late 1820s, she was so identified with the working class that the Workingman’s Party slate of candidates was dubbed the “Fanny Wright ticket.” And in 1828—before large American audiences—Wright was the first woman to argue for gender equality and equal roles for women in public life.²

Wright’s achievements dazzled the rich and famous, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Jeremy Bentham, who said Wright’s was “the sweetest and strongest mind that ever lodged in a female body.” Marquis de Lafayette considered Wright “his daughter,” while Walt Whitman viewed her as “sweeter, nobler, grander—multiplied by twenty—than all who transduced her.”

 Wright’s atheism was grounded in her epistemology. According to Celia Morris Eckhardt (Franny Wright: Rebel in America), Wright adopted the philosophy of Scottish professor (and great-uncle) James Mylne. Known as “Old Sensation,” Mylne taught that knowledge can be obtained only through our senses, known as a posteriori. Throughout her life, Wright attacked religion for advocating beliefs grounded in the human imagination (also known as a priori), not in sensory experience—to her, the basis of all “knowledge.” In her drama A Few Days in Athens, her most famous work of fiction, her protagonist Epicurus states that the philosopher “must believe in the existence of things, as they exist to his senses. I know of no other existence, and can therefore believe in no other; although … I may imagine other existences to be.” Accused of atheism, Epicurus calmly states that “As I never saw the Gods … I cannot assert their existence.” He also admits that he has “no reason for my denying (their existence).^”3

In a long, eloquent concluding statement, Epicurus says religion is both useless and mischievous. It is useless because if gods do exist, they inhabit different worlds and therefore cannot “afford a guide” for our existence. (“As well should the butterfly take pattern from the lion, the lion from the eagle, as man from a god.”) More important, religion is “mischievous: the source of our planet’s misery and crime.” Its essence is “fear … its source is ignorance.” In the absence of fact, religions “give the rein to fancy, see a miracle in every uncommon event, and imagine unseen agents as producing all that (the mind) beholds.” Traditional hostility toward atheism is “the result of deficient information.” But as science progresses, superstitions decrease and religion declines, as humans understand that “matter alone is at once the thing acting, and the thing acted upon—eternal in duration, infinitely various and varying in appearance, never diminishing in quantity, and always changing in form.”⁴

Religion’s support of capitalism also affected Wright’s atheism. As England’s enclosure movement forced many small farmers off their land and into cities, Wright observed capitalists and clerics collaborating to defraud and exploit the urban working class, whose poverty was attributed to their “laziness.” Welsh capitalist Robert Owen, however, had argued that the environment molded people’s character and that capitalists’ exploitation of children explained the poor’s condition and behavior. Ultimately, Owen said, capitalism and religion had kept the working class in misery. Adopting Owen’s viewpoint, Wright pledged to help the poor and the helpless and (in Eckhardt’s words) “to redress the grievous wrongs that seemed to prevail in society.” This pledge, Eckhardt writes, was “an oath that became the motive force in her life.” According to Eckhardt, Owen influenced Wright “more, perhaps, than any other person she met in her adult life.”

Wright in America

When, in 1819, Wright arrived in America, she was, in Richard Stiller’s words, “disgusted with reactionary Europe and anxious to find everything perfect” in America.⁵ She was especially enthralled by the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” As a result, her travelogue, Views of Society and Manners in America, is an idealistic description of antebellum America that today seems embarrassingly naive. All American citizens are depicted as helpful, servants as cheerful, and slaves as loving to joke and dance. Compared to “civilized” White Americans, Native Americans—lazy and intemperate—“hold a lower place in the creation of men,” and Whites’ decimation of their tribes was a “triumph of peace over violence.” Wright also falsely writes that in America, “Violence is positively forbidden in the schools, in the prisons, on shipboard, in the army.” She thinks “(Blacks) have the same political rights as other Americans.” And then there is her claim that Congress had prohibited the spread of slavery into the nation’s territories: true for territories northwest of Ohio, but not for those obtained in the Louisiana Purchase.

Although Wright changed most of these views later in life, she held on to one fundamental illusion. While she understood how the Framers hoped to correct weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation, she (like many Americans today!) failed to see the differences between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Echoing Jefferson, not Madison, she stated “The government acts with the people, is part of the people, is in short the people themselves.” She equated “liberty” with freedom of speech and, later in life, with “equality,” not with an individual’s right to private property as the Framers had. In later life, she often carried the Declaration of Independence with her, and she seemed to believe that it not only reflected the law of the land but that a nation of social and economic equality would best serve the interests of America’s ruling class. She believed her role was to show Americans the road to true equality.

Despite its hyperbole and falsehoods—or more likely because of them—Views of Society and Manners in America made Wright famous. Stiller writes that “Without this book, the world might have never heard of (Fanny Wright).” The book admitted her to the lecture circuit and the homes of America’s elite. However, Views of Society and Manners in America did present some criticisms of American life. For example, Wright argued that American women still lacked equal educational opportunity and thus ended up marrying early in life. Wright also criticized America’s use of the death penalty, as well as its public executions. Most important, while some Virginians had freed their slaves, they could not—Wright said—be blind to the potential evil of slavery and the possible ruin of their moral character. She urged Virginia to end slavery given that “A servile war is the least of evils which could befall her.”

Slavery was still very much alive and well during Wright’s arrival to the United States in 1819. It would not be abolished until 1865 by Abraham Lincoln.

After she toured the South in 1825, Wright hardened her attitude toward American capitalism, especially its exploitation of slaves. She argued that, in addition to the profit motive, ignorance explained capitalist exploitation of working people, as well as America’s social ills and crimes. Blinded by America’s competitive economic system, the rich did not understand that if oppressed Americans had equal educational opportunities and developed a “spirit of enquiry,” they could escape poverty, become more productive, and, knowing their rights, be truly free and independent human beings. Educated Americans, both rich and poor, would then have the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence. Even slaveholders would realize that emancipating their slaves would benefit them and the nation as a whole.

Wright believed that eradicating ignorance required Americans to understand what knowledge is and how to obtain it. In 1828, she began a series of lectures and addresses throughout the Northeast, the first in Philadelphia. Although they were repetitive and verbose, her themes were clear. Echoing her character Epicurus, she emphasized that “all real knowledge is derived from our positive sensations.” Scientific knowledge compounds “the accurately observed, accumulated and agreeing sensations of mankind.” Although science “can never constitute for us matter-of-fact certainty, only greater or less probability,” physical science is “the best road to corrective reasoning.” In fact, “the only corrective … of superstition is physical science.”

But acquiring knowledge also required Americans to eschew religion. Claiming falsely that God has revealed truth only to them, clerics “tell us of dreams dreamed thousands of years ago, which all our experience flatly contradicts.” Wright was flabbergasted by religion’s annual expenses—then estimated to exceed $20 million. She exclaimed, “Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown! … Their doctrines, by their own confession, (are) incomprehensible … their morality based on human depravity.” By conjuring up images of eternal damnation, preachers and religious teachers prey on people’s weaknesses, vices, and prejudices. They do so to patronize capitalists—their “paymasters”—who wish the poor, especially slaves, to remain ignorant of their human rights. She said, “The master of the slave is he who pays the preacher.”

Women are also victimized. Religion, the media, and the government limit their education, demand that they marry, and enforce marriage laws. Wright argued that marriage not only keeps women ignorant but favors “their subordination (and) ensures their utility.” Essentially, marriage makes women slaves to their husbands. It also limits sexual passion, which—Wright later argued—is “the strongest … and noblest of human passions, the primary source of human happiness.” Like all behavior, expressions of sexual passion should be regulated only by their effects on others: not by religion, not by law. Wright was the first to openly advocate for miscegenation, a view that most Americans abhorred, especially in the South. Her “mixing of the races,” Madison said, was “universally obnoxious.” During her public lectures, Wright’s friends often feared for her life, so a group of Quakers often accompanied her on stage.

Wright argued that a “spirit of enquiry” should begin in childhood. Parents should never “advance an opinion without showing the facts upon which it is grounded.” Children should learn to “Ask why of every teacher. Ask why of every book. While there is a doubt, suspend judgment; while one evidence is wanting, withhold assent.” As for morality, parents should not teach “a code of morals, any more than a creed of doctrines.” Rather, a parent “is to direct his young to observe the consequences of actions on himself and on others, and to judge the propriety of those actions by their ascertained consequences.” In the end, a child will, “in the free exercises of his senses, in the fair development of his faculties, in a course of simple and unrestrained enquiry … discover truth (and) seize upon virtue.”

To ensure all children received a science-based education, Wright proposed that the government establish state-run boarding schools with a nonreligious, common curriculum funded by taxpayers and parents. She argued that every community should also have a “Hall of Science,” where citizens could learn science “in a place uncontaminated and undistracted by religious discussions.” Putting her money where her mouth was, in 1829 Wright bought an old church for $7,000 and created her first “Hall of Science” in New York City. Between 1829 and 1832, when the Hall closed, according to Stiller it was “the only place in the United States where a young mechanic or workingman could get any sort of higher education.” For poor working-class youth, “the Hall was a college campus.”

Today, Wright’s proposals may seem tame, but in the 1829—during the “Great Awakening”—her concepts (in Eckhardt’s words) “threatened the sanctity of private property and undermined the foundations of family life … probing dangerously close to the nerve centers of American life.” At Wright’s proposed boarding schools, parents would be allowed to visit their children but not bring them back home before graduation. Wright understood her proposal’s radical nature but felt that economic inequality threatened America’s future. Always working within the law, and rarely an advocate of violence, Wright believed that her education system could forestall a revolution among America’s poorer classes.

To further foster “a spirit of enquiry,” Wright changed her newspaper’s name from the New Harmony Gazette to Free Enquirer. It reprinted her lectures and thus echoed her views—and Robert Dale Owen’s views—on religion and education, especially the nation’s need for a rational education system. The paper also supported the moderate faction⁶ of the Workingman’s Party in New York’s 1830 election. Wright called the working class “the salvation of the country.” But the paper also had an interesting, lively, and humorous side. Stiller cites the time a reader expressed skepticism about the biblical story of a whale swallowing Jonah. Wright replied that “it was surely but an easy miracle … seeing that so many human beings are swallowing both Jonah and the whale every day.” According to Stiller, the Free Enquirer was “the only paper in the United States—perhaps in the whole world—in which one could read about birth control, the marriage rights of women, and the population explosion.”

Before Wright renamed it, the newspaper had promoted Dale Owen’s New Harmony commune and Nashoba, an experimental farming commune Wright founded near Memphis in 1825. Wright eventually invested months of her own hard labor and half her fortune, $40,000, into Nashoba. She created the commune to demonstrate how slaves could be emancipated to the benefit of all Americans, including slaveholders. By freeing its slaves, America would benefit not just economically but morally. As she wrote in 1827: “Men are virtuous in proportion as they are happy, and happy in proportion as they are free.” Nashoba was an “experiment” designed to prove that hypothesis.

At Nashoba, purchased slaves would earn their freedom by “working off” their purchase price and any costs for their food and lodging. Working under humane conditions to obtain their freedom, Wright thought slaves would produce more than plantation slaves and earn their freedom in five years. They could then be recolonized in Haiti, because racial prejudice in America threatened their existence. Over time, slaveholders would also see the benefits of changing from slave to free labor in their system of production. In short, Nashoba attempted “to harness self interest and accommodate white prejudice in the name of humanitarian reform.”⁷

After two and a half years, the commune failed for several reasons, especially “poor management, resistant laborers, plunging cotton prices, and a complete lack of public support.”⁸ But the commune had also developed a reputation as “a cesspool of sexual promiscuity and miscegenation.”⁹ To address public concerns—and encourage others to consider joining or supporting the failing commune—in 1827 Wright wrote a pamphlet titled Explanatory Notes Respecting the Nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba. Eckhardt calls it “the most powerful statement Fanny ever made, and the most revealing.” (Today, it is also the most readable.¹⁰)

In her pamphlet, Wright blasted capitalist society for not only exploiting but disrespecting the working classes, whose labor enriched lawyers, priests, soldiers, and some of the other least useful, least productive classes. Among all working people, slaves were the most exploited, the most disrespected. Nashoba thus aimed to offer them—and free women—a legal, nonviolent pathway to freedom in an environment of pure equality. Whipping, religion, private property, marriage laws, and child labor were all forbidden; slaves’ children were educated in the commune’s school. Wright encouraged anyone sharing her moral convictions to join the commune, especially men under thirty. “Membership” cost $200 annually, with all members expected to do manual labor. She predicted that the falling price of cotton would soon make slavery unprofitable and Nashoba would then become a model for the nation. But by the time her pamphlet was published in 1830, Nashoba had failed, while “king cotton” thrived.

Personal and Public Decline

In 1830, Wright’s life took a turn from which she never recovered. She got pregnant, and to protect her expected child married Philquepal D’Arusmont, an ex-doctor who, like Wright, was interested in educational reform. They returned to Europe where, for the next five years, Wright lived a mostly secluded life. In 1831, she suffered a devastating blow when her sister and lifelong companion, Camilla, died. Wright gave some lectures in England, but—as Stiller writes—“Nothing in her experience had prepared her for the traditional feminine role (of married woman).” According to Orestes Brown, “After (Wright’s) marriage, her charm was broken and her strength departed her.” One of her friends even thought it would have been better if Wright “had drowned herself.” She and D’Arusmont usually lived apart; eventually, they divorced.

In 1835, Wright returned to the United States and campaigned for the Democratic Party in the 1838 congressional elections. She published and edited a newspaper, Manual of American Principles. She also lectured on America’s need to restructure its economic system, to create a communal society without private property or money. Large audiences heard her lectures, but amid rising tensions over slavery and the Panic of 1837, they could not tolerate her. On one occasion, 10,000 surrounded her speaking venue and attacked her carriage as she departed. Newspapers also castigated her. In 1838, the Cincinnati Chronicle published “What a Woman Has Done,” a piece scapegoating Wright for America’s problems. Another labeled her “the High Priestess of Infidelity.” Conceding that Americans were not ready to accept true equality, she returned to Europe in 1839.

In 1843, Wright returned to America alone; alienated from most of her friends, she died in 1852. As the woman suffrage movement gained momentum, her works were read by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Ernestine Rose, among others. But Wright was much more than a feminist; in fact, she thought women’s suffrage was an overrated reform. Insofar as she vehemently rejected religion and capitalism—and believed children should attend state boarding schools—Robert Connors may have the best explanation for her relative obscurity now. According to Connors, Wright “is still too radical in too many eccentric ways for most academics today.”

Notes

1. Robert Connors, “Frances Wright: First Female Civic Rhetor in America.” College English, vol. 62, no. 1 (September 1999).

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

3. To ensure that the audience grasped Epicurus’s historical significance, Wright added a short comment at the end of the fifteenth chapter. She credited Epicurus with understanding that atoms are “the simple elements of all existences,” the basis of all “modern discoveries in chemistry … all our ingenious inventions and contrivances … and the wonderful qualities of matter … which we call attraction, repulsion, electricity, magnetism, etc.”

4. Eckhardt (Franny Wright: Rebel in America, p. 135) argues that the play’s last few chapters—“a broadside attack” on religion—are “intellectually flimsy and emotionally brittle,” written by a woman “trapped in a personal dilemma … and … confronted … (by) the growing revival movement” of religion in America. Eckhardt thinks Wright’s “dilemma” is that with the loss of religion, there is “the inevitable loss of the moral life.” She says Wright reduces morality to “an experiment in chemistry or a problem in long division.” But for two reasons, Eckhardt is spouting nonsense. First, there’s nothing “flimsy” about Epicurus’s (i.e., Wright’s) attack on religion, a logical extension of his epistemology and his view that clerics are blinding the public and eliciting fear by conjuring deities having no basis in real knowledge.  Epicurus reminds the reader of Richard Dawkins, who has raised his arm to heaven and said if God exists, let his presence be felt now. He’ll then happily acknowledge god’s existence. And like Dawkins, Epicurus’s willingness to accept a seen or heard deity does not preclude indictments of religion, especially its fostering of ignorance and “superstitions.” Second, in her writings and speeches, Wright’s view of morality (echoed by Epicurus) is nothing more than a version of what today we’d call situational ethics. Wright always argued that “what is right or wrong” depends on whether your action will elicit pleasure or pain in another person. Of course, whether any action elicits that pleasure or pain will depend on the context of the action, as well as the people involved. Eckhardt ridicules this view because she implicitly equates morality with religion’s—or society’s—immutable precepts and laws. In fact, throughout her biography, Eckhardt seems uncomfortable with Wright’s view of religion. It’s instructive that while Eckhardt calls Wright a “rational materialist,” she never once labels her an atheist, even though Wright clearly is one.

5. Richard Stiller, Commune on the Frontier: The Story of Fanny Wright. New York, NY: Crowell, 1972.

6. The party was divided into two factions, one of which called for revolution—a concept too radical for Wright at this time, though later in life she became more amenable to the idea.

7. Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Wright’s explanatory notes can be read online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015080475737&seq=5.