Frances Wright & Whitman

Born in Dundee, Scotland, Frances Wright became a prominent feminist, abolitionist, and liberal crusader of the 19^th Century. After traveling to the United States in 1818, Wright published Views of Society and Manners in America, a critique and celebration of American society that garnered praise from people like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay, much like Alexis de Tocqueville’s later Democracy in America. After becoming an American citizen, Wright formed a utopian community, called Nashoba, where slaves Wright had purchased and liberated worked alongside white volunteers. The community turned out to be a failure. Wright became a public speaker, arguing for free love, birth control, equal rights for women, and separation of church and state. Among her critics, she was known as “The Great Red Harlot.”

Wright enchanted Whitman. Even as a small boy, he would have been familiar with Wright’s periodical The Free Inquirer, which his liberal father subscribed to. Perhaps as early as the age of ten, he saw her speak in New York. He later described her as “a woman of the noblest make-up” and “a most maligned, lied-about character—one of the best in history though also the least understood.” Whitman was a big fan of her A Few Days in Athens, a factually inaccurate book about the philosopher Epicurus. John W. McDonald states that, in her book, Wright made Epicurus into a determinist, and that this possibly led to Whitman’s interest in determinist philosophy and “the inevibility of all things.”