Frances Wright was a woman's rights and emancipation advocate in the early nineteenth century. She spoke on the abolition of slavery and on how religion was systematically repressing people from reaching their potential. Frances grew up in London, and toured the U.S. from 1818 to 1820, and spoke enthusiastically of her experiences in her published writings, "Views of Society and Manners in America".
             Her work gained a massive following and was translated into three languages. The French military leader and hero of the American Revolution Marquis de Lafayette became a good friend and strong ally of Frances's. Through this friendship (which Frances had strategically planned) she was able to meet many prominent statesmen. On her second tour of the colonies she became obsessed with the "pestilence" of slavery, and vowed to do something about it.
             Her idea was to establish a colony where slaves could come and work to pay for their own freedom, and be educated, the slave owners would be reimbursed the cost of the slave after five years, and the slave would be freed to a foreign place, such as Texas, or Haiti. She deducted since the slaves would be working toward their own freedom they would work harder. Frances purchased an area in Tennessee place for this settlement that she dubbed Nashoba. Once the Nashoba project for gradual emancipation began to fail, Frances decided to follow the footsteps of Robert Owen, and changed the idea of her small community to sexual and religious liberation. In short Swamp fever, sensational negative publicity, and other problems caused the experiment to end in failure.
             In 1828, Wright began to lecture, and became coeditor of the New Harmony Gazette with the American legislator Robert Dale Owen. The next year she and Owen founded the Free Inquirer as successor to the Gazette. In both her lectures and her writings Frances Wright vigorously advocated abolition, univ...