HERSTORY:

Frances Wright

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Frances Wright was one of the first women to speak publicly in America for human rights. She wrote on female equality almost 25 years before Elizabeth Cady Stanton and on abolition 20 years before Garrison. She also formed an alliance with labor early in the industrial era.

Frances was born in 1795 in Scotland and first came to America in 1818 with a friend who was escaping British prosecution. She spent her first year in America in the literary circles of New York and produced a drama about political liberty called "Altdorf." The play received spectacular reviews, although Frances produced it anonymously. (This was a time when women's activity did not venture outside the home.)

After her theatrical success, Frances toured the United States but would not journey to the South. She said, "the sight of slavery is revolting everywhere, but to inhale the impure

breath of it's pestilence in the free winds of America is odious beyond all that the imagination can conceive."

Frances returned to England and to the house of Jeremy Bentham where she studied utilitarianism, the philosophy of the "greatest happiness for the greatest numbers." Also during this period she began corresponding with General Lafayette and came into contact with leading French liberals. She and Lafayette later toured the South together.

Ms. Wright thought slavery should be ended in a "rational and natural manner." She attempted this by starting a community on some land she purchased in Tennessee. The community was called Nashoba and was to be a place where 100 slaves would be emancipated through education, industry, and a sense of cooperation through freedom. The project failed, however, due to the fact that Frances

became too ill to stay at Nashoba and signed the land into trusteeship for the benefit of the Negro race. The community changed from that of self-emanicipation to a society with a class structure, ie. the blacks doing the heaviest work. When Frances had been in the fields she worked as hard as each individual.

Frances Wright was also in open revolt against the rigid conventions placed on her sex and observed American society as a place of encouragement for "nowhere did women seem to be held in higher esteem." Her first plea for American women was for that of education. She also called for a cultivation of the "feminine" characteristics such as tenderness because she felt their incorporation into all people would result in a "new humanism."

Frances went beyond the call for equal education and lectured against inequality

in the law, where the wife gained identity through her husband and became his property. She also advocated birth control, an issue which ended her influence as a speaker and a writer. The public did not recognize the need for birth control to lessen the size of city families and instead damned Frances as an advocate of "free love."

She left public life, was married, and bore a son. Her marriage failed and she returned to public speaking at the beginning of the abolitionist movement.

Ms. Wright lectured for many years on racial and women's issues but led a lonely life, bitter over the failure of her marriage. She died in 1852 from complications of a broken hip, leaving a great number of ideas which would later become a part of feminist thought. As one of the first women to speak out in America, she set a courageous example for feminists.

What's

Ahead

CHICAGO--A third of the nation's school superintendents don't want women on their school boards, according to a survey conducted by The American School Board Journal.

The Journal published by the National School Boards Association, sent questionnaires to 1,000 school superintendents chosen at random from the nation's approximately 15,000 superintendents, and received 540 responses. The survey was augmented with 44-follow-up interviews.

Its findings indicated that superintendents were divided into three almost perfectly even groups: those who do not want women to

page 2/ What She Wants/ October 1974

serve on school boards, those who reluctantly accept the idea of a limited number of women on school boards, and those who believe the sex of a school board member is irrelevant.

Representative of comments offered by superintendents opposed to female members on their boards was this statement by the superintendent of a suburban Boston district:

"By and large, women on school committees (as school boards are called in Massachusetts) are nit-picking, emotional, use wiles to get what they want, demand to be treated as equals, but have no hesitancy at all to put on pearls and insist on "respect" when the going gets rough. And they talk too much."

Plain Dealer Aug. '74

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