Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical

Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust
  • 5.0 (2)
  • HISTORY
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY

Explore America's past through the unexpected story of an extraordinary early 19th-century woman. Frances Wright, the reformer, writer, and activist, was an abolitionist before it was cool and feminist long before the word existed. Why was she forgotten in the standard narratives of American history? Over 8 episodes, you’ll hear what made her infamous and inspiring from scholars, history researchers, and writings by her, her friends, and her enemies. Turns out, Americans have been arguing about gender, class inequality, race, citizenship, and belonging from the very beginning of our republic.

Episodes

  1. Erasure: Why Brilliant Women Disappear

    09/25/2024

    Erasure: Why Brilliant Women Disappear

    Over this series, we’ve learned how famous Frances Wright was in her lifetime: influential, well-connected, notorious, scandalous. So how could her star fade so quickly? Where are the Broadway shows, biopics, and bestsellers about her? In this episode, we trace Frances Wright’s later years, her death and burial in Cincinnati, Ohio, and what happened to her legacy. Some of the people closest to Wright didn’t keep her fame alive, which is heartbreaking, but it’s also part of a bigger pattern. Why do women keep slipping out of the historical record, even when they are legends in their own time?  We welcome back Rachel Hope Cleves (University of Victoria) to explain how most people—especially women—tend to fade from historical memory.   To keep doing our part to restore the record, we asked scholars to tell us about two women who were Fanny's contemporaries in New Harmony, Indiana. We hear from Silvia Rode (University of Southern Indiana) about Gertrude Rapp’s nearly forgotten role in the Harmonist community. Then Linda Warrum (New Harmony Working Men’s Institute) tells how she solved the mystery of Clorion, an artist associated with Robert Owen’s New Harmony, uncovering her real name and story. This is a podcast about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool. Feminist long before the word existed.  Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Robert Dale Owen is voiced by David Meyer. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    42 min
  2. Priestess of Beelzebub: Going Viral in 1830s America

    09/11/2024

    Priestess of Beelzebub: Going Viral in 1830s America

    Frances Wright’s public speaking caused riots, raised hackles, and won over fans across the country. We’d call it going viral: reaching a level of fame that gets everyone talking, whether they react with revulsion or adoration.  In this episode, we ask Ashley Rattner (Jacksonville State University) to dig into the American media landscape in the 1830s: how could someone go viral for giving public lectures? Why was it so provocative to have a woman speak her mind that way, and how did people respond? Then Lori Ginzberg (Pennsylvania State University) traces what happens to radical voices when their ideas are dismissed as “unthinkable,” and how Wright’s contemporary reformers reacted to her notoriety. How does Wright’s meteoric rise to prominence and the backlash it sparked reflect dynamics still in play today? In an age of online abuse campaigns toward women thinkers and “cancel culture,” what can we learn from past outspoken women like Wright, and the strategies opponents used to silence them?  This is a podcast about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool. Feminist long before the word existed.  Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Frances Wright is voiced by Emily McGee, and the anonymous hater from the pages of the Advocate of Moral Reform is read by Shannon Gayk. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    49 min
  3. Red Harlot: Sexuality and Motherhood

    08/28/2024

    Red Harlot: Sexuality and Motherhood

    Who (or even what) is a woman and who gets to say? What are women supposed to do in society? How should we as individuals and as a society relate to sex? We’re asking many of the same questions folks in Fanny’s day asked about the nature of womanhood, femininity, sexuality, and mothering. Our answers may differ, but one thing’s clear: Motherhood (or cat-loving lack thereof) and sexuality are still messing with us in America and are still prone to become political footballs.  In this episode, we explore what Frances Wright may have experienced as she went from public intellectual and firebrand to wife and mother. We consider why she may have made the choices she did, how she felt, and how those feelings squared with her radical ideas regarding marriage. These issues had a huge impact on Fanny’s life–her life changed dramatically when she became pregnant–but Fanny’s response to these issues also made the longest-lasting and biggest impacts of her career and inspired the first wave of feminists. Our expert guests this week are historians Rachel Hope Cleves of the University of Vancouver, who gives us context on changing American ideas of gender, sex, and marriage; and Shannon Withycombe, a medical historian at the University of New Mexico who studies the evolution of American popular and clinical ideas of prenatal care, pregnancy, and childbirth. Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Frances Wright is voiced by Emily McGee. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    51 min
  4. Amalgamation and what really made people hate Frances Wright

    08/14/2024

    Amalgamation and what really made people hate Frances Wright

    Nashoba, Frances Wright’s intentional community designed to end slavery, went sideways for reasons we’ll cover in this episode. The physical abuse of the enslaved there might be what we find most upsetting nowadays, but what really got people worked up about Nashoba at the time? It’s something called “amalgamation,” the mixing of people of different racial backgrounds. Frances Wright openly advocated this mixing and saw it as the future of America. Many people were outraged. For this episode we go deep into the context of this tension, a long-standing source of anxiety for white Americans and too often a justification for curtailing the rights of African-Americans. The actual history of interracial relationships under slavery, even in the free Northern States, was complicated, more so than we usually hear in history class, and it’s still reverberating today, though as a nation and as people, we’ve made progress.  Our expert guests this week are historians Leslie M. Harris (Northwestern University) and Amrita Myers (Indiana University). Leslie goes into the meaning and context of amalgamation and how it was weaponized against anti-slavery organizers–and what it says about America’s anxieties surrounding race and class. Amrita helps us explore the life and times of Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman who was also the wife of one of America’s early Vice Presidents–though he never freed her. She helps us glimpse what we need to do as historians to restore the stories of women like Chinn, which are vital to understanding America’s past.  Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Frances Wright is voiced by Emily McGee. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    1h 1m
  5. The Trouble with Nashoba

    07/31/2024

    The Trouble with Nashoba

    One of Frances Wright’s most famous? notorious? undertakings was founding an intentional community of her own inspired by New Harmony (for more about New Harmony, listen to Episode 3). Located in what was then the wilds of Western Tennessee, Wright called her community Nashoba and crafted a plan that would use the economic power of cooperation to prove that slavery could be undone step by step. Enslaved people and free (mostly white) people would work side by side. The enslaved would receive skills training and education, while the group effort would lead to decent profits from raising commodity crops like cotton. These earnings would pay off the enslaved person’s purchase price, they would be freed, and then moved to a safer location, such as Haiti. The plan purposefully didn’t rock slaveholders’ boats hard and purposefully insisted that African Americans should be educated and liberated. It was both a radical action for the time—and deeply embedded in white supremacist, paternalistic beliefs. This contradiction has made it hard to know what to make of Nashoba. We wanted to paint a broader picture by engaging with African American experiences and perspectives historians and scholars have worked hard to foreground in the past fifty years. Our expert guests this week are Leslie M. Harris (Northwestern University), Jack Kaufman-McKivigan (IU Indianapolis), and Sean Griffin. This is a podcast about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool. Feminist long before the word existed.  Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Frances Wright is voiced by Emily McGee. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    45 min
  6. Why Utopian Experiments Matter

    07/17/2024

    Why Utopian Experiments Matter

    Frances Wright imagined a community system that would accomplish the seemingly impossible, and she was a product of her times in this. Communities like the one Wright tried to establish at Nashoba were all the rage in the early 19th century. What did Frances Wright learn from the Harmony Society and Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana? What did Wright learn from her friend and supporter George Flower’s earlier experiences in Illinois? How do these communities fit into the history of American life, if we stop labeling them as quirky anomalies or foolish disasters? As we face our own, remarkably similar economic age, informed by radical new technologies (in her day the industrial revolution, in ours a digital revolution) that reshaped economic relationships, what can we learn from attempts like Nashoba and New Harmony?  Our expert guests this week are Silvia Rode (University of Southern Indiana) and Caroline Kisiel (DePaul University). This is a podcast about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool. Feminist long before the word existed.  Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Frances Wright is voiced by Emily McGee. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    50 min
  7. Writing While Female: How Women Wrote in Wright’s Time

    07/03/2024

    Writing While Female: How Women Wrote in Wright’s Time

    It’s easy to forget the limitations put on women’s basic intellectual development in Wright’s era, and how women experienced these limits. How did women write and speak publicly when this was very much discouraged—yet often practiced? Reflecting on educational literature of Wright’s time that articulated limited ambitions for girl’s intellects, how did real women navigate the tensions, contradictions, and hidden opportunities of these limitations? Our expert guest this week is Etta Madden, emerita professor at Missouri State University. This is a podcast about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool. Feminist long before the word existed.  Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. The Marquis De Lafayette was voiced by Paul Catanu and Walt Whitman by Ian Yeager. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    40 min
  8. Frances Who?

    06/19/2024

    Frances Who?

    If you visit Frances Wright’s grave in Cincinnati's gracious Spring Grove cemetery, you’d never know that Wright set the tone for an era. Even in a decade filled with mavericks and firebrands, she broke boundaries unlike anyone else and inspired some of the most powerful political and literary figures of her times. Feminist, abolitionist, and one of the first female newspaper editors in the US, she advocated for everything from interracial relationships to women’s rights to new economic relations. Why doesn’t anyone talk about her? This is a podcast about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool. Feminist long before the word existed.  Want to go deeper? Find shownotes with links to resources and rabbit holes here on our substack site⁠. There’s even more to read on our Bookshop.org lists here! Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Frances Wright was given voice by Emily McGee. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    34 min

  9. 06/05/2024

    Introducing Frances Wright

    How did America forget about Frances Wright, reformer, philosopher, writer, activist, abolitionist before it was cool, feminist long before the word existed? Find out from scholars, history researchers, and the writings of her friends and enemies. We’re historians who love America’s overlooked firebrands. Join Tristra Yeager and Eleanor Rust as we explore the life and time of a Forgotten American Radical on a new documentary podcast series, out late June 2024. Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical is a co-production of Newyear Media and Her Reputation for Accomplishment, written and hosted by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Yeager. Made possible by a grant from the Working Men's Institute, New Harmony, Indiana, and by the generosity of the Efroymson Family Fund. Thanks also to the Bloomington Area Arts Council for supporting this podcast. Music by Eleanor Dubinsky. Editing and audio support by Josh Perez.

    3 min

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

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About

Explore America's past through the unexpected story of an extraordinary early 19th-century woman. Frances Wright, the reformer, writer, and activist, was an abolitionist before it was cool and feminist long before the word existed. Why was she forgotten in the standard narratives of American history? Over 8 episodes, you’ll hear what made her infamous and inspiring from scholars, history researchers, and writings by her, her friends, and her enemies. Turns out, Americans have been arguing about gender, class inequality, race, citizenship, and belonging from the very beginning of our republic.

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