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Cover of Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Volume 22, Issue 3, Jan 1993
Pages 389-397

  • DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1993.9978988
  • Print ISSN: 0049-7878
  • Online ISSN: 1547-7045

Frances Wright: The other woman of early American feminism

An assistant professor of English , Tulane University

This paper focuses on Frances Wright, the first woman to lecture publicly in the U.S. to “promiscuous” audiences, those audiences composed of both sexes united in a public place. Despite her achievement, Wright has been ignored in historical analyses of nineteenth‐century feminist rhetoric, I argue that historians have avoided Wright because she differs radically from those feminists who directly succeed her. As the Other Woman of the women's movement, Wright practiced a rhetoric imbued with the ideals of the Enlightenment and Owenite socialism. She publicly interrogated the cult of domesticity and demanded equal rights for women at a time when gender anxiety was Intense. Wright caused a furor and provided a negative example for later nineteenth‐century feminists, most of whom developed “womanly” strategies of accommodation. I conclude that it is precisely because of her otherness that Wright is important, historically significant because she was marginalized and silenced within the feminist movement.