Before there was Susan B. Anthony or Alice Paul there was Frances Wright. Wright was born in Scotland. On a visit to the United States, “Fanny,” as she was known, was taken with the principles of freedom and justice that America stood for but she was disheartened by the practice of slavery. Wright immigrated to the United States and bought a plantation in the western part of Tennessee, where Germantown is today. The community was Nashoba, and it was created with the notion of teaching slaves literacy and job skills that they would need for freedom in Haiti. Moreover, Wright was the first woman to address a mixed sex audience and she came with a message of ending slavery, equality between the sexes, and a free education system for the nation’s children. Her views made her wildly unpopular, and she was ridiculed for her stances on each of these subjects. Her lectures and unconventional ideas won her the title of “Most Dangerous Woman in America.” She persisted in continuing to lecture and when Nashoba failed as a community, she moved her ideals to a socialist community in Indiana called New Harmony.
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