Frances Wright: America’s Forgotten Radical Podcast
1) 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, ...Show More
2) 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 w...Show More
3) 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 ...Show More
4) 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 upse...Show More
5) 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...Show More
6) 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 wer...Show More
7) 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 muc...Show More
8) 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 bro...Show More
9) 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 research...Show More