Frances Wright : a contextual interpretation of a leader in early nineteenth century America

Abstract

In this paper a case study of two years in the works of Frances Wright is offered as a context for examining an alternative view of leadership. The thesis of this paper is to claim that when historians use a pre-established screen for selecting that and those who are worthy of historical study, e.g., out-front leaders of opinion, that the richness of context is not appropriately explored and thus historical studies tend to distort rather than inform one's understandings of social movements and social events. By examining Frances Wright through the context of such social conditions as women without suffrage, women as privatized and women as pioneering when they moved into public sector activity, one gains a contextual understanding of the significance of her work. To study how she participated in, how she responded to and interacted with, how she developed her responses to that which contributed to popular opinion helps one to further appreciate her influence in altering popular opinion. This nineteenth century woman, in addition to pushing the barriers to women, challenged the economic establishment and the moral base of a slavery system which had been protected by the out-front male opinion. Third and of tremendous importance to one's understanding of this nineteenth century leader's context was the role and dominance of organized religion in all of its display of power through out-front opinion. To look at the dynamics of these conditions is to add a dimension beyond the interest of earlier historians who would have one look to the personalized heroics which flatten and isolate Frances Wright as having had a meteoric and personal achievement in her efforts on behalf of women, blacks, and workers, and those who had not yet achieved a right to free public education. In that this is intended only to raise the issue of historical method through a case study example it has not been a project which would yet do a nineteenth century history or a richly deserved contextually sensitive biography of one of its most visionary leaders.