Wollstonecraft’s tradition of feminism and applied them to Fourier social visions. She created her own settlement after visiting Robert Owen’s utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana. Later, Wright published the pamphlet, A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South, in which she proposed plantations that would buy slaves’ freedom.
In the late 1820’s, adhering to a radical perspective, she promoted women’s rights, and lectured with Robert Owen during her visits to New York. With his son, Robert Dale Owen, and labor activists, she launched the Free Enquirer.
When anti-slavery radicalism sparked the appearance of a women’s rights movement in the
United States, another woman, British writer Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), was at the source.
After Wollstonecraft, the first full feminist treatise was written by Irish political and philosophical writer and social reformer William Thompson and his friend, Anna Wheeler, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, WOMEN, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, MEN, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery; in reply to a paragraph of Mrs. Mill’s Celebrated "Article on Government" (1825). Born in Ireland, Wheeler (1785-1848) was a writer and advocate of political rights for women and for the benefits of contraception. In the 1820’s, she traveled to Dublin, London, France, and Scotland where she met Owen and Fourier, and learned about the religiously-based Saint Simonian socialist communities in France. The Saint Simonians had probably the most radical feminist ideas of the 1830’s. Founded by Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon, the movement promoted love, sex, and emotions as a foundation for marriage instead of socio-economic needs. They published a periodical, La Femme Libre (The Free Woman).
In the 1840’s, an outpouring of feminist writings accompanied
radical social and religious movements in Britain and Europe with Catherine Barmby’s Demand for the Emancipation of Woman, Politically and Socially (1843) leading the way.
By that time, feminist groups were well established in the US. As an example of the migration of European feminism to America, Ernestine Potowski Rose(1810-1892) moved from Poland to the United States with her second husband in 1836. She was the embodiment of European feminism. Denied equal education, married at age 16, she rebelled and obtained a court annulment. She started speaking at many of the women’s rights conventions of the 1850’s and became a spokesperson on behalf of women’s rights, abolition, and temperance.
American women’s movements deepened in the 1850’s; by the 60’s, popular support for feminism had become weaker in France than in America.
The Romantic Era was a time of turmoil, revolution, great ideas, socialist and feminist movements, but also of artistic wonders. I encourage you to investigate on your own. In the meantime, women, be kind to each other. Remember that a little act of kindness goes a long way. Be strong, safe and healthy!!!
by Al Mohymont
Jeanna Bauck "The Danish Artist Bertha Wegmann Painting a Portrait" late 1870s
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. PD.
Sources: http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/awrm/intro.htm, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sand, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Tristan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft
71 | Ceres Magazine | Spring 2016