Frances Wright has co-founded the Free Inquirer newspaper and authored Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) and A Few Days in Athens (1822).

Her publication of Views of Society and Manners in America had been a major turning point, as it had brought her new acquaintances, and had led to her return to the United States, where she has become established as a social reformer.

A significant example of the eighteenth-century humanitarian outlook confronting the new democratic world, it is translated into several languages and widely read in Great Britain, the United States and Europe.

Wright again visits the United States in 1824 and 1825, accompanying the Marquis de Lafayette during much of his famous tour of the United States.

As Lafayette heads south in February, Wright heads west towards Robert Owen and the community he has established at New Harmony.

One of three children born in Dundee, Scotland, to Camilla Campbell and James Wright, a wealthy linen manufacturer and political radical who designed Dundee trade tokens, knew Adam Smith, and had corresponded with French republicans, including Lafayette.

Both parents had died young, and Fanny (as she was called as a child), orphaned at the age of three, had been left with a substantial inheritance.

Her maternal aunt became her guardian and took Fanny to her home in England.

Upon her coming of age at sixteen, Fanny had returned to Scotland, where she lived with her great-uncle James Mylne, and spent her winters in study and writing and her summers visiting the Scottish Highlands.

She had written her first book by the age of eighteen.

Wright had traveled to the United States in 1818 at the age of twenty-three, and with her younger sister toured the country for two years before returning to Scotland.

She believes in universal equality in education, and feminism.

She attacks organized religion, greed, and capitalism.

Along with Robert Owen, Wright demands that the government offer free boarding schools.

She is "a fighter for the emancipation of slaves and for birth control and sexual freedom for women. She wanted free public education for all children over two years of age in state-supported boarding schools. She expressed through her projects in America what the utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said in France, "that the progress of civilization depended on the progress of women."" (Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States; p. 23)