Robert Owen is the founder of infant childcare in Great Britain, especially in Scotland.

Though his reform ideas resemble European reform ideas of the time, he is likely not influenced by the overseas views; his ideas of the ideal education are his own.

Born in Newtown, a small market town in Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales, in 1771, Robert was the sixth of seven children.

His father, also named Robert Owen, had a small business as a saddler and ironmonger.

Owen's mother was a Miss Williams, and came from one of the prosperous farming families.

Here young Owen had received almost all his school education, which ended at the age of ten.

In 1787, after serving in a draper's shop for some years, he settled in London.

Traveling to Manchester, he had obtained employment at Satterfield's Drapery in St. Ann's Square.

By the time he was twenty-one, he was a mill manager in Manchester at the Chorlton Twist Mills.

His entrepreneurial spirit, management skill and progressive moral views were emerging by the early 1790s.

In 1793, he had been elected as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, where the ideas of reformers and philosophers of the Enlightenment were discussed.

He also became a committee member of the Manchester Board of Health which was set up to promote improvements in the health and working conditions of factory workers.

During a visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with Caroline Dale, the daughter of the New Lanark mill's proprietor David Dale.

Owen had induced his partners to purchase New Lanark, and after his marriage to Caroline in September 1799, set up home there as manager and part owner of the mills from January 1810.

Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton mills in Manchester, he hopes to conduct New Lanark on higher principles and focus less on commercial principles.

The mill of New Lanark had been started in 1785 by Dale and Richard Arkwright.

The water power afforded by the falls of the Clyde have made it a great attraction.

About two thousand people have associations with the mills.

Five hundred of them are children, brought at the ages of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The children had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people is very unsatisfactory.

Many of the workers are in the lowest levels of the population; theft, drunkenness, and other vices are common; education and sanitation are neglected; and most families live in one room.

The respectable country people refuse to submit to the long hours and demoralizing drudgery of the mills.

Many employers operate the truck system, whereby payment to the workers is made in part or in full by tokens, which have no value outside the mill owner's "truck shop"; the owners are thus able to supply shoddy goods to the truck shop and charge top prices.

Owen opens a store where the people can buy goods of sound quality at little more than wholesale cost, and he places the sale of alcohol under strict supervision.

He passes on the savings from the bulk purchase of goods to the workers.

These principles will come the basis for the cooperative shops in Britain that continue to trade today.

His greatest success is in the support of the young, to which he devotes special attention.

Robert Owen, at first regarded with suspicion as a stranger, had soon won the confidence of his people.

The mills continue to have great commercial success, but some of Owen's schemes involve considerable expense, which displeases his partners.

Tired of the restrictions imposed on him by men who wish to conduct the business on the ordinary principles, Owen arranges in 1813 to have them bought out by new found investors.

These, including the classical liberal and utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and a well-known Quaker, William Allen, are content to accept just five thousand pounds return on their capital, allowing Owen a freer scope for his philanthropy.

In the same year, Owen first authors several essays in which he expounds on the principles which underlie his education philosophy.

Owen had originally been a follower of Bentham.

However, as time passes, Owen becomes more and more socialistic, whereas Bentham thinks that free markets (in particular, the rights for workers to move and choose their employers) would free the workers from the excess power of the capitalists.

At an early age, Owen had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion and had thought out a creed for himself, which he considers an entirely new and original discovery.

The chief points in this philosophy are that man's character is made not by him but for him, that it has been formed by circumstances over which he had no control, that he is not a proper subject either of praise or blame.

These principles lead up to the practical conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man's character is to place him under the proper influences–physical, moral and social–from his earliest years.

The principles of the irresponsibility of man and of the effect of early influences form the key to Owen's whole system of education and social amelioration.

They are embodied in his first work, A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, the first of four essays appearing in 1813.

Owen's new views theoretically belong to a very old system of philosophy, and his originality is to be found only in his benevolent application of them.

The Harmonist commune, ten years after the move to southwestern Indiana, moves again, this time returning to Pennsylvania and naming their town 'Ökonomie', Economy.

The Harmony Society’s Indiana settlement, thirty thousand acres (twelve thousand one hundred and forty hectares) of choice farmland, is sold to Robert Owen, at which point it is renamed New Harmony, Indiana.

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)

Lafayette and Fanny Wright meet back up in New Orleans in April 1825, and travel north along the Mississippi River.

Wright returns to Memphis, Tennessee, Iin autumn 1825 and founds the Nashoba Commune, where she plans to educate slaves to prepare them for freedom.

Wright hopes to build a self-sustaining multiracial community composed of slaves, free blacks, and whites.

Robert Owen coins the term "socialist" in his London periodical, The Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, in November 1827.

Nashoba, partially based on Robert Owen's New Harmony settlement, where Frances Wright spends a significant amount of time, is described briefly in Frances Trollope's 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans.

Trollope had visited Nashoba with Wright in 1827 and lived in the United States for a few years.

Her work is critical of American society for its lack of polish.

She thinks residents at Nashoba lack both sufficient provisions and luxuries.

Nashoba—which, at its largest, has only twenty members—will last about three years, until Wright becomes ill with malaria and moves back to Europe to recover.

The interim managers of Nashoba take a more strict approach in terms of work requirements.

In addition, they are worried about rumors of interracial marriage, which damages financial support for the community.

Frances Wright, a Scotswoman who had emigrated to the United States in 1818, and with her sister toured from 1818 to 1820, had become enamored with the young nation and become a naturalized citizen in 1825 at the age of thirty.

Wright has authored Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) and A Few Days in Athens (1822).

The publication of the former had been the turning point in Fanny Wright's life, bringing her new acquaintances, leading to her return to the United States, and establishing her as a social reformer.

The book is of great significance to the American people, their social institutions, ideals, and for the liberal revelations of the humanitarian mind of the eighteen-century Enlightenment becoming acquainted with the new democratic world.

The book is translated into several languages and widely read.

Wright advocates abolition, universal equality in education, and feminism.

She also attacks organized religion, greed, and capitalism.

Along with Welsh socialist and social reformer Robert Owen, she demands that the government offer free boarding schools.

In 1828, Wright becomes the first woman to lecture publicly before a mixed audience when she delivers an Independence Day speech at New Harmony, Indiana, where she has spent a significant amount of time.

However, Owen’s brave new world of New Harmony, an experimental self-contained community, fails after two years of dissension among the residents, who, in the words of Owen's son, are "a heterogeneous collection of radicals... honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in."

The utopian visionary will shortly disband the utopian community at year’s end.

Josiah Warren, one of the participants in the New Harmony Society, will later assert that the lack of individual sovereignty and private property had doomed the community to failure.

The interim managers of Nashoba instigated the concept of free love within the commune.

In practice, it was interracial, but far from egalitarian.

As rumors spread of interracial marriage, the Commune encountered increasing financial difficulty, eventually leading to its collapse in 1828.

Before Nashoba failed, Wright was returning by ship to America.

On her journey, she wrote “Explanatory Notes Respecting the Nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba, and of the Principles upon which it is Founded.”

he elaborated on a notion of Nashoba as an interracial and egalitarian utopia.

Her plan outlined in “Explanatory Notes” was never put into effect, however; Nashoba had already failed when Wright arrived back in the United States.

Wright personally charters a ship and delivers the remaining slaves of Nashoba to Haiti, where she emancipates them.

Despite the failure of Nashoba, it provides an example of working utopian theory.

Wright has progressive ideas of liberty and equality for her time, but the burden of leadership and financial hardship prove too much for the community.

Frances Wright had founded the Nashoba Commune in 1825 intending to educate enslaved people to prepare them for freedom.

Wright had hoped to build a self-sustaining multiracial community comprised of slaves, free blacks, and whites.

Nashoba (now the modern-day city of Germantown, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis) had been partially based on Owen's New Harmony settlement in Indiana, and had lasted until Wright became ill with malaria and moved back to Europe to recover.

The interim management of Nashoba had been appalled by Wright's benevolent approach to the slaves living in Nashoba; rumors had spread of interracial marriage and the Commune had fallen into financial difficulty, which had eventually led to its demise.

Wright moves in 1829 to New Harmony.