A LONG-FORGOTTEN Dundee woman who tried to eradicate slavery in the United States and ended up as a pioneer of women’s emancipation is celebrated in a new book about Scottish heroes.

Frances Wright has been rescued from obscurity in North Sea Heroes by Mike Shepherd who has previously written about attempts to prevent Scotland’s union with England.

In his new book, he tells the story of Wright, who is recognised as America’s first women’s rights campaigner, as well as the epic tale of the survival of Spanish men shipwrecked on Fair Isle during the Spanish Armada.

Also highlighted in the book is a forgotten Jacobite rebellion, an unusual coalmine, a Scottish janitor who made major scientific discoveries, the first flight across the North Sea and the unexpected reception given to the men from a German U-boat during the Second World War. The seven stories deserve to be famous but have been largely forgotten, according to Shepherd.

He is particularly shocked at the lack of recognition in Scotland for Frances Wright, whose incredible life is marked by no more than a plaque in her birth town and a nursery named after her.

“I find it astonishing that given all the breast-beating about the legacy of slave money in Scotland, that a Scottish woman who took direct action to try to stop slavery in the United States is not celebrated in the country of her birth,” he said.

“To read about Frances Wright is to be awed by her. Determined, in her own words, to redress the grievous wrongs which seemed to prevail in society, she succeeded.

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She also got men to take women seriously, truly a remarkable achievement.”

Wright was born in Dundee in 1795. She and her sister Camilla became orphans at a young age and were brought up by relatives of her mother in England.

Returning to Scotland at the age of 16 to live with her great-uncle James Mylne, a professor of philosophy at Glasgow College, Wright became interested in the Greek philosophers and wrote a book about Epicurus when she was just 18 years old.

She also developed an interest in the US’s form of democratic government and travelled there with her sister in 1818 when she was 23. There she wrote a play about Switzerland’s struggle for independence from Austria which was performed in New York and Philadelphia without much acclaim.

More successful was her book, Views Of Society And Manners In America, which she published in 1821 after she had returned to Britain and which caught the attention of the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. He asked her to join his circle of leading thinkers whose criticisms of religion made an impression on Wright.

She then travelled to France, returning to the US in 1824 where the French Marquis de Lafayette, a key figure in the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, introduced her to Thomas Jefferson.

Visits to utopian communities, including one run by the Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen, inspired her to start her own in Tennessee.

Her plan “for the gradual abolition of slavery in the United States” involved the buying of slaves, whereby the money earned from their labour was set aside to pay back the cost of buying them. Once their five-year term was up, the slaves would be set free. Her community, called Nashoba, fell apart when she became seriously ill with what may have been malaria or sunstroke.

She left for Europe to recover her health, returning later to wind down her experiment and in 1830, she chartered a ship and went with the slaves to Haiti, which had become independent in 1804 and where they could live as free men and women.

After Wright returned to the US, she became co-editor with Robert Owen’s son, also Robert, of the Free Enquirer and began campaigning and lecturing for equal education opportunities for women and other subjects, including abolition and women’s suffrage, as well as marriage and property law reform. In doing this, she is recognised as America’s first campaigner for woman’s rights.

She said: “However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.”

She was the first woman in the United States to talk in public to both men and women. So popular were her lectures that Fanny Wright societies were established to further her views. Not everyone was happy about her promotion of social reforms and criticism of religion and she was dubbed “a female monster” by the New York American.

Undeterred, Wright joined the Working Men’s Party and became an activist in the Popular Health movement which argued for

women’s involvement in medicine and health. Her own health began to break down, however, and she retired from the lecture circuit to Cincinnati where she died in 1852.

On her gravestone is the inscription: “I have wedded the cause of human improvement, staked on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.”

Shepherd said he hoped his new book would help give Wright the recognition she deserves.

“Frances Wright is one of my heroes: a Dundee woman who took direct action to end slavery, and when this failed, furthered the cause of woman’s rights, the first in America to do so,” he said. “The world is a better place because of Frances Wright.”