Fanny Wright

Fanny Wright was born on September 6, 1795.  Both her parents died when she was just three years old and she was brought up by her relatives including James Milne, a "progressive philosopher, who encouraged Fanny to question conventional ideas".  She spent time in the United States beginning in 1818 and after returning to England she wrote and published a book titled Views of Society and Manners in America (1821) in which she praised the value of American democracy.  The most significant accomplishment of her life was in 1825 when she purchased 2000 acres of land and populated the land with slaves whom she bought, liberated them and granted them land.  Wright's experimental community raised controversy because it went against the conventional norms of the time.  She encouraged sexual freedom, in her view marriage was a discriminatory institution with the solution being free love, she articulated her own dress code for women including "bodices, ankle length pantaloons, and a dress cut to above the knee".  In 1828 after her communal experiment failed, Wright and Robert Dale Owen planned for the "former slaves to be sent to the black republic of Haiti".  She later became involved in the Workingmen's Party in New York.

Whitman drew influence from Wright's teachings as seen in his own writings.  Her radical ideas involving free love, women's rights, stance on abolishing slavery, experiment in utopian community, and the workforce must have had some profound meaning for Whitman.  And growing up in New York, he was constantly being exposed to the political radicalism and religious fanaticism of that period.  Let's face it, Leaves of Grass is a radical text that touches upon all sorts of aspects of life in America and nature.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/REwright.htm