Jen McCreight, alias Blag Hag, is a little miffed about the Brainz.org list of the Top 50 Most Brilliant Atheists. Not only are there just three women on the list, but those three women are Katherine Hepburn, Jodie Foster and Ayn Rand. Yikes.

McCreight rattles off some of the prominent names left off, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Marie Curie. It’s a good list, and I’d add that Brainz.org’s failure to include Elizabeth Cady Stanton is inexcusable, particularly since Stanton’s stock among intellectual historians is rising.

Let me just throw one more name on the list: Frances Wright (1795-1852). Frances Wright – “Fanny” to her associates – was a major part of the Freethought movement during the late 1820s and 1830s. She was a gifted speaker, writer and political organizer, and someone who deserves to be remembered.

Of course, there are reasons that Wright has been forgotten. She was Scottish and was only active in America for a few years at a time. She was also an all-purpose radical, and she’s as likely to be remembered as an abolitionist or the founder of the utopian Nashoba Commune as an atheist. Towards the end of her career, in the 1830s, she seems to have grown bored with religious wrangling and focused more on economic reform.

Another part of the problem was the Freethought movement itself. More or less founded in the mid-1820s, the movement was a reaction to the Second Great Awakening. Wright, alongside reformers like Abner Kneeland and Robert Dale Owens, would fight a rearguard battle against the tide of evangelical Christianity, and ultimately lose. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the movement was basically a men’s club. Its members were more comfortable seeing women as passive victims of religious indoctrination than as potential allies.

Of these reformers, Wright was clearly the most infamous. In the conservative thinking of the time, society was held together by a framework of institutions that curbed the self-interest of the individual and educated them in the virtues of civic life. Since women were seen as morally superior to men, they were considered the lynch-pin of this framework. Their roles as mothers teaching children and wives supporting husbands were the bulwark against anarchy.

As a woman and a radical reformer of marriage and society, Wright threatened that more than any other person. The panic she caused shows up in the invective thrown at her. She was “the Red Harlot of Infidelity,” a “procuress of atheism and infidelity,” and of course, the “female Tom Paine.” The thought that she might lead other women into her system of atheism, free love and community scared the living hell out of American conservatives.

Wright’s name would become a label hurled by conservative at reformers and liberals. For decades, to be too radical was to be a “Wrightist.” An extreme version shows up in the final blasphemy trial of Abner Kneeland. Kneeland had escaped punishment for publishing blasphemous material three times before, and this time the prosecutor was taking no chances. He laid bare the consequences of allowing Kneeland to publish his newspaper:

Starting from this polluting fountain, I might trace the progress of vice and misery in a thousand narratives. . . how infidelity towards God leads to infidelity toward man and woman, destroys domestic peace and harmony, breaks up marriages, blunts the natural feelings and affections between parents and children, and dissolves families. I might show the origin of fraud and crime in young men, of lewdness and prostitution in young women. . . ,

And the final blow, associating Kneeland with that woman:

What too did Fanny Wright come here for, but to plant the standard of Infidelity, to raise an insurrection against Christianity, to make an open and gross attack upon our religious faith and our domestic happiness; to open a rendezvous to gather volunteers to enter upon a crusade against Religion, marriage, chastity, order and decency, and the very foundations of civil society? […]

If open, gross, palpable and indecent blasphemy, and all the consequence of the Fanny Wright system—atheism, community of property, unlimited lasciviousness, adultery, and the thousand evils of infidelity, receive no check, the reproach will not fall on me. […]

If marriages are dissolved, prostitution made easy and safe, moral and religious restraints removed, property invaded, and the foundations of society broken up, and property made common, and universal mischief and misery ensue, the fault will not lie on me. . . . Take care that this day you offend not God, nor injure man, that you violate not the law, and the constitution. . .

And that, finally, is probably the last reason that Frances Wright has been forgotten. After decades of being branded as “Fanny Wright men,” most atheists were probably glad to see her name slip into obscurity.

But I think it’s time to remember Wright as one of the great Freethinkers in that dark period between Jefferson and Ingersoll. She was an abolitionist, a feminist and a great advocate for liberty in all its forms. I’m proud to be a Wrightist.