Founding Radicals:

Frances Wright and the Women Who Shaped a Young America

OUT FEBRUARY 2027 from LYONS PRESS

A new look at once famous—and notorious—progressive American women

by Eleanor Rust and Tristra Newyear

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Meet the underappreciated yet fascinating early nineteenth-century women who dared to pursue America’s cherished values of liberty and justice for all

Founding Radicals tells the eye-opening stories of American radical speaker, newspaper editor, and philosopher Frances Wright along with a dozen other historically impactful women who were active in the first decades of the American republic. In a time shaped by the revolutionary fervor of the eighteenth century, filled with mavericks and firebrands creating a new country, these women stood out for breaking boundaries and inspiring powerful political and literary change.

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  • "With accessible and engaging prose, Newyear and Rust create the historical contexts for Fanny Wright’s writing, public speaking, and social activism. Along the way they share the stories of other forgotten women who fought for equal rights and paved the path for later Suffragettes and activists. This book is a must-read for everyone interested in women’s voices and social reform. It will remind them that a host of other women have preceded them, adding hope and strength to the ongoing fights."

    —Etta Madden, author of Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks, managing editor of Utopian Studies, and professor of English Emerita, Missouri State University

  • Eleanor Rust and Tristra Newyear go boldly where their heroines did. Impassioned and well-researched, Founding Radicals is a delightful book with an important message about the ways we remember and forget."

    — Elizabeth Cobbs, Fearless Women: Feminist Patriots from Abigail Adams to Beyoncé

  • “Founding Radicals is an engaging romp through American radical traditions centered on the life of the so-called “Red Harlot of Infidelity,” Fanny Wright. Lively, accessible, and well-researched, the book introduces readers to an often-neglected and much-maligned figure who was, in her own time, a frequently-invoked epithet meant to keep women activists from challenging the boundaries of respectability and Christian orthodoxy. Read this book and resist!"

    —Lori Ginzberg, “the author of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life and Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History. 

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