Anna Doyle Wheeler, born in 1785, grew up in County Tipperary, Ireland. Her father was a Church of Ireland cleric, though he died when she was just two. At the age of fifteen she met and married (against the wishes of her family) Frances Massey Wheeler, who was nineteen at the time. Though they had six children in the twelve years they were together, only two of them, both girls, lived past infancy.

The marriage was an abusive one, and though Anna found solace in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, in 1812 she fled with her children to the Isle of Guernsey, where she stayed for four years winning acclaim from the aristocratic and rich. After four years she began to travel. She even went back to Ireland a few years after her husband’s death in 1820, but she eventually ended up in Paris.

In 1825 she co-wrote The Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Restrain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery with William Thompson, whose socialist and economic theories Anna had been impressed by. She was also connected to the Saint-Simonian women’s journal Tribune des Femmes, translated articles for The Crisis, and was a well known lecturer at a time when women simply didn’t do Such Things. She died in 1848.1

 

1 McFadden, Margaret, Hypatia’s Daughter. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996.