The women's rights movement also gained momentum in this climate of reform. In 1825, Frances Wright, a lecturer on such controversial topics as equal rights and birth control, moved from England to America. In 1828, Sarah Josepha Hale, advocate for women's education, became editor of the Ladies' Magazine in Boston. In 1837, she became editor of Godey's Lady's Book in Philadelphia. Transcendentalist and reformer Margaret Fuller tackled such issues as marriage, the employment of women, and prostitution in her controversial and influential Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which was published in 1845 and sold out within a week. In 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first in a series of annual women's conventions in Seneca Falls, New York. Suffrage, property rights, and divorce were debated. Two years later, a national women's convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts. Also in 1848, the Boston Female Medical School, the country's first medical school for women, opened. In the same year, New York State granted property rights to women commensurate to those for men. New, more radical suffrage periodicals arose. Amelia Bloomer's Lily appeared in 1849, Una in 1853.
The reform of society through the establishment of utopian communities was a phenomenon of the 1840s. Religiously based communities (the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania, for example) had existed in America in the eighteenth century. The Harmony Society, a religious group, had come to America in 1804, under the direction of George Rapp, and established itself in Pennsylvania, then in Indiana. In 1824, the Harmony Society reestablished itself in Pennsylvania in a community called Economy. New Harmony, founded by Robert Owen in 1825 at the Harmonists' Indiana site, was the first secular utopian community in this country.
