Background
Robert Dale Owen was born in Glasgow, Scotland on November 9, 1801. He was the eldest son of Robert Owen.
Robert Dale Owen was born in Glasgow, Scotland on November 9, 1801. He was the eldest son of Robert Owen.
He attended the school his father had established at New Lanark. After studying for 4 years at Hofwyl, Switzerland, he came home to head his old school, which he celebrated in his An Outline of the System of Education at New Lanark (1824).
In 1825 Owen joined his father in his New Harmony, Ind. , experiment, where he taught and edited its Gazette. He was impressed by the idealism of the social reformer Frances Wright, who was at New Harmony in 1825, and toured Europe with her. When Owen returned to New Harmony he found it in decay; still bent on social change, he organized a group of "Free Enquirers" who repudiated religion, exalted education for all, and urged lenient divorce laws and fairer distribution of wealth. Owen moved to New York City in 1829, and with Frances Wright urged his causes in the Sentinel and the Free Enquirer, as well as through the short-lived New York Working Men's party.
In 1836 Owen was elected for the first of three terms in the Indiana Legislature. There he advocated liberal causes, including universal education. In 1842 he was sent as a regular Democrat to the U. S. Congress. During his second term in Congress he prepared the bill (1845) creating the Smithsonian Institution. Defeated for a third term in Congress, Owen helped liberalize rights for women in Indiana. President Franklin Pierce appointed him chargé d'affaires for Naples, Italy, in 1853. Back in America 5 years later, Owen joined other antislavery Democrats in crossing over to the Republican party. He was a moderate on slavery, but the increasing gulf between pro and antislavery forces gave contemporary distinction to such writings as The Wrong of Slavery (1864). In Italy, Owen had been converted, like his father, to spiritualism, and he wrote eloquently on its behalf in Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860) and The Debatable Land between This World and the Next (1872).
(Format Paperback Subject Body Mind Spirit)
Like his father, Owen converted to Spiritualism and was the author of two books on the subject.
He distinguished himself as an influential member of the Indiana General Assembly during his first term by securing appropriations for the state's tax-supported public school system. In addition, Owen was instrumental in introducing legislation and argued in support of widows and married women's property rights, but the bill was defeated. He also proposed laws granting women greater freedom of divorce.
Quotations: In The authenticity of the Bible (1833), Owen remarked :"For a century and a half, then, after Jesus' death, we have no means whatever of substantiating even the existence of the Gospels, as now bound up in the New Testament. There is a perfect blank of 140 years; and a most serious one it is. "
Indiana House of Representatives
In 1832 Owen married Mary Jane Robinson in a ceremony repudiating male dominance.
He married Lottie W. Kellogg in 1876.