SOCIAL ORDER AND WOMEN’S ROLES IN THE UTOPIAN NOVELS OF
EDWARD BELLAMY, H.G. WELLS, AND CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
Stephanee Andraea Ruiz
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2009
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
HISTORY
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
FALL
2009
SOCIAL ORDER AND WOMEN’S ROLES IN THE UTOPIAN NOVELS OF
EDWARD BELLAMY, H.G. WELLS, AND CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
A Thesis
by
Stephanee Andraea Ruiz
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Chloe S. Burke
__________________________________, Second Reader
Rebecca M. Kluchin
____________________________
Date
ii
Student: Stephanee Andraea Ruiz
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University
format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to
be awarded for the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
Mona L. Siegel
Department of History
iii
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
SOCIAL ORDER AND WOMEN’S ROLES IN THE UTOPIAN NOVELS OF
EDWARD BELLAMY, H.G. WELLS, AND CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
by
Stephanee Andraea Ruiz
In Looking Backward, A Modern Utopia, and Moving the Mountain, Edward Bellamy,
H.G. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, respectively, refashioned conceptions of
women’s roles as the basis for their visions of economic and social order. Although each
of these authors offered his or her own method for creating new forms of social order, all
started from the premise that order will follow from universal access to education,
satisfying work, and a high quality of food, clothing and shelter because these provisions
will allow women to fulfill their highest duty: they can become mothers to children who
are healthier in mind, body, and spirit that they otherwise would be, and so continuously
improve the physical, mental, and moral health of humanity.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Chloe S. Burke
_______________________
Date
iv
DEDICATION
For Nellie Bailey Worley,
an extraordinary grandmother
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some theses come together easily, while others take shape only after many false
starts. This is one of the latter. It would never have seen the light of day without the
patient effort of faculty mentors who listened to my early ideas and who provided
encouragement when one after the other faltered. Chloe Burke, who agreed to be my
faculty advisor almost two years ago, provided space to let me sort my ideas, while
patiently, and repeatedly, helping me comprehend the aspects I kept missing. In its many
stages, this thesis also needed the patient attention of editors. My father, Gordon Wood,
read many early drafts, and in the final stages, Patsy Hardin stepped in, helping me
understand what I was trying to say, and then making sure I said it. Any errors that
remain are mine. Thank you to all of you.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication ..................................................................................................................... v
Acknowledgments....................................................................................................... vi
Chapter
INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1
1. HISTORICAL METHOD AND CONTEXT IN BELLAMY
WELLS, AND GILMAN .......................................................................................5
2. LOOKING BACKWARD: WOMEN IN THE YEAR 2000 ...................................22
3. A MODERN UTOPIA: WOMEN IN A UTOPIA-IN-PROGRESS ......................40
4. WOMEN CREATE STABILITY IN MOVING THE MOUNTAIN .......................59
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................77
Bibliography ................................................................................................................83
vii
1
INTRODUCTION
Three utopian novels written between 1888 and 1911 refashioned women’s roles
through improved access to education, as well as through redesigned labor and social
structures. The author’s goals were to establish social order largely by allowing women to
become better mothers to children who are healthy in mind, body, and spirit. The idea of
imagining a perfect, or near perfect world, has a long history, with Plato’s Republic
standing as an example from antiquity.1 Sir Thomas More contributed a name for the
genre in his work Utopia in the early sixteenth century, with the term derived from Greek
and literally meaning “no place” or, when spelled as “eutopia,” meaning “good place.”2
“Utopia” implies the existence of a community of people who have solved societal
problems and created an orderly environment for its members. These presumably ideal
communities are perceived as ideal only by those who share the author’s perspectives.3
Edward Bellamy, Herbert George Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the
utopian authors who are the subject of this thesis, consciously or not, utilized conceptions
of female and male gender roles, providing a basis for their imagined society, especially
in the realms of education, labor, reproduction, and motherhood. Their visions for
refashioned women’s roles proposed to establish economic order, with plentiful jobs and
meaningful work for everyone, and social order, with an adjusted hierarchical authority
structure, out of the chaos they perceived in their contemporary society. Rather than
1
Marie Louise Berneri, Journey Through Utopia (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950), 9.
2
Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander, eds., No Place Else: Explorations in
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), vii.
3
Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1999), 2-4. Berneri, 2.
2
inducing disorganization in social structures and thus a fragmentation of family and
society, developing women’s faculties to the full, and allowing them to realize these,
recreated social order, albeit in a different form than most in the nineteenth century were
accustomed to seeing. In these utopian visions, such changes ended problems with the
economy as well as those related to “delinquency, alcoholism, broken families, [and]
national minorities.”4 In these utopias, everyone has a place and a role to follow.
Although each of the authors discussed here offered his or her own method for creating a
new form of social order, all start from the premise that order will follow from universal
access to education, satisfying work, and a high quality of food, clothing, and shelter
because these provisions will allow women to fulfill their highest duty: they can become
mothers to children who are healthier in mind, body, and spirit than they otherwise would
be, and so continuously improve the physical, mental, and moral health of humanity.5
While utopian groups formed regularly from the 1780s to the present, the
frequency with which utopian novels were published peaked between 1888 and 1900, a
time of both social instability arising from industrialization and its attendant urbanization
along with increasing literacy.6 This thesis concisely examines three of the over sixty-five
4
Wolfram Fischer, "Social Tensions at Early Stages of Industrialization," Comparative Studies in
Society and History 9, no. 1 (1966): 65-66.
5
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Dover Publications, 1996; reprint, Boston: Ticknor
and Company, 1888), 130;Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Moving the Mountain," in Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland, ed. Minna Doskow
(Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1911), 75,77,82,86-87;H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia
(Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1905; reprint, 1971. References are to the 1971 edition), 180.
6
Robert L Shurter, The Utopian Novel in America, 1865-1900 (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1973;
reprint, 1975), 51-53, 70. See also John Milton Cooper Jr, Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 3. Note that Robert P. Sutton argues that utopian communities continued
to form throughout the twentieth century. See Robert P. Sutton, Communal Utopias and the American
3
utopian novels published in the United States and Britain between 1888 and 1914:
Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy, A Modern Utopia (1905) by H.G. Wells,
and Moving the Mountain (1911) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.7 Each of these works
presents a secular view of ideal world communities placed on an Earth readers at the turn
of the twentieth century would have found familiar. Looking Backward stands as the
seminal utopian work of the late nineteenth century. Subsequent utopian authors during
the next three decades either expand or refute its premises, depending on their own
political and social perspectives.8 Bellamy’s book also sparked a national political
movement, became a “bestseller in the United States,” and was widely “translated into
almost every language of the world.”9 The novel’s message even reached into the 1930s,
when Ida M. Tarbell, journalist and author of the muckraking book The History of the
Standard Oil Company (1904), wrote that no other utopia “has ever been so substantial,
so realistic, so seemingly practical [as Looking Backward]. A dream-yes-but a dream
built upon materials in our hands.”10
A Modern Utopia and Moving the Mountain contribute a comparative British
author and a feminist perspective, respectively, on women’s roles in utopia. These two
works also represent an additional realm of public discourse on social issues. Both Wells
Experience: Secular Communities, 1824-2000 (Westport: Praeger, 2004).
7
Bellamy;Gilman;Shurter, 17;Wells.
8
Lyman Tower Sargent, "Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells," Science Fiction Studies
3, no. 3 (1976): 279.
9
Sylvia E. Bowman, Edward Bellamy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), 23.
10
Ida M. Tarbell, The Forum, xcii (September, 1934), 139, quoted in Charles A Madison, "Edward
Bellamy, Social Dreamer " The New England Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1942): 466.
4
and Gilman wrote a combination of fiction and nonfiction during their literary careers,
with these utopian novels providing an alternate method of presenting their ideas. When
compared with Looking Backward, it becomes evident that Wells and Gilman expanded
on Bellamy’s views, even as they also reflected changes in eugenic theory and practice.
In order to interpret these literary works fully, it is necessary to begin with an
examination of their historical context, including that of eugenics and the centrality of
reproduction to these authors’ goals. Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of cultural and
literary history as methods for analyzing the works of Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman. The
chapter then provides the reader with details of the changes induced in nineteenth century
American and British society by industrialization and urbanization, as well as on the fears
that these changes evinced and the eugenic solutions that medical professionals and
scientists offered. Chapter 2 provides a brief biographical sketch of Bellamy, discusses
the impact of Looking Backward, and provides a synopsis of the plot. This chapter then
analyzes the details of economic and social structures that Bellamy provided in this work
to explore the relationship between proposals for women’s roles and economic and social
stability in his ideal world. Chapters 3 and 4 examine Wells and Gilman, respectively, to
provide a chronological presentation of the novels. They also follow the format of
Chapter 2, so that they first introduce the author and his or her life and then balance a
discussion of historical context with an analysis of the novels. The Conclusion identifies
patterns common to each of these works and emphasizes the attempts of the authors to
create an orderly society from the chaos they experienced in their own lives by
emphasizing women’s roles as mothers or as potential mothers.
5
Chapter 1
HISTORICAL METHOD AND CONTEXT IN BELLAMY, WELLS, AND GILMAN
Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman refashioned and reinforced cultural conceptions of
women’s roles in respect to education, labor, reproduction, and motherhood to envision
worlds wherein vital and vibrant women bore physically and mentally healthy children.
To advance this analysis, this thesis draws on literary and cultural historical methods, and
presents the real world problems of industrialization and urbanization and the fears these
conditions engendered. The solutions the novelists gave drew on their understanding of
socialism, gender roles, and eugenics. This chapter first discusses literary history as it
relates to these novels, and then establishes the social and cultural context of the turn of
the twentieth century, focusing on the societal problems related to industrialization, the
fears these challenges induced, as well the solution offered by many medical
professionals, political figures, and scientists: eugenics.
LITERARY HISTORY OF UTOPIAN NOVELS
Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman’s utopian novels examined here present detailed
accounts of world communities that have adjusted their economic and social structures to
reestablish a sense of order and security in their citizens, and in this they meet historian
Lewis Mumford’s criteria for utopian novels.1 First, he stipulated the works must be
fiction, which excludes treatises on political science. Second, the utopian work must
1
Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Peter Smith, 1941; reprint, Boni and Liveright,
Inc., 1922. Citations are to the Peter Smith edition.), 3.
6
“describe a particular state or community.”2 These states are often recognizable as
variants on existing political structures, which means that they avoid crossing the line
into the genre of fantasy.3 Third, the theme needs to focus on “the political structure of
that fictional state or community.” 4 Although, as Mumford notes, the authors might use
“a touch of romance or adventure” as devices to add interest, the focus must be on the
structure of the world.5
The authors’ visions for states that had solved societal problems prodded
contemporary readers to rethink how they interpreted their world and provided them with
skills to navigate times of “social, political, and cultural” discord.6 These authors sought
to open their readers’ minds to new ways of thinking about women’s roles, and prompted
them to conclude that the only way to bring order out of chaos lay in reevaluating
commonly held ideas about women and their roles in society.
Because the authors’ referenced their own experiences to invent their utopian
societies, it is necessary to emphasize their personal experiences and the cultural milieu in
which they lived to understand the content of their utopian novels. This historical
approach contrasts with those studies that seek to interpret a work by looking only at its
internal structure. English professor Silvia E. Bowman argued for the importance of
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., 4.
4
Ibid., 3.
5
Ibid., 5.
6
Phillip E Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xvii-xviii,2.
7
looking beyond the text to examine Bellamy and Looking Backward. She wrote, “Utopian
novels can only be fully understood, appreciated, and evaluated when they have been
fitted into the pattern of the author’s life and thought and have been viewed in their
relationship to the political, social, and economic conditions of their period.”7 English
professor Chris Ferns further reinforced this idea when he argued that utopian authors
remain intrinsically connected to reality; that they incorporated those aspects of social
reality that they appreciated while envisioning changes in those aspects they found
distasteful.8
Historians such as Milton Cantor and Daniel Aaron noted the relationship
between authors’ life experiences and their writings. Cantor, for example, effectively
showed that Bellamy saw Chicopee Falls, MA, the idyllic town of his youth, give way to
the darker side of industrialism as factories sprang up everywhere around town and the
population subsequently grew. He attempts to resolve his disillusion with these changes
in Looking Backward by envisioning a utopia that harkened back to the largely preindustrial Chicopee Falls.9 Aaron placed Bellamy’s ideas and work within a proto
progressive era, which Aaron thinks began in the early nineteenth century. He defined
this version of progressivism as a social philosophy that sought to ameliorate the effects
of industrialization rather than as the turn of the century reform movement called
7
Sylvia E. Bowman, The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy (New York: Bookman
Associates, 1958), 9.
8
Ferns, 2.
9
Milton Cantor, "The Backward Look of Bellamy's Socialism," in Looking Backward, 1988-1888:
Essays on Edward Bellamy, ed. Daphne Patai (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 23-25.
8
Progressivism.10 Aaron also noted that Bellamy was very much a product of his place and
time, writing, “He was a Yankee, will all the connotations that go with that word.”11 This
identity included worrying about being considered a “ne’er-do-well,” as people without a
definite purpose were often labeled in his day. However, to resolve that nagging fear,
Bellamy rationalized his lack of direction by recasting the purpose of living as not just
having a single career, but simply living to the fullest degree possible by whatever means
that entailed for an individual.12
Another example of contextual analysis of utopian fiction is Bowman’s 1958
biography of Bellamy, where she showed that he held the idea that “woman,” in her role
as child bearer, was something beyond human, but that “women,” in their role as
individuals, were flawed. Bowman argued that this disparity derived largely from
Bellamy’s perception that existing expectations for women’s behavior prevented them
from developing intellectual acuity and from attaining economic independence. These
conditions, as Bellamy saw them, left women clinging to superstitions and holding back
humanity’s progress.13 In Looking Backward, Bellamy envisions a world that had
corrected these inequities and which, as a result, had, in just a few generations, expanded
women’s roles, allowing them to become the “woman” he thought they had the potential
to attain. One corollary to this change was that women bore and raised physically,
10
Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1951), xi.
11
Ibid., 96.
12
Ibid., 97.
13
Bowman, Year 2000, 269-297.
9
mentally, and morally healthy children, which then nearly eliminated criminality, with its
attendant challenges to authority and order.14
Historical and literary scholar Sylvia Strauss also noted that Bellamy’s work
discussed women’s roles at the same time that “scientists, philosophers, essayists,
novelists, and politicians” were in conflict over women’s roles within society. Social
reformers, she noted, argued in favor of an expansion of women’s activities, even as
others worked to “keep women in their traditional domestic sphere, fervently believing
that the preservation of civilization depended on it.”15 At the same time, middle-class
women formed associations to support their aims, whether these were for or against
issues such as suffrage and “free love.”16 Other groups emphasized “women’s moral
influence as a force for progress,” and worked for the creation of parks and schools and
for other improvements to alleviate the poor conditions of the working class.17
English professor John R. Reed and professor of social policy Jane Lewis also
looked at historical and psychological contexts in their discussions of H.G. Wells and his
literary endeavors. Their works enriched readers’ understanding of how an author’s
experiences shape his or her beliefs about life and society and how these find expression
14
Bellamy, 97-98.
15
Daphne Patai, ed., Looking Backward, 1988-1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
16
The term “free love” had several connotations. The most prominent comes from Victoria Woodhull
and her campaign for the presidency in 1872. She associated free love with women’s ability to freely
choose a marriage mate based on love rather than on economic necessity.
17
Sylvia Strauss, "Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia," in Looking Backward, 1988-1888: Essays on
Edward Bellamy, ed. Daphne Patai (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 68-69.
10
in literature. For example, Reed drew on Wells’s autobiography to demonstrate the link
between his adolescent imaginings and his description of women in the Samurai, or
ruling class, in A Modern Utopia.18 In the article "Intimate Relations between Men and
Women: The Case of H. G. Wells and Amber Pember Reeves," Lewis discussed Wells’s
comparatively liberal views on sexuality, as seen in his affair with Reeves and in his later
relationships with other women. Lewis then shows how Wells’s integrated these views
into works such as In the Days of the Comet (1906), a novel about abrupt, yet temporary,
changes in society brought on by a comet passing near Earth, and in Ann Veronica
(1909), a book about the life of a New Woman, a college-educated, confident woman
who happily “initiates a sexual relationship with an older man.”19
Gilman’s life also provides evidence of the connection between lived experience
and literary content, again reinforcing the idea that the content of her novel can only be
fully interpreted when placed in its historical context. Historian Dolores Hayden pointed
out that Gilman’s father had abandoned her mother and that, consequently, Gilman, her
mother, and her brother lived with various relatives during her childhood, moving
“nineteen times in…eighteen years.”20 Hayden also noted Gilman’s later interaction with
Bellamy’s Nationalists, Socialists, and other philosophers of the day, including
Sociologist Lester Ward, and who argued that humanity could only progress when
18
John R Reed, The Natural History of H.G. Wells (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), 3,19,69.
Note that Reed did not provide any further explanation for Wells’s adolescent imaginings.
19
See Jane Lewis, "Intimate Relations between Men and Women: The Case of H. G. Wells and Amber
Pember Reeves," History Workshop 37 (1994): 76-78.
20
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American
Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 184.
11
women gained their freedom from society’s economic shackles. Hayden’s exploration of
Gilman’s life allowed Hayden to connect Gilman’s experience to the development of her
political beliefs as expressed in her writings. Gilman’s proposal for communal housing to
help mothers care for their children, for example, takes on a greater depth of meaning in
light of knowing that Gilman’s own mother struggled to provide for her children after
being abandoned by her husband.21
HISTORICAL CONTEXT: PROBLEMS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION
In the late eighteenth century, industrialization arose in England as mechanical
inventions made it possible to harness steam and water power to mass produce textiles
and other goods, including improved agricultural implements. In America,
industrialization began about one hundred years later, in the 1790s. In these two
countries, as well as in other nations across Europe that also began to develop their
industrial capacity, the rise of mechanical manufacture resulted in the development of
factory towns. Continual innovation in mass production meant that material goods people
had formerly made on their own, or purchased from their local artisans, could now be
obtained for less money than before. This was a boon for consumers, but at the same time
made many artisans’ work obsolete.22
Another factor in industrialization was the expansion of railway and steam ship
transportation, which made shipping food over long distances profitable. One result was
21
Ibid., 183-189.
22
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1998), 44-45,50.
12
that Russia, Canada, and the United States sold their excess foodstuff to middle European
countries for less money than it could be grown for in those states. This event displaced
agricultural workers, who subsequently sought employment in the cities, especially in
America.23
The rapid conglomeration of migrants to cities, either from the countryside or
from other nations, changed the residential landscape so that rich and poor often rubbed
elbows. As historian Daniel T. Rogers explains, “handsome shopping thoroughfares for
the bourgeoisie [stood] by acres of pawn shops, push carts, and secondhand stores for the
masses.”24 It also pointed to the need for a uniform method of supplying services to urban
inhabitants. Up to this time, the middle and upper classes had contracted with private
parties to provide water and to haul away their waste products.25 The poorly paid worker
could not afford these services and so large areas of the city were without clean water
supplies and sanitation services.
The shift to wage based labor also undermined community based support systems.
In an agricultural or small town setting, people falling into economic distress likely had
family or community to help them survive until their circumstances improved. In the city,
no such support system existed, so that accidents or capricious factory owners and
landlords could instantly deny workers shelter and wages. This unpredictability led to
23
Ibid., 49.
24
Ibid., 48.
25
Ibid.
13
“bread riots, urban mobbing, and peasant uprising.”26 Although these were not new
developments, the fact that they took place in cities where the upper and lower classes
mingled made them seem especially problematic.27
As noted above, displaced agricultural workers migrated to cities. In late
nineteenth century United States, the influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern
Europe shifted population demographics in major cities from a largely homogenous to a
heterogeneous grouping. The entrance of these immigrants introduced new religious
customs and languages, and shifted the locus of authority from the middle or upper-class
white male to figures that better represented each minority group.28 Britain also dealt with
immigration issues, but on a smaller scale, with the Irish providing the most noticeable
immigrant group during the middle portion of the nineteenth century.29 In the utopian
novels discussed in this thesis, Bellamy and Wells made immigration little more than a
footnote, assuming that problems with immigrants would diminish once their utopian
economic and social policies were in place. Only Gilman directly addressed solutions to
the heterogeneity of immigrants in America.
Problems deriving from industrialization fostered fears of societal chaos among
social commentators and sociologists as they perceived increasing incidents of crime and
26
Ibid., 51.
27
Ibid.
28
Robert Liebman and Michael Polen, "Perspectives on Policing in Nineteenth-Century America,"
Social Science History 2, no. 3 (1978): 346-347; David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geiography of
Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 55.
29
Jeffrey G. Williamson, Coping with City Growth During the British Industrial Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 132-142.
14
challenges to authority by workers, youth, and women. The commentators and
sociologists in Europe, England, and America framed these problems in different ways,
depending on their particular concerns. In the United States and England, what many in
Europe called the “Social Question” became more precisely identified as “social
problems,” “social pathology,” or “social disorganization,” which denoted problems such
as “delinquency, alcoholism, broken families, [and] national minorities.”30 Whether
perceived or real, the foregoing problems indicated a breakdown in authority, whether
from direct challenges to authority or from the absence of an authority figure in the home.
Social commentators, sociologists, and alienists, as psychiatrists were then called,
also worried about death, which can be interpreted in a few ways. One of these involved
physical death through suicide. In the United States, England, and Europe, many alienists
attributed the increase in suicide to problems stemming from nineteenth century
civilization, which for them was synonymous with industrialization and urbanization, or
as they called it, modernity. Implying that industrialization broke down establish
community authority, French alienist Etienne Esquirol, writing in 1820, argued that
without an established, and presumably, male authority in their lives, many men’s
“passions” were left ungoverned and undirected. This state of being left them susceptible
to suicide when faced with life’s difficulties because they might find themselves
“defenseless against the sufferings of life’s predicaments, against internal anguish,
against the vicissitudes of fortune” and subject to perceiving suicide as their only
30
Fischer: 65-66.
15
option.31 Although any increase in suicide was likely more perceived than real, the
commonly-held perception that incidents of suicide were more numerous led alienists in
the United States, England, and Europe to translate each other’s works and to debate the
issue in professional journals. The question of suicide also found its way into the popular
press.32
For many, the antidote to this effect of industrialization lay in a return to
traditional rural hierarchical patterns where women remained focused on home and
hearth and thus dependent upon men, with commentators and alienists agreeing that
“familial roles [provided] the primary defense against the forces of social
disintegration.”33 Indeed, common belief among alienists and the general populace held
that women committed suicide only when they transgressed social conventions and
entered into the public realm. These alienists assumed that women had a “natural”
affinity for family and an inferior intellect, which supposedly made them better able than
men to withstand the vicissitudes of life and so less likely than men to commit suicide as
long as they remained in the private domain of home and hearth.34
However, at the same time that many in the professional alienist community and
in the popular press were arguing for the importance of preserving traditional hierarchical
order to avoid suicides, expanding, if still limited, economic and educational
31 Howard I. Kushner, "Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Medical and
Social Thought," Journal of Social History 26, no. 3 (1993): 464.
32
Ibid.: 464,465.
33
Ibid.: 462,464-465,467.
34
Ibid.: 470.
16
opportunities for women were making it easier for them to live outside of the authority of
father or husband.35 Additionally, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw
the development of the “New Woman,” a term used to describe women who challenged
nineteenth century middle class American and English expectations of female behavior.
These women cut their hair short, “demand[ed]…access to higher education, the vote and
the right to earn a decent living…[and] challeng[ed]…views of femininity and female
sexuality.”36 Part of the reason these challenges to authority were such a point of
contention is explained by the idea of gender, a term that is often used as a synonym for
“women,” but which in its deeper context questions how a society in any given time and
place define both the relationship between men and women and what it means to be a
man or woman in that time and place. Studies of gender have shown that ideas about men
and women and about how they should relate to each other have changed over time; that
they are based on cultural needs and values rather than on innate physiological
differences.37 Thus, any time women move into what men have constructed as their realm
of influence, this creates a challenge to male authority and undermines their feeling of
control, thus leading to perceptions of chaos.
Other challenges to the existing patriarchal authority structure came from calls for
an expansion of sexual freedom for women, so that women would be in control of their
35
Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870-1900 (Boston:
Brill, 2005), 94-96.
36
Ann Heilman and Margaret Beetham, New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and
International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930 (London: Routledge, 2004), 1.
37
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999), x-xi.
17
sexuality and free either to decline their husband’s sexual advances or to freely engage in
unmarried sexual activity without censure from society.38 The prospect of women
becoming financially independent and able to determine the course of their sexual lives
not only promised to further undermine patriarchal authority, but in the interpretations of
suicide which held that women committed suicide in greater numbers when they entered
the male sphere, also threatened to increase the number of deaths among women who
might otherwise meet ideal middle-class standards for wives and mothers.
Another fear related to death revolved around what became known as “race
suicide.” 39Under this rubric, many white elites in the United States and England feared
the demise of the white middle class as a source of cultural authority because they
perceived a wide differential in birth rates, which seemed to follow from women
abandoning white middle class values of home and hearth. These elites concluded that
part of the problem came from women bearing fewer children, because they were more
interested in demanding greater freedom of activity for themselves in the public sphere.
As the elites interpreted the situation, the choices these women made reduced the birth
rate of families in their own group was falling while the birth rate among non-elites
occurred at a prodigious rate. They extrapolated that a continuance of this trend would
mean the eventually end of the white elite class. The non-elites included members of the
working class, as well as immigrants, especially in America because many of the latter
38
Linda Gordon, "Voluntary Motherhood; The Beginnings of Feminist Birth Control Ideas in the
United States," Feminist Studies 1, no. 3/4 (1973): 11-12,17.
39
Sara Watts. Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire.
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 83-85.
18
retained their own habits, beliefs, and mores, which introduced competing value systems
in American society.40 Because physicians and sanitarium superintendents, among others,
asserted that immigrants and working class whites were responsible for a majority of
crime, and because nineteenth and early twentieth century scientific thought held that
criminal tendencies were inheritable traits, many of these authority figures turned to
medicine for answers.41
Beginning in the 1820s, some American physicians became interested in heredity
as a transmitter of criminal tendencies. In 1849, one of these, Gideon Lincecum,
advocated for sterilization through castration to prevent men who committed crimes from
fathering children who would presumably grow up to become criminals like
themselves.42 Although Texas politicians did not enact his proposals, other “judges,
juries, medical authorities, and vigilantes” in Texas, as well as authorities in other states
forcibly sterilized numerous black men as well as “prison inmates and mental health
patients” without the benefit of legal sanction in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s.43 In 1888,
Orpheus Everts, superintendent at the Cincinnati Sanitarium, advocated for the castration
of criminals who might otherwise transmit their criminal behavior to future generations.44
40
Frank P. Sargent, "Problems of Immigration," Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 24 (1904): 156; Daniel J Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human
Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 88.
41
Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 11-17.
42
Ibid., 11-12.
43
Ibid., 12.
44
Ibid., 12-13.
19
Additional calls for the asexualization of men and women by removing testes in
men and ovaries in women became more numerous in the 1890s. Although many
advocates were worried about the connection between crime and heredity, others focused
on women who practiced masturbation and on those who engaged in intimate
relationships with other women.45 In all of these situations, the individuals challenged
white middle-class male authority, either by depriving the latter of their material property
or their perceived property in women.
In the midst of these calls for castration to end societal chaos caused by criminals
and women who challenged male authority by taking control of their own sexuality in the
United States, a separate advocate for the importance of heredity came from Sir Francis
Galton, a British scientific aristocrat. He also adapted ideas of heredity into a new branch
of study he called “eugenics.”46 The term, coined in the early 1880s while Galton was
writing the book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development (1883), literally
translates to “well born.”47 His works and those that followed proposed that heredity
determined physical health and behavior patterns, including things like intractable
poverty, criminality, and immorality. The conclusion that many scientists and others
interested in heredity drew was two-fold: first, those with desirable traits, or those they
labeled as “fit,” should be encouraged to reproduce; and second, those with undesirable
45
Ibid., 13-21.
46
Harry Bruinius, Better for all the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's
Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 2006), 36-37.
47
Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
(New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2003), 16.
20
physical and behavioral traits, or those labeled “unfit,” should be prevented from
reproducing.48 The terms that historians have used to identify these two aims are
“positive” and “negative” eugenics, respectively.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many who were interested in
improving humanity through reproduction also held the Lamarckian idea of inheritance,
which stated that children inherited the traits that their parents acquired during their
lifetime. This meant that a child born to a parent who had been maimed by an injury
might pass on that characteristic to his or her children.49 This view continued to be
popular among scientists, physicians, and the lay public in spite of the fact that biologist
August Wisemann had ably refuted this belief in the 1890s.50
By the late 1890s, the development of the vasectomy made it possible for
physicians to render male criminals and others they declared “unfit” sterile without
interfering with sexual function. Because physicians noted that castration induced
depression and prevented men from fully enjoying life, the availability of the vasectomy
allowed proponents of eugenic aims to present this option as a humane answer to
castration and as a deterrent to reproduction. Some doctors held that “unfit” women,
spontaneously developed conditions such as endometriosis and inflammation of the
fallopian tubes, and so were less able to become pregnant.51 The potential success of
48
Ibid., 18-19.
49
Kevles, 66.
50
Ibid., 30.
51
Largent, 28-30.
21
these proposals promised to end societal chaos.
Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman held a combined view of genetics and environment
as determiners of heredity, although they differed in the emphasis they placed on each.
Bellamy, writing in 1888 before Wisemann’s refutation of Lamarckian inheritance,
placed an emphasis on environment, with people making wise reproductive choices
because their environment had improved. Although Wells and Gilman also envisioned
ideal living and working conditions for individuals in their utopian communities, the state
regulated selective reproduction in their utopias. The diversity of these authors’
approaches to establishing beneficial reproduction represents the diversity of eugenic
solutions to social problems that was advocated at the turn of the twentieth century.
22
Chapter 2
LOOKING BACKWARD: WOMEN IN THE YEAR 2000
Reviewing Edward Bellamy’s early life, shows how his experiences shaped his
writings, including his approach to economics. Born in Chicopee Falls, MA in 1850,
Bellamy came from a family of Calvinist ministers.52 As a young adult, he spent a year in
college in the United States, and then attended a university in Germany.53 When traveling
in Europe, he observed urban living conditions, which made him acutely aware of the
inequalities between classes.54 Upon his return to the United States, he took up the study
of law, but became a “journalist and fiction writer” rather than a lawyer.55 Bellamy
married in 1872. After becoming father to two children, he became more thoughtful
about the world his children were living in, and began to apply himself to working out
possible solutions to the social and economic problems that he had noted earlier in his
life.56 According to historian Daniel Aaron, Bellamy’s journals and other writings
describe a man in search of himself, a man desiring “to become a ‘success’ in the
transcendental sense: that is, to enlarge his mind, develop the chords of sympathy, and to
pulsate with ‘the rhythm of infinity.’”57 This concerted endeavor led Bellamy to write his
52
Madison: 444-445.
53
Ibid.: 445-446.
54
Edward Bellamy, "How I Wrote "Looking Backward"," in Edward Bellamy Speaks Again! (Kansas
City: The Peerage Press, 1937; reprint, Originally published in the Ladies' Home Journal, April 1894), 217.
55
Aaron, 96.
56
Bellamy, "How I Wrote," 222.
57
Aaron, 97.
23
utopian work Looking Backward (1888), in which a young man of 1887 awakens in the
year 2000 and discovers how the world has solved its problems.
The book sold briskly, with roughly 370,000 copies purchased between 1888 and
1891.58 Its popularity also spread beyond America’s national borders, with translations
appearing in numerous languages including “French, German, Italian, and Spanish.”59
This work also moved beyond the realm of leisure reading, as it provided a catalyst for
the formation of the Nationalists, a grass-roots political party that promoted the novel’s
economic and social ideas.60 In addition to inspiring people to political action, Looking
Backward also had the distinction of setting the shape for utopian novels for the next
three decades in the United States and Britain, with some reinforcing Bellamy’s ideas and
others challenging them.61 One of the latter was William Morris’ News From Nowhere
(1890), which sought to discredit the vision of gradual and peaceful change Bellamy’s
novel offered.62 Though both authors used socialism as a starting point, Morris held that
revolution would be the only way to change society.63 Whether through gradual change
58
Shurter, 138. Shurter here reprints numbers provided by Houghton Mifflin, publishers of Looking
Backward, in their advertisements for the book. He lists 175,000 in November 1889, with numbers
increasing to 371,000 in January 1891. However, he fails to specify if the publisher was listing sales or
published copies of the work.
59
"Edward Bellamy Dead," The New York Times, May 23 1898.
60
John Hope Franklin, "Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement " The New England Quarterly
11, no. 4 (1938): 765.
61
Sargent, "Themes in Utopian Fiction," 279.
62
William Morris, "News From Nowhere," in Three Works by William Morris (1890; reprint, Reprinted
with an introduction by A.L. Morton. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986. Page references are to the 1986
edition.).
63
A.L. Morton, "Introduction," in Three Works by William Morris (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1986).
24
or revolution, the basis of socialism promised to give women more power. An in depth
examination of Looking Backward shows that Bellamy’s proposals for women’s roles in
education, labor, and motherhood make women’s reproduction central to his goal of
eliminating societal chaos.64
Looking Backward, set initially in Boston in 1887, relates the experiences of the
fictional Julian West, a self-described rich, idle, and educated man, who attempts to build
a house so that he and his fiancée, Edith, can be married. Unfortunately for West, a
“series of strikes” that “had been nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of
1873” prevents the laborers from completing the home, and delays the marriage.65
Bellamy catapults his protagonist to the year 2000 by making West an insomniac who
had a subterranean sleeping room built into the family mansion that completely cut off
sound from the outside world. In addition to being encased in concrete, the room is
hermetically sealed and lined with asbestos, presumably to facilitate West’s survival.
Having consulted a hypnotist to help him sleep, West expects to be awakened by his
servant the following morning. For whatever reason, the manservant never appears, and
the protagonist sleeps through the next 113 years until new construction on the site of his
home awakens him.66
Now in the year 2000, West meets Dr. Leete and his family, who are descendants
of his fiancée Edith. Throughout the rest of the novel, Dr. Leete, and to a lesser extent his
64
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 130;Gilman, 75,77,82,86-87;Wells, 180.
65
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 3,7.
66
Ibid., 3-4,9-12.
25
daughter, who is also coincidentally named Edith, discuss with West the state of the
world before and after the implementation of societal changes that created this utopia.
What follows is an extensive description of an ideal world in which all the corporations
and other business ventures have consolidated into “a single syndicate representing the
people” and their common interests.67 While Bellamy does not eliminate all unpleasant
work, he describes a system whereby the more arduous and unpleasant tasks require the
fewest hours of labor each day, with more desirable work requiring more hours of labor.68
In this utopian state, the single syndicate replaced private enterprise and now supplies
material everyone’s needs. The new framework ended individual profit and this, in
conjunction with universally available necessities of life, dispensed with corruption and
improved the overall behavior of the population.69 All individuals, men and women, are
now employees of the one great employer, and view work as one would military service,
as a duty to the state. After being educated to the age of twenty-one, men and women
begin their service to the state. The first three years are spent learning “habits of
obedience, subordination, and devotion to duty.”70 People work until the age of fortyfive, at which point they retire. Machinery and an efficient use of resources virtually
eliminated the need for housework, and thus also freed women to be employed by the
67
Ibid., 27.
68
Ibid., 32-33.
69
Ibid., 29.
70
Ibid., 59.
26
state, rather than tied to their individual homes and families.71 In the end, West remains in
the year 2000 and looks forward to marrying Edith, thus finally getting the marriage he
hoped for at the beginning of the novel.
One of the social problems Bellamy eliminated in his vision of utopia was
unequal access to education. In the latter portion of the nineteenth century, the level of
schooling a person received in the United States depended on the combination of state
requirements and the individual’s race, class, and gender. White society often provided
inadequate facilities and equipment for black children. Immigrants and working-class
whites often had to send their children to work instead of to school once they were
beyond the age of compulsory education, which in 1888 meant that a person might spend
just five to eight years in school with most states setting school terms lengths at twelve to
twenty weeks.72
Another problem that Bellamy eliminated was lack of ready access to education
for women of the middle classes. Although this class of had increasing access to colleges
from the middle of the nineteenth century, they still faced difficulties.73 They could
attend either all female colleges or those that matriculated men and women, although
only about half the colleges that existed in 1879 were coeducational institutions.
However, the equal opportunity to enter these latter colleges did not automatically grant
71
Ibid., 124.
72
W. A. Cook, "A Brief Survey of the Development of Compulsory Education in the United States,"
The Elementary School Teacher 12, no. 7 (1912): 333-334.
73
Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty (New York: Free Press 1989; reprint, 1997, References are to the
1997 edition), 139,147;Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 249-252.
27
equality of educational content. Because many school authorities assumed that men
would use their skills in the public area while women would use theirs in the home, they
created two separate courses of study for men and women. For example, women at the
University of Wisconsin in the 1870s could only gain access to regular college
curriculum if men had not already taken all the seats in the classes. They also only had
access to the library on certain days so that men and women were not present in the
building simultaneously.74
Part of the reason for gender-based curriculum as well as for resistance to
granting women an education equal to men lay in lingering medical and scientific views
of the female physiognomy. These enduring perspectives had followed from “scientific”
comparisons of the “weight of the brain, the strength of the muscles, the depth of the
respiration, the powers of digestion, [and] the richness of the blood, [which] established
that the typical woman, wherever she appears, must be an inferior animal to the typical
man, wherever he may be found.”75 Besides concluding that women were substandard
beings, many physicians and scientists held that the development of women’s
reproductive organs precluded an extensive education, as the body could only develop
one aspect: the body or the mind. Because they held that women’s true purpose in life
was to produce children, and not just any children, but intelligent and healthy offspring
who could contribute to white civilization’s continuing survival, they argued that women
74
Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York:
Hill and Want, 1984), 122-129.
75
Mary Putman Jacobi, "Shall Women Practice Medicine?" The North American Review 134, no. 302
(1882): 62.
28
should focus on developing healthy bodies rather than educated minds.76
To help prove this point, physicians and scientists in the latter portion of the
nineteenth century created surveys designed to highlight correlations between education
and reproductive dysfunctions.77 These questionnaires asked women about the duration
of their education, about their occupation, and most importantly, about their experiences
with menstruation, including the age of menarche and any discomfort during
menstruation. Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, one of the roughly 400 women licensed to
practice medicine in the United States in the latter portion of the nineteenth century,
correlated the data and demonstrated that education had not affected these women’s
health negatively.78 While some men, such as Harvard professor Edward Clarke, argued
that responses to such surveys proved that college education caused “dysmenorrhea,
chronic and acute overitis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria, neuralgia and the like,” others
disagreed.79 In 1877, Jacobi published the book, The Question of Rest for Women During
Menstruation, in which she also used women’s responses to one of these surveys to refute
the medical idea that women become unfit for work in body and mind during
menstruation and so should be forced to rest at that time.
In Looking Backward, Bellamy redresses the existing inequities in education and
76
Evans, 139.
77
Mary Putman Jacobi M.D., The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation (New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons, 1887; reprint, 1978), 5-6,223-232. Jacobi: 71.
78
Jacobi M.D., 26-63.
79
Edward Clark, Sex in Education: or A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873; reprint, reprint ed., New
York: Arno Press, 1972).quoted in Clinton, 223.
29
implicitly rejects the idea that a college education would harm women’s reproductive
potential. He envisions a utopian society that educates all men and women through the
age of twenty-one. His goal, as outlined in the novel, is to prepare men and women to be
pleasant company for fellow citizens and to be ready for their careers in service to the
nation. As Dr. Leete explains, everyone receives the “education of a gentleman” because
everyone wants to “have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons.”80 In
accordance with contemporary proposals to mitigate mental strain by balancing it with
physical strength training, education in Bellamy’s utopia combines mental and physical
exercise in children from the age of six to twenty-one.81 The result is an improvement in
people’s health. West notes that the students he saw at the university were “stalwart
young men and fresh, vigorous maidens” and that this represents an improvement over
what he had observed before his extended sleep.82 Unfortunately for readers, none of the
characters in the novel completely explain how balancing mental and physical education
creates a healthier population. Instead Dr. Leete links these improvements more to the
fact that no one in utopia is either underworked, as the aristocrats had been in the past, or
overworked, as the working class had been before the advent of utopia.83 However, in
spite of the lack of explanation, the fact that women became healthier through the new
educational model, even though their training lasted until the age of twenty-one, shows
80
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 105, 107-108.
81
Ibid., 108;G. Stanley Hall and others, "Educational Needs," The North American Review 136, no. 316
(1883).
82
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 108.
83
Ibid., 108-109.
30
that Bellamy’s utopian world swept away any lingering notions that women should
receive only truncated educations.
While Bellamy provided women with equality in education in Looking Backward,
his view of labor proves to be more complex, as he standardizes and minimizes working
hours while limiting the scope of work available to women because he assumes that
women physiology is weaker than men’s and so requires special accomodations. Whether
women worked for wages or did unpaid work at home, work consumed much of their
time and energies. Working-class and middle-class women who applied to enter the paid
workforce were routinely offered low skilled positions and paid lower wages than were
men, with women of color paid less than white women. Even the immigrant and middleclass women who entered the teaching field received only minimal wages for their
efforts.84
Even though the middle-class ideal assumed that men should be able to earn a
wage sufficient to care for the family and so held that a married woman should leave the
workforce, the reality was that economic necessity drove numerous women to work for
wages. The 1870 United States Census indicated that roughly sixteen percent of the
female population over ten years of age worked for wages.85 For a majority of workingclass women, marriage meant a life of wage work and domestic industry.86 Because
wages were low and work sporadic, the money earned by a woman’s husband often
84
Clinton, 123,127.
85
Jacobi M.D., 19.
86
Jacobi: 68.
31
proved to be insufficient to provide for the family’s needs and so she had to either remain
in the workforce or return to it periodically.87 Women in the middle class substituted
wage work with domestic work, which often took as much time and energy as the former.
Only women of the highest classes in America were freed from all work, as their
families’ financial resources released them from wage work and provided funds sufficient
to hire domestic workers to care for their homes.88
Wage differentials in the United States contributed to the challenges workingclass and middle-class women faced in the workforce. Factory owners and managers
routinely hired women for positions that required little skill, and then justified paying
them lower wages than men because their work needed no special abilities to complete.
Cultural values also degraded women’s work, and resulted in lower wages as the middle
and upper class norms that called for women to leave the workforce upon marriage began
to be applied to working-class women even though economic realities made this an
impossible goal for the majority of them. The application of this ideal meant that hiring
managers could claim that women were only temporary workers and so did not deserve
higher wages.89 Even where men and women did the same work, women usually earned
only half the amount paid to men.90
87
Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker: 1865-1920, ed. John Hope; Eisenstadt
Franklin, A. S., Third ed., The American History Series (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1996), 25.
88
Jacobi: 68.
89
Judy Lown, Women and Industrialization: Gender at Work in Nineteenth-Century England
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 174-177. Clinton, 127.
90
Dubofsky, 23.
32
An additional difficulty for women revolved around the idea that a woman’s wage
belonged to her father or her husband, rather to herself, so that unless specifically
prohibited by law, men could legally appropriate their wives’ and daughters’ wages.
While the reality was that many women did exercise control over their own wages, as for
example in the state of Illinois, where they were granted that right in 1869, women in
states without this protection were at the mercy of men’s monetary largesse.91 American
law as adopted from English common law justified the denial of a married woman’s right
to ownership of her wages under the principle of feme covert, a term that implied that a
woman’s legal identity was “covered” by her husband upon marriage. Thus, her earnings
were hers only as far as her husband allowed or as regional statutes decreed.92
In Looking Backward, Bellamy rejected the middle-class notion that married
women should work exclusively in the domestic sphere rather than working for wages.
While his vision of utopia eliminated economic classes, it can be said that he proposed to
“balance” the workload across the classes, so that there would no longer be a class-based
disparity in working hours. This meant that working-class women would work fewer
hours, while middle and upper-class women would work more hours. However, he also
eliminated unpaid domestic work for all women by assuming that mechanization and
centralization of cooking and dining as well as of laundry and clothing repair would
nearly eliminate the need for housework, although none of the characters in the book
91
Clinton, 139.
92
David Stewart, "Married Women Traders," The American Law Register (1852-1891) 33, no. 6
(1885): 353-363.
33
explain who does the little work that remains. Bellamy shifts the load for food service
from women to men at the beginning of their industrial careers.93
In the year 2000, all people living in utopia earn equal economic remuneration.
This means that everyone, men, women, the infirm, and immigrants, receive the same
amount of credit annually to care for their needs and wants. To accomplish this, the
governing syndicate apportions the gross national product equally among the population
by providing everyone with a credit card at the beginning of the year.94 The card holder
then presents the card as payment for purchases, and a clerk marks off on the card the
value of the goods or services procured. People may spend their allotment as they wish,
so long as they do so responsibly.95 Dr. Leete explains that any who cannot manage their
annual allotment might be paid in smaller installments, or “not be permitted to handle it
all,” but offers no specific examples, implying that only the rarest of individuals would
need financial supervision.96
Equal remuneration also repudiated the legal concept of feme covert, making
women independent legal entities, fully entitled to control over their earnings and to
payment made specifically to them while they were engaged in industrial work, as well as
during times of pregnancy and child rearing. This new custom of paying women directly
93
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 56,57-58,59,63,65,70,76.
94
Note that Bellamy does not include an explanation for how the syndicate handles children, so there is
no internal indication about whether infants also receive an annual allotment or, in not, how parents
apportion childrearing expenses.
95
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 42.
96
Ibid., 43.
34
demonstrates that this utopian society values women and their reproductive abilities,
which contrasts sharply with existing conditions nineteenth-century America. At that
time women either needed to marry men who could provide for them and their children,
or had to continue working as long as possible during pregnancy so as to minimize the
loss of wages.
While Bellamy’s vision of utopia offers equal education and remuneration for
work, it also reinforces nineteenth century views of women’s “weaker” biology and the
related arguments that they were only suited for certain fields of economic endeavor.
One example of these ideas can be found in the field of jurisprudence. In the late
nineteenth century, some women were able to complete schooling to practice law, but
were denied a license to practice because the men who granted admittance to the bar
thought women’s constitutions were not made for handling criminal cases. One example
is the 1872 case of Bradwell v. Illinois, wherein the United States Supreme Court upheld
the Illinois state’s denial of Myra Bradwell’s admittance to the bar to practice law
because she was a woman. Justice Bradley’s comments provide insight into one strand of
thought about women’s fitness for certain kinds of labor. He wrote, “civil law, as well as
nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and
destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The
natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits
it for many of the occupations of civil life.”97 Although the Illinois legislature did amend
97
Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873).
35
state statutes to allow women to practice law in 1872 in spite of the Supreme Court
ruling, discrimination against women in the field continued into the twentieth century.98
Bellamy’s utopia incorporated the idea that women’s physiology determined the
type and duration of work most suitable for them. In Looking Backward, Dr. Leete
explains that women make up a separate force within the industrial workforce, calling
them “an allied force rather than an integral part of the army of men.”99 He also says they
are “under an entirely different discipline” than men and justifies this organizational
structure by calling on cultural ideas that many of Bellamy’s readers would have readily
accepted. Dr. Leete explains:
Women being inferior in strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in
special ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for them, and the conditions under
which they pursue them, have reference to these facts. The heavier sorts of work are
everywhere reserved for men, the lighter occupations for women. Under no
circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly adapted,
both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex. Moreover, the hours of women’s work
are considerably shorter than those of men’s, more frequent vacations are granted, and
the most careful provision is made for rest when needed.100
Although Bellamy failed to include details about the fields unsuitable for women
as well as who would specify these types of work, he demonstrated an interest common
among his contemporaries about women’s health and work because as Dr. Leete tells
West, women are the “wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the
98
Clinton, 139.
99
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 125.
100
Ibid., 124-125.
36
future are confided.”101 He says that they fulfill their obligations to humanity by choosing
their husbands and thus, the fathers of their children, as if these were sacred duties. This
means that women avoid marrying men “who have failed to acquit themselves creditably
in the work of life.”102 Indeed, only the woman “with a very evil sort of
courage…[would] defy the opinion of her generation” and marry a man who has failed to
contribute generously to society through his work. Instead, the most sought after men are
“those who have risen above their fellows by the solidity or brilliance of their services to
humanity.”103
The goal of these societal expectations for women and men is to allow the law of
natural selection to operate unhindered, so that “for the first time in human history the
principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of
the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation.”104 This idea of
improving humanity through careful reproduction also had a corollary in Bellamy’s
nineteenth century America. Beyond physician Gideon Lincecum and Superintendent of
the Cincinnati Sanitarium, Orpheus Everts’s promotion, of castration to prevent criminals
from reproducing, researchers in the 1870s began collecting “family studies,” which
seemed to indicate that traits such as “pauperism, prostitution, insanity, and crime” were
101
Ibid., 131.
102
Ibid., 128-129,130,131.
103
Ibid., 130, 131.
104
Ibid., 129. For Bellamy, inferiority derived from a failure to cultivate middle-class characteristics.
He does not directly link physical inferiority with reproductive inferiority in the novel. See p. 130.
37
inherited characteristics.105 One of the most famous reports that came from these family
pedigrees was the case of the Juke family. Presented to the New York legislature in 1874,
the researcher, Richard L. Dugdale, concluded that criminality was inherited, but in
accord with Lamarckian genetics, argued that most cases could be prevented through
changes in people’s physical environment. In the few remaining cases that did not
respond to improvements in living conditions, he argued that individuals should be
prevented from reproducing.106
In Looking Backward, Bellamy appears to agree with this view, as he has Dr.
Leete explain that changing the environment to provide abundant resources to everyone
has virtually eliminated criminality. People now consider any crime committed to be a
manifestation of an inherited trait, and so the person exhibiting such behavior is subject
to medical treatment.107 However, the inclusion of the idea of sexual selection in Looking
Backward incorporates the other common argument that humanity could only improve
through careful reproduction.
Bellamy imagined a fictional world with universal education and equal annual
income to improve the quality of neighbors and children, but reified beliefs about
physical inequalities between men and women so that this ideal society still honored
some aspects of perceived innate differentiation between men and women. However, he
105
Largent, 11-14;Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Amherst:
Humanity Books, 1995), 42.
106
Paul, 42-44.
107
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 97-98.
38
expanded on women’s roles as reproducers, instilling value in that role. He linked
reproduction to education, labor, and motherhood. Bellamy promoted the idea that
attaining a university level education is not harmful to women’s reproduction, and that
when mental and physical training are balanced, the result is a vibrantly healthy female.
He promoted the idea that reduced workloads combined with “appropriate” career fields
protected women’s health while contributing to their value as mothers, which in turn
contributed to the public wheal by raising physically and morally healthy children. This
was so important to Bellamy that he continued to pay women their annual allotment even
when they withdrew from the workforce to raise their children. This custom, along with
improvements in living conditions and an end to material want contributed to a
restoration of social order. Bellamy thus clearly expressed Lamarkian ideas. Bellamy’s
work suggests the application of these ideas in society produces social order. Children
born in this new environment are no longer impelled by genetic defect to commit crime,
so society is not threatened by delinquency. When these “improved” children reach the
age of twenty-one, they begin their industrial careers with a three-year course of
instruction in obedience and work habits, which they appear to respond to favorably.
In the twentieth century, H.G. Wells and Charlotte Perkins Gilman articulated
their own visions of utopia, with Gilman having started her public speaking career in one
of Bellamy’s Nationalist clubs.108 While both Wells and Gilman diverged from Bellamy’s
vision of utopia in his conception of economics, they agreed with Bellamy on points of
108
Hayden, 184.
39
providing expanded opportunities for women. Their goal, like Bellamy’s was to make it
possible for society to advance through selective reproduction. Unlike Bellamy, A
Modern Utopia and Moving the Mountain reflect the coercive reproductive views that
were increasingly popular after the turn of the century in America, as both Wells and
Gilman incorporated specific tenets of this social and scientific ideology.
40
Chapter 3
A MODERN UTOPIA: WOMEN IN A UTOPIA-IN-PROGRESS
In 1905, seventeen years after Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward,
H.G. Wells presented his ideal world in A Modern Utopia. This work expanded on his
ideas about the shape of the future that he first presented in 1902 in Anticipations of the
Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought and in
1903 in Mankind in the Making.1 Where Wells purposely eschewed a fictional format in
favor of providing a contemplation of the future in light of the “scientific method” in
Anticipations, he presented his expanded ideas through fiction in A Modern Utopia. He
used the literary format to explore his ideas from the perspectives of various characters in
his work.2 A contextual examination of Wells’s ideas regarding education, labor,
motherhood, and reproduction expressed in A Modern Utopia in light of Anticipations
and Mankind in the Making, shows that Wells, like Bellamy, both refashioned and
reinforced women’s roles to formulate his vision of an orderly society.
In his own life, Wells found it difficult to achieve the education that many men
from wealthier backgrounds took for granted. He was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent to a
family of the “lowest level of the middle class.”3 His mother was a housewife when
Wells was born, but soon after his father fell and broke his leg. This injury made it
1
H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life
and Thought (London: Harper & Brothers, 1902); H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making (London: Chapman
& Hall, Ld, 1903). Available from http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/7mimk10.txt. All references are
to the electronic version.
2
See Wells, Anticipations. See also Wells, Modern Utopia, xxx,xxix.
3
David C Smith, H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 4.
41
difficult for him to support the family, and so Wells’s mother, Sarah, eventually returned
to work as a ladies’ maid. She found a position working for the same woman she had
served before marrying Wells’s father.4
When Wells broke his leg at the age of seven and spent several weeks in bed
recovering, his father obtained two books from the library to help keep his mind
occupied, which, his biographer noted, greatly influenced the course of his life. One of
the works was the English natural history writer John George Wood’s The Illustrated
Natural History; the other was a book on astronomy. The former book made him yearn to
learn more, but because of his family’s financial status, he had to be creative in pursuing
the education he desired.
Although Wells was able to attend a few private schools, these did not fulfill his
educational ambitions, so he cajoled his parents until they revoked his apprenticeship to a
draper so that he could attend Midhurst Grammar School both as a student and as an
assistant teacher to pay for his classes. He went on to attend the Normal School of
Science at South Kensington at eighteen years old, where he studied the physical and
biological sciences and then took a teaching job. The effects of another injury suffered at
school convinced physicians he had tuberculosis, and as he was convalescing, he decided
to make a living from writing, although he continued teaching for a time.5 Wells
eventually wrote both fiction and nonfiction, including such works as The Time Machine
4
Ibid., 4-5.
5
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2003), v;
Smith, 4-8,10,14-15,25,58.
42
(1895) and An Outline of History (1921), and like many of his English contemporaries,
favored socialism as a valuable form of government.6 His works were generally well
received in the United States and Britain. A Modern Utopia was reviewed in The New
York Times and also scholarly journals, such as The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods, and The International Journal of Ethics.7
Wells also openly engaged in numerous intimate affairs with women, several of
whom, in the fashion of the “New Woman,” pursued him even though he was already
married. From these relationships came three children from three different women.8
Wells married twice, first to a cousin named Isabel, whom he divorced after they had
grown apart intellectually, and second to Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he called Jane,
a student he had met at the Correspondence College where he worked.9 Then, between
1908 and 1910, while still married to Jane, Wells began an intimate relationship with
Amber Pember Reeves, a young woman in the Fabian Socialist group, who by all
accounts openly pursued a relationship with Wells. He had a child by her, and after she
accepted another man’s marriage proposal, to hide the fact that she had become pregnant
6
See Wells, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. Originally published in 1895Wells, The Time
Machine and The Invisible Man, v; H.G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and
Mankind, 2 vols., vol. I (Garden City: Garden City Books, 1940).See also "Plans and Whims of Writing
Folk," The New York Times, September 8 1906.
7
See, for example: "About Authors," The New York Times, July 29 1905.;"Wells's Utopia," The New
York Times, May 27 1905.; F.L. Wells, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 9,
no. 24 (1912): 670-671.; H.S. Shelton, "The Spencerian Formula of Justice," International Journal of
Ethics 21, no. 3 (1911): 303n6.
Smith, 210-211. For details of his numerous relationships with women, see Chapter 8, “Women and
Fiction: I and Chapter 15, “Women and Fiction: II
8
9
Ibid., 24-25.
43
out of wedlock, she and Wells continued to see each other for a short time. Even though
Wells and his wife remained married, he had additional affairs. That he was vocal about
his belief in sexual equality for women is made clear by historian Jane Lewis as well as
by one of his biographers, historian David C. Smith.10 Lewis explained that Wells
expressed his views about sexuality in a lecture for the Fabian Society in 1906, and made
them clear that same year in the novel In the Days of the Comet. At least one journalist
responded with criticism in a Times Literary Supplement and Wells’s proposals became
an issue in British politics the next year. Undeterred, Wells wrote about his affair with
Reeves in 1908 in the novel Ann Veronica.11
His life course and his fiction illustrated one aspect of gender relations in
Victorian London. Even though Wells advocated a more open sexuality for men and
women than middle-class society overtly allowed, he largely remained true to social
mores. As Lewis explained in her article about Wells’s affair with Reeves, for all his
protestations of challenging sexual standards, Wells “effectively follow[ed] the Victorian
pattern he sought to reject: keeping a chaste wife and [a] passionate mistress, the only
difference being his willingness to admit the existence of the latter.”12 Wells’s
incorporated his visions of a freer sexuality into A Modern Utopia when he presented a
utopia were women could form sexual relationships outside of marriage without violating
cultural mores as part of his improved social structure, although eugenic goals triumphed
10
See Lewis and Smith.
11
Lewis: 77.
12
Ibid.: 76-83-85,89.
44
over sexual freedom for married women, because the latter were to become the mothers
to future generations and had to bear children only to the man to whom they are legally
bound.13
As a vehicle for the expression of his ideas in A Modern Utopia, Wells created the
characters of a narrator and his botanist friend, who, while traveling through Switzerland,
suddenly find themselves transported to a parallel Earth. The narrator spends the
remainder of the work alternating between a discussion of conditions on the original and
parallel Earth and relating events of their travels in the other world. Wells’s develops the
work topically and chronologically, using his narrator to discuss the state of society in the
new world in the first chapter. Then, in subsequent chapters, Wells chooses a topic and
uses his characters as vehicles for expressing his ideas. His chapters address such details
as individual freedoms, utopian economics, nature, failure, women, government, and
race. Each of these topics receives attention as the companions travel through this utopian
Europe and Britain. In the end, the narrator and his friend find themselves back on the
original Earth.14
In this novel, people in the parallel utopian world are physically the same as on
the original Earth, but with different “traditions, ideals, ideas, and purposes.”15 The
narrator assumes that the inhabitants are people “with infirmities like our own,” subject to
13
Wells, Modern Utopia, 194-195.
14
Ibid., 366. Note that each of the topics listed is contained within a chapter in the novel.
15
Ibid., 16,23-24.
45
vagaries of nature, “antagonistic diseases, and inimical beasts and vermin.”16 What Wells
changes in his individuals, fully admitting to following in the footsteps of earlier utopian
authors, including Bellamy, is the ability for people to have a new set of assumptions
about cultural, social, and political structures.17
Wells, like Bellamy, promoted universal education, with his proposals
challenging existing Victorian English standards.18 These approaches to education helped
to explain the difficulty Wells had in obtaining the extensive education he desired, and
sheds light on his educational proposals. In England, the school system was stratified, so
the level of education a child received depended upon his or her class, with children of
poor parents receiving only a minimal education from church-run institutions. Evidently
girls of the working-class received some education once the government made attendance
mandatory, as for example, the 1876 reform law which stipulated that minors had to
attend school until the age of twelve unless they could prove that they had attained a
minimum level of knowledge. As the government only partially funded these schools,
parents had to pay for their children’s education until 1891, when the government
rescinded the fees. One consistent problem, at least according to Wells, was that the goal
of education was to provide only enough knowledge for members of the working-class to
succeed at tasks specific to their social standing. Authorities wanted to avoid providing
an education that could help the poor to escape their place in the social hierarchy. Even
16
Ibid., 7,30.
17
Ibid., 9.
18
Ibid., 50,60,70,149,151.
46
after the turn of the twentieth century, the 1902 Balfour Act, which promised additional
educational reforms, continued to reinforce class boundaries.19
In Anticipations, Wells challenges contemporary views of education when he
writes that the goal of education should be “the preparation for the life of mental activity
in which the citizen of the coming state will live.”20 This included creating an educational
system that would facilitate open discussion and debate over “general question[s] of real
and practical interest and complicated reference.”21 In Wells’s experiences, access to
education would have allowed him to learn all he wanted without needing to start his
working life as a draper’s apprentice, which he hated.
The economic and social structure Wells envisions in A Modern Utopia also
contributes to social order. In this alternate world, the government provides a living wage
for even the most menial workers, ensuring everyone at least a minimum standard of
living as well as a measure of dignity and respect. This is far different from what most
workers experienced in the early twentieth century in Britain, especially those without
specific trades. As in the United States, these unskilled workers dealt with low wages and
intermittent employment, leaving them close to poverty.22 In contrast, Wells establishes a
living minimum wage for workers in his utopia, which creates a standard of living that
19
Denis Lawton, Education and Labour Party Ideologies, 1900-2001 and Beyond (New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2004), 5-7,22.
20
Wells, Anticipations, 292.
21
Ibid., n295.
22
David Kinley, British Labor Conditions and Legislation during the War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1919), 4.
47
allows even the meanest of workers, men and women alike, to live “in comfort and
decency…[and with enough to] pay his small insurance premium against disease, death,
disablement, or ripening years, and have a margin for clothing and other personal
expenses.”23 Although he notes that his work refers to the masculine pronoun, he assures
his readers that he really means men and women. He writes, “‘He’ indeed is to be read as
‘He and She’ in all that goes before.”24
In A Modern Utopia, Wells envisions an alternate route to economic security for
married women. Because mothers stay at home with their children, the state provides
them with a stipend at the point of the birth of their first child, even paying them a higher
stipend for when “the child…rises markedly above certain minimum qualifications,
physical or mental.”25 The payment demonstrates the value Wells places on motherhood
because it “in fact, does its best to make thoroughly efficient motherhood a profession
worth following.”26 As in Bellamy’s utopia, this represents a significant revision of
existing customs and an acknowledgment of the value of women’s reproductive labor.
Had the British government made these provisions, Wells’s own mother would have been
able to avoid returning to domestic service after his father became disabled. However,
Wells allows that some women would not want to take on child rearing duties full time,
23
Wells, Modern Utopia, 149.
24
Ibid., 186.
25
Ibid., 188.
26
Ibid.
48
so if mothers in this utopia can afford a suitable alternative, presumably a wet nurse and
governess, he allows them to return to work.
Working conditions in Wells’s utopia are also generally better than what most
people experienced in reality. Rather than long hours living and working in the midst of
the industrial city, Wells envisions the physically dirtier and less desirable industries
being located apart from living areas. Thus, in the “regions of mining and smelting, black
with smoke of furnaces and gashed and desolated by mines….men will come thither and
work for a spell and return to civilization again, washing and changing their attire in the
swift gliding train.”27 This working structure protects the children by separating the
industrial world from the living world. Indeed, he proposes to a dual taxation system that
remits taxes for parents who locate their children in idyllic settings.28
Outside of heavy industry, he provides an example of comfortable working
conditions. When the narrator and his friend apply for work at the local Public Office,
the government worker sends them to a small manufactory where they finish
woodcarvings. Machines do the rough work, and then the laborers complete the efforts.
They work just a half-day and, since it is summer in the novel, the “shed lies open at
either end,” presumably to allow for airflow and to provide some measure of comfort for
the workers.29 The employer, too, provides a friendly environment as he takes a personal
interest in the workers and the product, rather than seeing the employees as an
27
Ibid., 49.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid., 221-222.
49
anonymous means to his financial ends. Wells writes, “[Our employer] walks about the
workshop, stopping to laugh at this production or praise that, [and] one is reminded
inevitably of an art school. Every now and then he carves a little himself or makes a
sketch or departs to the machinery to order some change in the rough shapes it is turning
out.”30 Even though the manager sets a standard for the number of items the worker needs
to complete each day, Wells gives workers the ability negotiate a number either greater or
lower than the expected level.31
Wells did not provide a corresponding example for women’s labor in his utopia,
so even though he was advocating changes for women, his focus in labor remained on
men. When he chose to use the masculine pronoun, he made women largely invisible
throughout the book. In spite of this seeming lack of presence, however, Wells made
provisions for women to be part of the leadership of his utopian world. He envisions the
creation of a select group of especially intellectually minded men and women who can
also meet additional restrictive personal standards of behavior. He calls this group the
Samurai and the governors of utopia come from members in this body. This idea that
women could rule was, like the idea of paying women for their reproductive work, a
radical idea.
Wells provides more details about women in matters of sexuality and
reproduction than he did in aspects of education and labor. People of his utopia directly
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., 221.
50
incorporate eugenic principles into their lives. The majority will never meet minimum
financial and physical standards sufficient to permit them to marry and reproduce.
Disqualifying characteristics include people who are “idiots and lunatics…perverse and
incompetent persons…people of weak character who become drunkards, drug takers, and
the like....[as well as] persons tainted with certain foul and transmissible diseases.”32
Although he lists these types of people as “unfit,” he fails to define his interpretation of
these words, implying that the concept was so familiar to his readers that they did not
require any detailed explanation.
Wells assumes that the government would identify such persons, without
specifying exactly what kind of person would do this work. He does, however, indirectly
criticize eugenicists of his own day when he notes individuals would not be hastily
deemed unfit “by a number of zealous half-educated people in a state of panic at a quite
imaginary ‘Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit.’”33 He appears, here, to prefer deliberation
and indicates a preference for working with individuals before separating them from the
general populace on islands. According to Wells’ narrator, the eventual segregation of
those who cannot, or who choose not, to meet to this utopia’s standards keeps the general
population safe from those who would harm others and small enough to be sure that the
32
Ibid., 141-142.
33
Ibid., 142-143
51
government could provide the minimum standard of living it promises to everyone. It
would also help to assure that children would survive to reach old age.34
In spite of desiring to be more deliberate in actions than many eugenicists of his
own day, Wells incorporates the rather extreme notion of euthanasia for any infant born
“deformed and monstrous and [any] evilly [sic] diseased births.”35 Again, he fails to
specify what conditions he was referring to, but this along with his ideas of segregation
for those he deems a danger to the population, clearly establishes the coercive nature of
the utopian state. He justifies this policy of euthanasia by calling on economics: the state
promises to care for all its citizens and will do so if they become disabled during their
lifetime, but will not take on the responsibility of a person born with specific diseases or
disorders.36 These state stipulations imply that Wells valued the community over the
individual. It is also worthy of note that he denied that this state would ever kill an adult
who proved to be unfit, but had no such compunction toward infants. In this, he seems to
assume that adults, including the parents of the infant, would agree with this stipulation,
or at least would have no objection to having an “unfit” infant killed.37
34
Ibid., 142,152,185-186.
35
Ibid., 143. For a detailed discussion of medical and eugenic issues surrounding newborn children with
physical deformities, see Martin S. Pernick. The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective”
Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996).
36
37
Ibid., 143-144
Although a detailed examination of this question of infant euthanasia is outside the scope of this
thesis, it does raise the question of when Wells thought an infant old enough to be considered a “citizen” to
be protected rather than rejected and by what means he would ensure that citizens would agree to the
euthanasia of deformed infants.
52
The cultural values of this utopia assume that men and women are sexual beings,
so as long as individuals avoid pregnancy, men and women are free to form any sort and
number of relationships they choose, including polyandry and polygamy.38 Although
Wells did not directly discuss methods that people would use to prevent conception, he
did support the dissemination of information on birth control in his own life, so
presumably he meant that citizens of his utopia would actively utilize birth control
technology.39 If whatever method of contraception couples use fails and a child results,
the government encourages personal responsibility and social order by stipulating that
parents must make a “life assurance” payment to the State to provide for their children’s
needs.40 Thus, those who fail to meet the standards of fitness and who have children must
repay the debt for their child’s care to society. In The Making of Mankind, Wells
proposes that parents must pay this monetary debt through their work by providing a
minimum standard of living for their children, and that parents who cannot or will not do
so would find themselves in celibate labor camps until they repaid society for having to
provide this care in their stead. He also saw these requirements as a means of restricting
continual reproduction by those least capable of securing the economic and emotional
welfare of their children, ensuring that parents would find themselves confined in camps
where they could not continue to reproduce. Although Wells remained somewhat vague
38
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 130. Wells, Modern Utopia, 193,206,210. Note that while Wells does
not specifically prohibit same-sex relationships, his presentation of sexual partnerships implies a
heterosexual orientation.
39
Smith, 365-367.
40
Wells, Modern Utopia, 193.
53
in his descriptions of these separate communities, he proffered the idea that areas could
be set aside where people who fell into this category could live. If a means could be
found to keep them from continuing to reproduce, although here again, he failed to
specify a method, then men and women could live together in these places. Otherwise he
concludes that men and women would need to be segregated. 41
Wells’s proposals for sexual freedom for those who could avoid unsanctioned
reproduction ran counter to objections from a number of women, including nineteenth
century feminists, who argued that relaxing sexual standards among middle-class women
would reduce social pressures on a man to take responsibility for any children he might
father.42 Because women bore the children, and because they were most often financially
dependent on men, a child born out of wedlock became the woman’s and her family’s
problem. Wells’s own life demonstrated this. He fathered three children outside of
marriage, and although he remained in close contact with their mothers, they had to find
their own way after their sexual relationship with Wells ended.43 Had he been a citizen in
his utopia, he would have had to provide for his children financially.
While the majority of people in his utopia would not meet the qualifications to
reproduce, those who do prove themselves able to earn more than the minimum wage,
who have reached a minimum age, who have “a certain minimum of physical
41
Wells, Mankind in the Making.
42
Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, 3rd ed
ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 66-67.
43
Lewis: 79;Smith, 361-367.
54
development, and are free from any transmissible disease” can apply to for a marriage
license.44 Although Wells wrote that men should be in their late twenties and women at
least twenty-one before marriage, he fails to specify his criteria for physical development
and transmissible diseases. This again leaves the reader to substitute his or her own
meaning of “fitness.”
Another dimension of Wells’s representation of sexuality in A Modern Utopia
revolves around the arrangement of monogamous marriage. Wells notes that many
marriages are unhappy arrangements, so his solution makes marriage a relatively unique
rather than nearly universal occurrence.45 In order to assure that the children a married
woman bears are the progeny of the man the state agreed to allow her to marry, marriage
rescinds sexual freedom for women. If a married woman enters into a sexual relationship
with another man and children result, the State will invariably invalidate the marriage. It
also will release the husband from financial responsibility for her children, and will
refuse to provide for them from the government treasury. Although this policy would
seem to negate Wells’s ideas of state support for all citizens, it appeared that this harsh
provision was designed to deter married women from forming extramarital affairs. This
idea also demonstrates that Wells failed to consider that a married woman might continue
a sexual relationship with her husband as well as a lover. In this he seems to assume that
middle to upper class women can only have one sexual partner at a time. Since it seems
44
Wells, Modern Utopia, 140-141,184,192.
45
Wells, Anticipations, 334.
55
likely that he understood that prostitutes have multiple sexual partners, and since
presumably women must meet the same wage requirements as men to qualify for
marriage this means that he melded Victorian middle class morality into marriage.
Upholding the sexual double standard in this case, Wells cements Victorian
sexual standards for males. While he requires fidelity from women, he places no such
stipulation for faithfulness on the part of the husband. However, he grants women a range
of control in her married life by allowing her to divorce a husband who conducts affairs.
These provisions mean that a woman who meets utopian standards for marriage and
reproduction has more control in the marriage than does the husband because she has the
option of divorcing a spouse who cannot demonstrate sexual self-control. She can choose
whether to remain with him or to seek another suitable partner. Where it becomes
obvious that a woman has failed in her fidelity, the state gives no such control to the
husband. The marriage in that case is automatically revoked; the husband has no choice
to stay with his wife if he chooses to.
Wells also demonstrates concern for spouses and for the welfare of children who
may result from marriage by including provisions for the dissolution of a marriage in
cases of infertility or desertion. Although these means of escape from a marriage were
not unfamiliar to Wells, he also incorporates eugenics into additional grounds for divorce.
In this, he allows that a person can become a poor marriage partner and potential parent
56
by allowing for divorce on the grounds of “the development of any disqualifying habit,
[including] drunkenness, or drug-taking…or any serious crime or acts of violence.”46
Part of Wells’s regulations on reproduction seeks to slow population growth,
especially among the group he considers “unfit.” In referring to Thomas Malthus’s ideas
on the necessity of population control, Wells expresses the idea that the state’s
certification process would increase the number of children born to those who exhibit
desirable physical traits and economic success while decreasing the number born to those
who fail to meet these standards. 47 In this he reflects twentieth century eugenic
arguments against the unchecked propagation of people with undesirable qualities and for
the increased reproduction among those with desirable qualities.48
Wells’s vision of utopia improved women’s daily lives, as it assured that they
would earn at least a living wage. It assumed that women were sexual beings, so that
those who were not permitted to marry were allowed to form sexual relationships as they
saw fit. If women were allowed to marry, the state placed a high value on their role as
mothers, paying them to have children, and even increasing the amount when the children
excelled physically and mentally. In return, and to promote eugenic aims, this utopia
required that married women remain sexually faithful to their husbands. That the focus on
women revolved around reproduction and that the utopian community endorsed eugenic
46
Wells, Modern Utopia, 194-196.
47
Ibid., 152, 180.See Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future
Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other
Writers(J. Johnson, 1798, accessed January 2, 2009); available from
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/prppl10.txt. Wells, Anticipations, 332.
48
See Kevles, 88.
57
aims indicates that Wells placed a high value on women’s reproduction. That Wells
incorporated women into the governing structure also shows that his vision of utopia
presented women as capable of taking on public duties as well as being mothers.
It also redefined hierarchies so that rather than have distinctions based on
anatomical sex, so that any who demonstrated fitness in body and mind could excel in
Wells’s society. With these proposals for his utopian society, Wells offered a class based
vision of social order. The difference between his own Victorian world and this utopian
vision lay in imposing a eugenic reproductive structure on society. His provisions keep
the masses content by providing a minimum standard of living along with access to sex
for both men and women while assuring that they stop reproducing in prodigious
numbers. He then leaves the “fittest” to reproduce and govern, which assures that society
is managed by those most capable of making beneficial choices for everyone and thus
producing order out of chaos.
Wells’s choice to impose selective reproduction and to have the state segregate
adults who continuously violated its reproductive laws and to euthanize infants with
physical deformities demonstrates that Wells envisioned a coercive state that favored
eugenics. At the same time, his comments and proposals showed that he rejected a
reductionist eugenic determinism that called for all people with the slightest
manifestation of “unfitness” to be prevented from reproducing. Rather than instantly
segregating an adult who violated the utopian state’s laws, he stipulated that the
government would attempt to rehabilitate the person first. Wells thus attempted to
58
moderate his coercive state. He tried to keep the general population pacified by offering
them the freedom of sexual intimacy, but in return he set restrictions on reproduction and
stipulated that the state had first priority in establishing the “fitness” of infants.
Gilman’s utopia, published six years after A Modern Utopia, envisioned a world
motivated to change by women who became aware of their potential and who became
men’s equals. Her state also has elements of coercion, and like Wells, structures her
utopia to have order follow from the implementation of selective reproduction. Like
Bellamy and Wells, Gilman’s early life shaped her views of what contributed to and
detracted from an orderly and healthy population. Perhaps not surprisingly, her
perspectives on society’s constraints on women contributed to a utopian novel that
focused on women and which provided them greater opportunities than either Bellamy or
Wells envisioned.
59
Chapter 4
WOMEN CREATE STABILITY IN MOVING THE MOUNTAIN
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a supporter of socialism, a prolific writer and speaker,
a promoter of women’s rights, and a woman who suffered from the nineteenth-century
illness known as neurasthenia, wrote numerous works during her lifetime, including her
treatise on the subjugation of women through economics in Women and Economics
(1898).1 She started her public career as a speaker for Edward Bellamy’s Nationalists,
then joined the Fabian Socialists, and embraced sociologist Lester F. Ward’s theories on
men and women, which argued that women were more important than men in
reproducing inheritable traits.2 As part of her literary endeavors, Gilman wrote Moving
the Mountain, a work that frames an ideal world around women’s expanded
consciousness and which, in the realms of education, labor, motherhood, and
reproduction, clearly remakes conceptions of women’s roles to create order from chaos.
In Moving the Mountain, women move beyond home and hearth and act as the
primary actors in the creation and maintenance of social order by assuming public
authority.3 According to literary scholar Minna Doskow, this woman-centered view
“opened a new chapter in the utopian literary corpus” and introduced a “unique vision to
1
See Charlotte Perkins Stetsen, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between
Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1898).
2
Hayden, 184; Jane S. Upin, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Instrumentalism beyond Dewey " Hypatia 8,
no. 2 (1993): 40.; Dana Seitler, "Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives," American Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2003): 77-78.
3
Mark W. Van Wienen, "A Rose by Any Other Name: Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman) and the Case
for American Reform Socialism," American Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2003): 603-604. Gilman, 65.
60
utopian literature and social transformation.”4 A brief review of Gilman’s early life
provides a general contextualization of her perspectives on women as vital contributors to
social order.
Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, and early in her life, experienced the
difficulties that gender inequities could impose on a family. Her father, grandson to the
well-known minister Dr. Lyman Beecher, and brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author
of the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, abandoned the family when Gilman was
four. Because he failed to provide monetary support for his family, Gilman, along with
her mother and brother, moved constantly, living on the charity of family and in near
poverty for most of her youth. However, by the age of twenty-one, due in part to the fact
that her absent father had provided her with reading material and an unstructured
education, if not financial assistance, she was supporting herself by working sixteen-hour
days in various avenues of employment, including “painting, teaching, and drawing.”5
As an adult, Gilman felt ambivalent about marriage and motherhood, but, at the
age of twenty-four, agreed to marry Charles Walter Stetson after deliberating on his
proposal for two years.6 Although she wrote in her autobiography that she looked forward
to having children after marriage, she fell into a “black helplessness” after the birth of her
4
Minna Doskow, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her
in Ourland (Madison: Associated University Press, 1999), 27-28.
5
Ibid., 9-10;Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: the Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 14-15,41-43. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Appleton-Century Co., 1935), 3,71.
6
Doskow, ed., 9-10.
61
daughter Katharine.7 Gilman eventually entered a clinic where the renowned physician
Silas Weir Mitchell treated women with this condition, which he diagnosed as a nervous
disorder. After her release from treatment, she described herself as going nearly insane
from following the doctor’s advice to avoid all forms of mental exertion, which for her
included writing. She eventually gave up trying to follow Dr. Mitchell’s advice, and
wrote the chilling work The Yellow Wallpaper, a semi-fictional account of a woman who
regresses to childhood and insanity after the woman’s physician-husband imposes “the
rest cure” for neurasthenia on her.8
Gilman herself escaped this fate by renouncing society’s expectations of women
as selfless wives and mothers, leaving her husband and child. She adopted part of the
male version of the treatment for neurasthenia by heading west and doing what she loved;
writing and thinking. She eventually married again, and became a well-known author of
fiction and non-fiction, including Moving the Mountain (1911). Three other works are:
Women and Economics (1898), a treatise on how the economic subjugation of women
prevented humanity from progressing, Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916),
a pair of utopian works that focused on a community of women cut off from civilization
who reproduced asexually.9 In this latter novel, three men enter this world of women, and
7
The symptoms as she describes them suggest that she possibly suffered from what is now known as
post-partum depression. In her day, there was no such term.
8
Gilman, Living Of, 90,95-96,119-121,154.
9
Stetsen. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Herland," in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Novels: Moving
the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland, ed. Minna Doskow (Madison: Associated University
Press, 1915);Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "With Her in Ourland," in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian
Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland, ed. Minna Doskow (Madison:
62
the ensuing education they receive about women’s skills and abilities to function
effectively without the presence of men demonstrated the absurdities of ideas about
women’s inferiority and weaker physiognomy that Gilman encountered in her life. By the
time she was penning these novels, publishers were not interested in “social philosophy,”
and so she published her works, including Moving the Mountain, in The Forerunner, a
magazine she authored and self-published. Although this literary endeavor only averaged
a readership of about 1,500 people, Gilman noted that they were spread far afield, with
subscribers in America, Europe, India, and Australia.10
Gilman opens Moving the Mountain by introducing John, a man lost to
civilization for thirty years after suffering from amnesia while traveling in Tibet. The
book’s narrative follows his reintegration into a much changed American social structure
through a series of discussions and tours. John’s amnesia isolated him among the local
Tibetans, and thus separated him from the industrialized West for thirty years. At the
beginning of the novel, his sister, Nellie, finds him. The shock of seeing her again
restores him to his senses. Thirty years have passed since he left the American social
structure and culture he knew, so there have been some significant changes in America
that have created a budding utopian society, but there are still some people holding fast to
earlier social conventions and mores that are familiar to John. He acquaints himself with
this new world by visiting people he knew from his youth, like Dr. Frank Borderson, a
Associated University Press, 1916).
10
Doskow, ed., 10-15.; Gilman, Living Of, 303-307.
63
college friend who had fallen into criminal ways before utopia, but who was now
reformed. John also sees the contrast between old ways and new when he visits relatives
who have isolated themselves from progress in a rural town. In the end, John marries
Drusilla, a cousin and one of these relatives, and brings her into the utopian world, which
negates the drain upon her person caused by living outside utopia. Adopting the new
ideals makes her “[grow] young at a rate that seemed a heavenly miracle.”11 This
fictional world, like that in A Modern Utopia, represents a work in progress.
Gilman begins from the premise that a sudden change in people’s minds made
social change possible. In the novel, Nellie explains to John that “that the world has come
alive” because people chose to run the world “in a pleasant, practical way, all the things
which we could have done, at any time before—only we never thought so. The real
change is this: we have changed our minds.”12 Gilman’s method to reach utopia is,
however, only pleasant for those society deemed “fit” or at least redeemable, because,
like Wells’s utopian community, this society put into place a policy of euthanasia. This
difference is that Gilman’s utopians made the decision to establish their utopia by
eliminating adults who could not meet society’s new standards. Nellie tells John that
those “hopeless degenerates” who could not be “cured” were either rendered sterile or
“promptly and mercifully removed.”13 In a later conversation, Dr. Borderson, a reformed
degenerate himself, restates this process more pointedly. He tells John, “We killed many
11
Gilman, "Moving the Mountain," 148.
12
Ibid., 53.
13
Ibid., 86,98
64
hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts, after trying our best powers to
cure.”14 Where Gilman declined to call this process eugenics, instead opting for
“humaniculture,” her aims openly embrace eugenic proposals and demonstrate that she
was willing to go even farther than Wells in utilizing state power to eliminate the “unfit”
and allow the “fit” to flourish.15
It is notable that Gilman does not identify the people who decided which portion
of the population would be killed. However, because women provided the impetus for
change in society, and because they actively contribute to the creation and maintenance
of this utopia, it is likely that she imagined that women would support this process of
euthanizing the “unfit.” In this, Gilman created a much darker side to utopia and took
women farther from Victorian ideals of white middle-class womanhood than did either
Bellamy or Wells.16
Beyond supporting sterilization and euthanasia for eugenic purposes, women in
Gilman’s utopia also direct children’s education by choosing the content of the training.
Although the only comment she made in this regard was that the adults in charge of
children identify their interest and aptitudes and adapt their education accordingly.
Beyond this note, she failed to elaborate on exactly how women determine what children
14
Ibid., 136
15
Ibid., 58,85
This aspect of Gilman’s proposals could arguably make this utopia a dystopia for those targeted for
elimination. Note that this thesis does not debate the ethics of these utopian societies, but seeks instead to
examine how the author’s used women’s roles to create stability.
16
65
will learn.17 Women also shape cultural mores in that their consumer choices and
expectations for moral behavior necessitate changes in men’s actions. For example,
women no longer purchase goods made from animals and simultaneously teach children
that hunting animals demonstrates “primitive cruelty,” thus eliminating a market for
animal products while minimizing the likelihood that children would want to grow up
and become hunters.18
Gilman addresses the nexus of immigration, education, women’s roles, and social
order in this novel when John and Nellie end their journey from Tibet at the Long Island
harbor. Nellie explains to John that in their utopia, socializing centers on the East and
West coasts of America assimilate immigrants to American standards before allowing
them to enter the country. Additionally, she notes that immigrants and their belongings
must be “antiseptically clean” before boarding the ships that bring them to the United
States. At these centers, the immigrants learn English and must pass physical
examinations, including “microscopic” and “chemical” tests.19
In the contemporary world in which Gilman wrote, cleanliness and efficiency had
become hallmarks of the ideal American home. Historian Suellen Hoy effectively showed
that cultural ideas about illness and disease pushed ideas about personal and home
cleanliness to the forefront of middle-class consciousness. Numerous middle and upperclass women foisted these ideas onto immigrant women and children, working to teach
17
Ibid., 118-122
18
Gilman, "Moving the Mountain," 93.
19
Ibid., 56-57.
66
the newly arrived immigrants the importance of adopting the former’s existing standards
for bathing and cleaning. Hoy explained that numerous Americans at the turn of the
century believed that being clean protected them from illness, and feared that a lack of
sanitary habits among Eastern European immigrants would spread disease to the native
population. She also showed that the efforts to spread the cleanliness ethos represented
more than the fear of illness; it also involved fear of cultural differences. To alleviate
their fears of illness and the real or imagined potential for chaos represented by the
cultural diversity that Eastern European immigrants brought with them, “social workers,
educators, and employers attempted to help immigrants adjust to their new surroundings
by teaching them American ways.”20 These included lessons on bathing, brushing teeth,
cleaning fingernails, and airing bedding. Hoy explained that immigrants often complied
with these directions to best of their abilities in order to retain their health and in hopes of
gaining the acceptance of white America.21 In Gilman’s utopia, the method she uses for
assimilating immigrants into American culture eliminates their threat to white middle
class society as it made them acceptable to white America before they ever entered the
general population. Cleanliness would not only have washed the dirt from the agricultural
worker and made him pure and clean, but maybe also, made him physically whiter. An
additional important result, was that these environmental changes potentially made these
immigrants “fit” for reproduction.
20
Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995), 88.
21
Ibid., 89.
67
In Gilman’s utopia, these standards of cleanliness and cultural education make the
assimilation of immigrants more efficient by requiring them to adopt behaviors necessary
to become acceptable citizens before they enter the general population. Her proposals
rationalize the assimilation process and represent a significant departure of the early
twentieth century immigration policy, in which educating immigrants in American
middle-class habits began only after Public Health physicians declared them healthy and
released them from immigration quarantine.22 In Gilman’s utopia there was no need for
an army of volunteers and public health nurses to visit numerous homes and to set up
English classes in various locations, as immigrants were trained in how to become ideal
Americans in central locations. Gilman’s utopian solution to the immigrant problem
emphasizes speedy assimilation of newcomers, thus increasing homogeneity and
presumably, social regularity, in the United States and reducing cultural conflict between
established residents and the newly arrived immigrants.23 Beyond establishing that this
assimilation process occurs at specific segregated centers, Gilman fails to explain the
language adoption process, how long expected this process to take, and what happens to
people who are not able to adopt English.
Gilman made universal education central to her ideal world, but she proposes an
individualized approach to learning. She starts with the idea that children ought to grow
up in a combination of their parents’ homes and in group homes designed specifically to
22
Alan M Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace" (New York: Basic
Books, 1994), 2.
23
Gilman, "Moving the Mountain," 57.
68
allow children to master their spatial and physical skills through play in a safe
environment. These buildings have, for example, mattresses on floors and “shallow
pools” of water, so that children can freely tumble and learn to swim with fear of injury.24
Additionally, adults in her utopia “universally respect” children, treating them as
“persons, not subordinates and dependents, but Equals [sic].”25 Gilman envisions a world
of children who learn more by activity than through books, with only those physically
and mentally healthy spending a great deal of time reading so as not to overtax the minds
of those more naturally suited to non-intellectual pursuits. As children mature, parents
and others who look after them note where their interests lie and adjust their
environments accordingly.26 In Gilman’s mind, this new perspective of children and the
new educational structure results in the formation of “happy children,” without
“discontented, careworn, anxious, repressed, or rebellious faces.”27 It also results in men
and women who are qualified to work in fields they find interesting and personally
fulfilling.28
Gilman provided women with the freedom to choose any field of endeavor, not
just those that society deems acceptable for them.29 They earn a living from their work
rather than through motherhood, but Gilman made it possible for women to combine
24
Ibid., 114-115,118-120.
25
Ibid., 115.
26
Ibid., 121-122.
27
Ibid., 114.
28
Ibid., 59,67.
29
Ibid., 40,45,59,67,97.
69
motherhood and career through state provision for child gardens. She describes women
who work a two-hour shift, then walk next door to the child garden to nurse their infants
before returning to work for another two hours.30 In this regard, Gilman introduced a
revolutionary concept in her utopia that clearly challenged contemporary expectations for
mothers, but which simultaneously ordered society. Not only were women given
complete and equal access to education, but in the new culture, people expected that
women would utilize their knowledge in careers that they found interesting and become
mothers to healthy, “happy” children. In this ideal world, women contribute to social
order by utilizing their education in their careers and, if they choose, by having children.
In this utopia, unlike that by Bellamy and Wells, Gilman desires that women bear the
healthiest children possible, but does not stipulate that a woman must have children to
reach the pinnacle of her existence. However, in comparison to Bellamy and Wells,
Gilman places mothers in an even more privileged position, because she provides them
with the ability to have a career and a family without undue effort.
The theme of freedom and happiness through education and work is emphasized
throughout Moving the Mountain. Although everyone works in this utopia, Gilman
envisions an environment that prevents overexertion and allows people to “choose the
work they like best.”31 Like Bellamy and Wells, Gilman envisions short work days. The
new economic structure requires only two to four hours of work each day, although
30
Ibid., 117.
31
Ibid., 67.
70
many, she writes, choose to work more hours per day because they enjoy their fields of
endeavor. She then leaves the balance of the day for personal endeavors. Even though
people in this world earn varied wages, everyone has at least enough to care for their
physical needs.32 In Gilman’s utopia, people work according to their preferences,
working hours are minimized and everyone has the means to acquire quality food,
clothing, and shelter.
In discussing women’s careers with his sister, John is amazed by the professional
fields available for women. Nellie, for example, attended college in the United States and
abroad, then became a physician, and at the time of the novel, holds a position as
President of a coeducational college. Other women in this utopia own and manage large
stores. Some work in and outside America as home decorators, and still others are civil
engineers.33 The variety of their professions and their recognition in other countries
provides another means for women to spread this utopia throughout the world. All of this
contributes to a social environment of content individuals by creating, as John concludes,
“a world that was not tired, not driven…[a world] of people who only had to work two
hours—and worked four [instead]!”34 Women could attend colleges, but as noted in
Chapter 1, career opportunities were limited so that even where women could attain a
education, they could not always utilize those degrees.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid., 40, 45, 54, 59, 97.
34
Ibid., 60.
71
In the realm of reproduction, Gilman’s proposals encourage women to have
careers and simultaneously marry and become mothers. She facilitates this in part
through the short working hours, but also through the “child gardens,” the homes where
children grow up, and through minimizing housework.35 Most women who wish to
become mothers are allowed to have children, but if they desire to raise their children
personally, they must take training and be accepted in that role “by the other women—the
Department of Child Culture, the Government.”36 Here Gilman drops in this idea without
developing it in depth. While Gilman allows most women in this utopia to reproduce, she
also establishes that those who fail to meet certain behavioral and moral standards must
not have children.37 Although Gilman does not provide a list of unacceptable behaviors,
but one of the characters John meets notes that she used to be a drunkard and is not
qualified to have children. 38
Thus, only women deemed suitable for motherhood take charge of their children.
Restrictions on child-bearing and child-rearing create “happier” children and parents,
along with a more domestically peaceful and orderly society, as it prevents women who
would be frustrated or neglectful as fulltime mothers from making their children
unhappy. Indeed, Gilman describes women who wish to center their lives around home
and hearth as reactionary and out of step with the majority of the population. One woman
35
Ibid., 95.
36
Ibid., 76.
37
Ibid., 138.
38
Gilman, "Moving the Mountain." 136.
72
John meets tells him that she “took the child-culture course” in order to have her children
at home with her, but that “they won’t stay much,” preferring to spend time in the child
gardens. 39 This example implies that Gilman valued placed more value on the woman
who contributed to society by working for wages, and allowing professional child care
workers to raise her children. The housewife who centers her life on home and hearth as
middle class nineteenth century values expected becomes devalued in this model because
the only way she to contributes to society is through child birth and child rearing. Gilman
thus reverses the Victorian construction of women’s gender roles.
In Gilman’s utopia housework is rationalized; professionals take over what little
domestic work remains and earn salaries for doing so. Many people live in hotel-like
facilities, which provide meals and housekeeping services for less annual cost than standalone homes. People are welcome to eat in their own dining rooms if they choose, and
clean up consists of placing dishes in a case to be carried away for cleaning by the
professionally paid staff. In this utopia, professionals do this work, rather than menial
laborers. These arrangements free women from unpaid housework by providing
professionals to care for these matters. Although she does not specify the sex of the
worker, her example uses the female pronoun. As Nellie explains to her brother, “the
women who liked that kind of work are doing it now, as a profession, for reasonable
hours and excellent salaries; and women who did not like it are now free to do the work
39
Ibid., 95.
73
they are fitted for and enjoy.”40 In matters of food, people can call in an order for what
meals they would like to have. This leaves women time to pursue their own endeavors
and to spend time with any children they may have. These provisions prevent women
from becoming overworked and exhausted by home chores and allow them time to join
men in the public sphere and to become their equals.41 One of John’s friends explains that
before the utopia, married women were “generally…tired, nervous, overworked
creature[s]….Now, women are intelligent, experienced, well-trained citizens, fully our
equals in any line of work they take up, and with us everywhere. It’s made our world
over!”42
Although women were free in Gilman’s utopia to choose their career paths in
accordance with their talents and desires, she assumed that desire played no role in
women’s sexuality. Indeed, women in this utopian world are nearly passionless beings
who linked sexuality with reproduction. However, she does assume that even those who
do not qualify to reproduce might desire marriage, and so she includes a provision of
marriage without children for those not qualified to reproduce.43 What she did not make
clear is how these couples would avoid parenthood. By the time Gilman wrote Moving
the Mountain, surgical sterilization was possible, as were barrier methods of birth control
40
Ibid., 96-97.
41
Ibid., 66,68-72,81,96-99.
42
Ibid., 81.
43
Bellamy, Looking Backward, 130. Gilman, "Moving the Mountain," 138.
74
in Europe.44 In the United States, barrier methods were available only to enterprising
couples who could find their way around the Comstock Laws that made it illegal to
distribute birth control information or devices.45 Historian Mary A. Hill notes that a few
years after Gilman wrote Moving the Mountain, she began to support Margaret Sanger’s
calls for birth control to prevent reproduction among unqualified couples. This implies
that Gilman may have assumed that couples would utilize these methods.46
Gilman’s common representation of sexuality assumes that women who are
overly sexual were ill and subject to medical treatment for their condition. In the novel,
Nellie’s husband Owen explains that women like this still exist thirty years into utopia,
but that “the whole thing is now recognized as pathological—cases for medical treatment,
or perhaps surgical [treatment].”47 In her utopia, then, Gilman saw sexuality as a
secondary issue; women, and presumably, men as well, would come to see sex as useful
for reproduction, but not as an end in itself. Gilman argued in Women and Economics that
a more rational view of sex would allow men and women to work together more equally
than they could in a world where sexual differentiation ruled the day and made people
more interested in impressing each other than in working. She writes, “We are the only
44
W. A. Chapple, The Fertility of the Unfit(Whitcombe & Tombs, 1903, accessed January 2 2009);
available from http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/6/2/5/16254/16254.htm.;Hera Cook, The
Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
45
Gordon, Moral Property, 111-113.
46
Stetsen, 38-39,43-44; Gordon, Moral Property, 32-37,61; Mary A. Hill, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
A Feminist's Struggle with Womanhood " The Massachusetts Review 21, no. 3 (1980): 517-517n31.
47
Gilman, "Moving the Mountain," 78-79.
75
animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species
in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation.”48 This economic relationship
meant that for women “sex-distinction…[becomes] a means of getting her livelihood.”49
Reducing “sex-distinction” by making women economically independent would return
interest in the sexual act to its function in the animal kingdom, that of reproduction, and
create “a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of
social evolution.”50 In other words, Gilman reduces men and sexuality to that of animals,
assuming that if all other physical, mental, and emotional needs are met, people will be
less driven by their sexual impulses.
Gilman thus turned American Edwardian society’s expectations for women 180
degrees. She made women the equals of men in intellect and in labor, but devalued
women who sought to focus on domesticity entirely. She also assumed that men and
women were only interested in sexual intimacy necessary for reproduction. She
incorporated eugenic ideas in establishing that some people were not “fit” for
reproduction and in assimilating immigrants before they “contaminate” American society
with their physical and mental impurities. The changes to immigrants along with
selective reproduction produce physically, mentally, and morally healthy children, which
in turn contributes to order in society.
48
Stetsen, 5.
49
Ibid., 38.
50
Ibid., 35-39,340.
76
In her view, women realized their potential and acted on it. When freed from
traditional roles and expectations that kept them bound to the family, they were able to
exert their influence through their public actions and to regulate society, first in America
and then gradually to spread their ideas to the rest of the world. They moved beyond the
boundaries of home and hearth and accomplished what men on their own could not. They
made sure that education was not only universal, but activity-based and focused on
children’s interests. Women also created an environment that honored children as
individuals, raising them in a combination of child gardens and in their parents’ homes,
assuring that all who reached adulthood have the greatest likelihood of being “happy,”
confident people. Once children reached maturity, Gilman’s utopian economic and labor
structure assured that adults remained content and able to contribute as much to society as
their skills allowed them. Men and women could work in career fields they chose, with
no restrictions based on their anatomical sex. Beyond imagining new customs that
facilitated economic and social order, Gilman restricted reproduction to those who met
American middle-class standards and by making sure that immigrants learned all they
needed about how to adopt those middle-class standards before they joined the general
population. In total, Gilman’s utopia, formulated an ideal world that reversed gender role
ideology to create social order out of chaos.
77
CONCLUSION
When Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman sought to put on paper their visions of ideal
worlds, of the structures that could solve social ills and bring order to society, they were
engaging in a realm of public discourse on social issues. Wells and Gilman especially had
written works of non-fiction before they wrote the novels considered in this thesis, and
they used these works to build on their other ideas. Their ideas also reflect Bellamy’s in
that they advanced education and careers for women.
However, while Looking Backward influenced their works, Wells and Gilman
diverged from Bellamy’s ideas in labor and reproduction. Gilman provided the most
opportunity for her women to simultaneously enjoy career and family and personal life,
while Wells provided the most sexual freedom to unmarried women. Both Wells and
Gilman envisioned coercive states, as both established government structures identify the
“unfit” and remove them from the general population, where Bellamy had done the
opposite, assuming that the state would not need to euthanize the recalcitrant.
Many scholars who examine utopian novels focus on the political and economic
structure that the authors imagined, including their political, economic, and social
proposals, but neglect to look at how these works engaged public debates, including that
of eugenics. They also often miss the ways the authors’ views of women’s roles shaped
the larger landscape of these ideal worlds. The utopian novels by Edward Bellamy, H. G.
Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman examined here provide examples of just how
extensively ideas about women’s roles shaped their social structures.
78
In these utopian works, the authors refashioned expectations for women’s
behavior in their visions of education, labor, motherhood, and reproduction. Whether
they were challenging or reinforcing nineteenth expectations of women, their visions of
these roles contributed to their versions of unchaotic societies. Each of the authors
proposed that education be universal and extensive in spite of the nineteenth and early
twentieth century laws and class structure that made it difficult for most men and women
to obtain anything beyond a basic education. In challenging constructions of gender roles
that prevented a majority of women, as well as men from the lower classes, from gaining
advanced education, Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman proposed that an educated populace
would create more pleasant neighbors, would make for more interesting interactions with
others, and would allow individuals to work in their chosen fields in their careers. These
changes in education and labor, would make it easier for women to bear physically
healthy children. Taken together, these authors’ proposed changes promised to allow all
citizens to productively contribute to the social wheal. A universal education would also
create a more homogenous population, and thus lessen societal and class tensions, as
everyone would have similar cultural frames of reference to facilitate communication.
Each of these aspects of education had the potential to regulate society.
In the realm of labor, Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman largely envisioned drastic
changes to the existing social order, and here again, the authors’ conception of women’s
roles contributed to economic and social order in their utopias. Each of these authors
proposed that their citizens use their education in the labor force, challenging nineteenth
79
century beliefs that middle-class women should remain within the home rather than
earning wages from the economy. For Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman, granting women
economic independence prevented them from marrying for economic security, which
improved the quality of their children and future citizens. It also created a healthier
population, as women were no longer used up physically in burdensome household work.
Instead, they could utilize their energies to create a stronger and more financially stable
society.
However, only Gilman advanced the idea even further in asserting that women be
wives, mothers, and workers simultaneously and that they work in any career in which
they are qualified. To accommodate women’s careers, Gilman proposed that society
create children’s crèches where they could be raised by specially trained individuals
while also spending quality time with their parents. Gilman saw this provision as
benefiting and regulating society because children could grow up surrounded by people
who knew how to provide for their physical, emotional, and mental needs rather by
stressed parents who might end up neglecting their children by being overworked. The
assumption is that children who are well cared for make for healthy, well-adjusted adults,
who in turn contribute to an orderly social structure.
In contrast to Gilman, Bellamy stopped short of total economic choice for
women. He saw fundamental differences between men and women, including female
frailties that would restrict them to work suited to their feminine physiology. Even in
these restrictions, it becomes evident that Bellamy used conceptions of women’s roles to
80
regulate society. His proposals to retain inequities presupposed that nineteenth century
beliefs about women’s nature were fundamental truths that could not be contravened
without inducing chaos, disorder, and death in the body politic.
Wells did not believe that women and men could ever attain pay equity, so he
made a provision in his utopia to remunerate eligible women for bearing exceptional
children. This idea emphasized the importance of reproduction and motherhood, and
elevated the status of mothers in society. He also placed control over women’s sexuality
with women, so that unmarried women could engage in sexual relationships as they chose
without societal censure so long as children did not result. Even though Wells placed
eugenic needs of assuring that married women bore her husband’s children ahead of
freedom to take lovers, he did provide married women with an extraordinary amount of
choice, as women had the legal right to divorce a husband who proved unfaithful. Order
came out of chaos as men and women who failed to meet Wells’s “fitness” requirements
stopped reproducing prodigiously and as motherhood for those who were “fit” became a
valued profession. These latter women would presumably raise mentally, physically, and
morally healthy children who would in turn become valuable citizens.
Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman all chose to order their societies by regulating
reproduction. Their utopian worlds used various means to choose who were eligible to
reproduce, but all incorporated some version of social conceptions of the ideal male and
female and eugenics into the criteria they used. They all drew on the principle of natural
selection as applied to humanity, basing their standards on American and English middle-
81
class values. Bellamy made women responsible for future generations by assuming that
they would choose their husbands carefully, basing their decisions on a man’s ability to
meet utopian society’s expectations of behavior. Wells and Gilman also stipulated that
individuals meet certain minimum standards of behavior and physical health before
receiving sanction from the state to reproduce. For each of these authors, regulating
reproduction would not only prevent unchecked population growth, but increase the
population of the middle class while decreasing the number of those of the lower classes,
thus creating what these middle-class authors would interpret as an orderly society. One
major difference between Bellamy and the others, however, is that in Looking Backward,
Bellamy privileged Lamarckian views as the vital means to achieve good heredity,
whereas in the other works, Wells and Gilman place a higher importance on a
reductionist eugenic view, holding that improved society followed from the
implementation of eugenic policies to control reproduction of the unfit.
Thus, examining Looking Backward, A Modern Utopia, and Moving the Mountain
demonstrates the extent to which women’s roles proved to be an essential factor in these
utopian visions of orderly societies. These works provide a lens to focus on the
relationship between women’s roles and economic and social order, as well as on the
diversity of ideas about heredity and social order. They also shed light on way individuals
formulated ideal behaviors to shape economic and social structures. These novels also
allow readers to understand how Bellamy, Wells, and Gilman refashioned existing
constructions of women’s gender roles to envision worlds that countered the chaos these
82
authors saw that industrialization, urbanization, and immigration created. The recasting
of women’s roles to facilitate change suggests that for these authors, providing a
perception of social order would contribute a vital key to changing those aspects of
society that they found distasteful. Their conceptions of women’s roles also suggest that
they assumed that a gradual, bloodless revolution would result largely from reforming
society’s expectations for women. Taken together, these works show that Bellamy,
Wells, and Gilman refashioned women’s roles because they saw women as vital to the
creation of an orderly economic and social utopian community.
83
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