Utopian Genderscapes
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2022 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award, Honorable Mention!A necessary rhetorical history of women’s work in utopian communities
Utopian Genderscapes focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members.
This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor.
An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible.
Utopian Genderscapes focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members.
This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor.
An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible.
Utopian Genderscapes focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members.
Michelle C. Smith is an assistant professor of English at Clemson University. Her teaching and research interests include feminist rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and historiography. Her writing has appeared in College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Peitho, as well as in other journals and edited collections.
1. Ecologies of Women’s Work: Feminist Historiography and Material Rhetorics
In 1907, a journalist named Alvan F. Sanborn wrote a cautionary article for Good Housekeeping called “The Revolt from Family Ties.” In the article, Sanborn associates contemporary critiques of the family by feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elsie Clews Parsons with the utopian fervor of the mid-nineteenth century. In Sanborn’s telling, the communal experiments of the Shakers, the Mormons, the German Amana Colonies, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida, and the Transcendentalist Brook Farm (as well as its close neighbor, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands) are a history of assaults on the nuclear family, attempts “to persuade their fellows to break away from the traditional family life” (167). Sanborn seeks to “remind the public, whose memory is proverbially short,” of the ostensible failure of these communities, which should “give us pause” when considering present-day reforms (167, 170). Decades prior, contemporary commenters prefigured Sanborn by assessing midcentury utopian communities as having “cast aside the family”—“at war with the whole principle of family responsibilities, support, and ties of relationship” (“Social Communities” 445; “The Last of a ‘Community’” 127). This threat was particularly salient in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when the American family stood as a symbol of continuity and security amidst the social and economic turmoil of industrialization. But how, specifically, did utopian communities threaten the family?
One clue comes in an alternative response to midcentury intentional communities. For Mary Roberts Coolidge, a pioneer of women’s studies, the significance of these experiments lay in their prospects for women. From the 1820s to 1880s, a striking array of intentional communities offered female members a “larger and more prophetic atmosphere,” promoting “the development of exceptional women whose careers were in themselves a contradiction of the accepted views as to feminine capacity” (261). Alongside and in contrast to new opportunities in factory work, wage labor, and urban life, utopian experiments underscored the expanding possibilities for women’s lives. Such communities were lived arguments for increasing women’s access to education, self-culture, and a variety of careers: “Then, as now, whenever a thinking man came to know such a woman, he ever afterwards had an enlarged idea of what women might become under the stimulus of broadened opportunities” (262). For Coolidge, then, the greatest significance of utopian communities was their embodied testimony to the possibility of revising conventional gender relations.
In 1907, a journalist named Alvan F. Sanborn wrote a cautionary article for Good Housekeeping called “The Revolt from Family Ties.” In the article, Sanborn associates contemporary critiques of the family by feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elsie Clews Parsons with the utopian fervor of the mid-nineteenth century. In Sanborn’s telling, the communal experiments of the Shakers, the Mormons, the German Amana Colonies, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida, and the Transcendentalist Brook Farm (as well as its close neighbor, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands) are a history of assaults on the nuclear family, attempts “to persuade their fellows to break away from the traditional family life” (167). Sanborn seeks to “remind the public, whose memory is proverbially short,” of the ostensible failure of these communities, which should “give us pause” when considering present-day reforms (167, 170). Decades prior, contemporary commenters prefigured Sanborn by assessing midcentury utopian communities as having “cast aside the family”—“at war with the whole principle of family responsibilities, support, and ties of relationship” (“Social Communities” 445; “The Last of a ‘Community’” 127). This threat was particularly salient in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when the American family stood as a symbol of continuity and security amidst the social and economic turmoil of industrialization. But how, specifically, did utopian communities threaten the family?
One clue comes in an alternative response to midcentury intentional communities. For Mary Roberts Coolidge, a pioneer of women’s studies, the significance of these experiments lay in their prospects for women. From the 1820s to 1880s, a striking array of intentional communities offered female members a “larger and more prophetic atmosphere,” promoting “the development of exceptional women whose careers were in themselves a contradiction of the accepted views as to feminine capacity” (261). Alongside and in contrast to new opportunities in factory work, wage labor, and urban life, utopian experiments underscored the expanding possibilities for women’s lives. Such communities were lived arguments for increasing women’s access to education, self-culture, and a variety of careers: “Then, as now, whenever a thinking man came to know such a woman, he ever afterwards had an enlarged idea of what women might become under the stimulus of broadened opportunities” (262). For Coolidge, then, the greatest significance of utopian communities was their embodied testimony to the possibility of revising conventional gender relations.
Despite their differing conclusions, Sanborn and Coolidge both highlight intentional communities’ reconfiguration of women’s roles. In this they were not alone: nineteenth-century commentators also oriented their praise and blame of utopian communities around questions of gender. Critics insisted that changing women’s roles would undermine the nuclear family and the American home, a threat only loosely tied to the social structure of the community in question. In such accounts, as in contemporary public discourse, ostensible concern for the family functions as a dog whistle for alarm over changes in women’s status: an instance of synecdoche where the whole (the family) serves as a veiled reference to one constituent part (women). For other contemporaries, intentional communities promised to liberate women by revising men’s and women’s work. An 1856 article in The United States Magazine, deploring “the pecuniary dependence of woman,” praised intentional communities as a step towards a future society “so organized that both sexes may, by virtuous industry, secure a competence,” such that women will no longer be forced “to assume the bond of marriage as an equivalent for bread and raiment” (“Social Communities”). Following Nathan Stormer’s approach to public memory as a “conduit of contestation (as opposed to a topic to be debated),” public debate over intentional communities functioned “not as a dispute awaiting resolution but rather as a way of orienting struggle around new ways of living” (4). For midcentury Americans, intentional communities—as a practice or an object of public valuation—were one means of coming to terms with the new social and labor dynamics of the Industrial Revolution.
In this light, Utopian Genderscapes reads midcentury intentional communities as a suggestive yet underexplored discursive and material site for American constructions of gender, labor, and industrialism. In the 1840s alone, the United States housed eighty-four active utopian communities (Fogarty, Dictionary). As Ralph Waldo Emerson quipped: “We are all a little wild with numberless projects of social reform; not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket” (qtd. in Hayden, Seven 9). These communal efforts involved significant reconfigurations of labor and gender as midcentury utopian communities attempted to cope with “the crisis of transition from pre-industrial to more modern forms of family and social life” (Foster, Religion 4). Their coping strategies involved alternative systems of labor that opposed industrial trends toward individualism, hierarchy, and the pursuit of wealth. But trying out new labor models also necessitated a reconsideration of women’s roles and work. As they grappled with new patterns of industrial labor, intentional communities redrew divisions between men’s and women’s work, raising and engaging the broader question: what would industrialism mean for women’s work? Throughout this book, I engage the 1840s as a kairotic moment where Americans explored the affordances of industrialism before it calcified into more rigid forms in the second half of the century.
In this light, Utopian Genderscapes reads midcentury intentional communities as a suggestive yet underexplored discursive and material site for American constructions of gender, labor, and industrialism. In the 1840s alone, the United States housed eighty-four active utopian communities (Fogarty, Dictionary). As Ralph Waldo Emerson quipped: “We are all a little wild with numberless projects of social reform; not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket” (qtd. in Hayden, Seven 9). These communal efforts involved significant reconfigurations of labor and gender as midcentury utopian communities attempted to cope with “the crisis of transition from pre-industrial to more modern forms of family and social life” (Foster, Religion 4). Their coping strategies involved alternative systems of labor that opposed industrial trends toward individualism, hierarchy, and the pursuit of wealth. But trying out new labor models also necessitated a reconsideration of women’s roles and work. As they grappled with new patterns of industrial labor, intentional communities redrew divisions between men’s and women’s work, raising and engaging the broader question: what would industrialism mean for women’s work? Throughout this book, I engage the 1840s as a kairotic moment where Americans explored the affordances of industrialism before it calcified into more rigid forms in the second half of the century.
This book has three principal aims: 1) to illustrate the material-discursive construction of women’s work in nineteenth-century intentional communities; 2) to consider these communities as instances of the gender reforms that were thinkable—that fell within the boundaries of the possible—in the mid-nineteenth century; and 3) to approach these communities as case studies of how industrialization shaped enduring configurations that differentiated labor across not only gender but also class and race. In the following chapters, I pursue these aims through an analysis of three distinct communities. The Transcendentalist Brook Farm community in West Roxbury, MA (1841-47)—where Unitarian ministers and other Boston intellectual lights tried their hand at self-subsistence—is the focus of Chapter Two as well as the most famous of the three communities, commonly celebrated as an egalitarian space tragically undermined by its leaders’ attention to philosophy at the expense of pragmatics. Chapter Three introduces the long-lived Harmony Society (1804-1905)—a community of religious Separatists fleeing persecution in Germany—whose members relocated several times before settling north of Pittsburgh in 1825, where the immigrant community was renowned for its worldly successes and policy of celibacy (satirized by Lord Byron in Don Juan). Finally, Chapter Four takes up the infamous upstate New York Oneida Community (1848-81), which shocked the American public with its practices of “complex marriage” (a highly structured polyamory) and “male continence” (an early form of birth control), among other eccentricities. Each body chapter focuses on women’s domestic, professional, or reproductive labor in a particular community, framing that labor in light of the community’s history and situating it as a rhetorical negotiation within the larger material-discursive landscape of women’s work during U.S. industrialization. Because the boundaries of women’s domestic, professional, and reproductive labor are often blurred and relational, there is a fruitful slippage among these categories as they are negotiated by the midcentury women and communities at the heart of this study.
Utopian Genderscapes is a feminist history of rhetoric mapping constructions of gendered labor in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. I pursue this task through a theoretical framework I call ecologies of gender, which I develop further in the next section. This approach is premised on the view that careers, workspaces, and work tasks are differently gendered in different times and places and that what counts as work—a perennial concern for women’s labor—is negotiable rather than given (see also Hallenbeck and Smith). Thus, I foreground the rhetorical-material production of gendered work within each community rather than explicit written or spoken arguments about gender. Though community leaders and members did circulate their visions through speaking or writing—notably through community newspapers—I locate the primary rhetorical force of utopian communities in their embodied and material. Similarly, while this project acknowledges women’s work as a site of rhetorical invention, my examination of women’s rhetorics is primarily deployed as a means to illuminate midcentury ecologies of gendered labor. Finally, by minimizing intention, an ecological approach forgoes simple binaries of resistance and compliance. As much as intentional communities were borne of resistance to contemporary trends, they were also of their age: thus, I analyze their innovations as an indication of what gender reforms were thinkable and achievable in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on conversations in feminist historiography and material rhetorics, Utopian Genderscapes articulates the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that comprised women’s work within each community, intervened in larger rhetorics of women’s work, and initiated patterns of gendered labor that persist today.
As a study of rhetorics of gendered labor, this project engages concerns that extend beyond utopian spaces and the mid-nineteenth century. This study takes as its object the construction of the persistent, counterfactual-yet-normative understanding of work spaces, practices, and identities as opposed to home. Because this binary particularly disadvantages women—while also unevenly affecting differently situated women—unpacking its production is an important feminist undertaking. Thus, this project answers Jessica Enoch’s call “to explore the often-thorny relationship between feminism and work” (Domestic Occupations 185). In pursuing this task, I consider the joint articulation of the labor of re/production. That is, I maintain that to fully understand the lives and work of women, we must consider the labor of reproduction and production together. The erasure and invisibility of much of women’s work is an enduring problem, and studies of the rhetoric of women’s work can help reveal the ideological and rhetorical maneuvers that render some women’s work invisible, natural, or inconsequential. Significantly, many of these rhetorical patterns emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
“Utopian Genderscapes is an important contribution to feminist rhetorical studies, filling a critical gap in our understanding of intentional communities, labor conditions, and gender relations in the nineteenth century. Setting careful archival research within a theoretically rich ecological framework, Smith demonstrates how gender, class, and race were deeply imbricated with each other in the sites she studies, positing a challenge to utopian visions of reform, both then and now.”—David Gold, author of Rhetoric at the Margins
Utopian Genderscapes is a feminist history of rhetoric mapping constructions of gendered labor in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. I pursue this task through a theoretical framework I call ecologies of gender, which I develop further in the next section. This approach is premised on the view that careers, workspaces, and work tasks are differently gendered in different times and places and that what counts as work—a perennial concern for women’s labor—is negotiable rather than given (see also Hallenbeck and Smith). Thus, I foreground the rhetorical-material production of gendered work within each community rather than explicit written or spoken arguments about gender. Though community leaders and members did circulate their visions through speaking or writing—notably through community newspapers—I locate the primary rhetorical force of utopian communities in their embodied and material. Similarly, while this project acknowledges women’s work as a site of rhetorical invention, my examination of women’s rhetorics is primarily deployed as a means to illuminate midcentury ecologies of gendered labor. Finally, by minimizing intention, an ecological approach forgoes simple binaries of resistance and compliance. As much as intentional communities were borne of resistance to contemporary trends, they were also of their age: thus, I analyze their innovations as an indication of what gender reforms were thinkable and achievable in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on conversations in feminist historiography and material rhetorics, Utopian Genderscapes articulates the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that comprised women’s work within each community, intervened in larger rhetorics of women’s work, and initiated patterns of gendered labor that persist today.
As a study of rhetorics of gendered labor, this project engages concerns that extend beyond utopian spaces and the mid-nineteenth century. This study takes as its object the construction of the persistent, counterfactual-yet-normative understanding of work spaces, practices, and identities as opposed to home. Because this binary particularly disadvantages women—while also unevenly affecting differently situated women—unpacking its production is an important feminist undertaking. Thus, this project answers Jessica Enoch’s call “to explore the often-thorny relationship between feminism and work” (Domestic Occupations 185). In pursuing this task, I consider the joint articulation of the labor of re/production. That is, I maintain that to fully understand the lives and work of women, we must consider the labor of reproduction and production together. The erasure and invisibility of much of women’s work is an enduring problem, and studies of the rhetoric of women’s work can help reveal the ideological and rhetorical maneuvers that render some women’s work invisible, natural, or inconsequential. Significantly, many of these rhetorical patterns emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
In the following chapters, Utopian Genderscapes explores material-rhetorical structures that discount women’s work as real work and divide women’s labor from men’s. As I pursue this task, I illuminate three rhetorical tropes that permeate the ecologies of gendered labor in this study. My investigation of domestic labor at Brook Farm highlights the role of teleological rhetorics in explaining (logos) women’s housework with reference to the presumed end or purpose (telos) of woman (as wife, mother, and caretaker). As an alternative to framing rhetorics of gender as static and essentialist, teleology directs our attention to the trajectories of gendered ecologies, as in midcentury discourses of working women “unfitting” themselves for future roles as wives and mothers. In the Harmony Society, the case of the exceptional woman professional illuminates how rhetorics of exceptionalism promote false narratives of “trickle-down feminism,” implying that one woman’s success automatically increases other women’s access to professional status. In this light, success stories about individual women often serve to mystify and reify structural inequities in specific workplaces and broader educational and economic institutions. Finally, I examine rhetorics of choice that oppose women’s reproductive and productive labor in the Oneida Community, illustrating how such rhetorics bolster zero-sum logics regarding work and family. Even as familial logics pervade women’s treatment and opportunities in the workplace, women are simultaneously positioned as needing to choose between irreconcilable career and family roles and identities. By articulating work as a crucial node in the rhetorical construction of gender, I identify rhetorics of teleology, exceptionalism, and choice as central to historical and contemporary ecologies of gender.
A central argument of this book is that constructs of gendered labor are never only about gender. Teleology, exceptionalism, and choice operate in midcentury ecologies of gender so as to divide work by class, race, ethnicity, geography, education, and religion—as well as gender. The domestic ideal of a woman’s purpose and eventual aim in life as directed towards a telos of home and family is deeply raced and classed. Women of color or working-class women, in particular, whose lives fall outside this imagined white, middle-class trajectory find their identities, lives, and work unrecognizable within dominant frameworks. In the professions, success stories about individual women as tokens often imply that their achievements are the just reward for exceptional personal qualities rather than the result of cultural and structural privilege. Similarly, the illusion of free choice eschews how women’s decisions are framed by economic, educational, geographic, and other constraints that operate unevenly across class, race, ethnicity, education, and so on. By directing attention to the personal rather than the social, structural, or institutional, rhetorics of exceptionalism and choice are complicit in maintaining unequal life chances. As I argue throughout this book, such rhetorics of gendered labor function to increase divides among women and preclude alliances on the basis of gender.
As the breadth of utopian experimentation in the period attests, midcentury industrialization disrupted existing norms so as to simultaneously invite resistance and open a space of possibility. In this time of flux, intentional communities modeled alternative configurations of women’s work, modifying the value accorded housework, women’s access to diverse occupations, and interactions between work and family. Individually, the chapters to follow illustrate the gendering or regendering of particular kinds of labor in a unique space and time. Together, they give us a better understanding of what midcentury norms of gendered labor proved mutable or recalcitrant and what rhetorical-material factors facilitated and impeded change. On the whole, the constructs of gendered work during industrialism speak to gendered work today, especially insofar as attempts to reform or revise women’s work continue to falter along lines of race or class. Ultimately, the industrial telos towards specialization, hierarchy, and sequestration undermined the utopian projects of the age. Nevertheless, by examining the rhetorical contours of gendered labor in utopian communities, we gain a deeper understanding of both the enduring patterns that emerged in the Industrial Revolution and the communities that embodied a counter-narrative to these trends. The remainder of this introduction elaborates on the theoretical framework, historical background, and methodological approach of this study.
A central argument of this book is that constructs of gendered labor are never only about gender. Teleology, exceptionalism, and choice operate in midcentury ecologies of gender so as to divide work by class, race, ethnicity, geography, education, and religion—as well as gender. The domestic ideal of a woman’s purpose and eventual aim in life as directed towards a telos of home and family is deeply raced and classed. Women of color or working-class women, in particular, whose lives fall outside this imagined white, middle-class trajectory find their identities, lives, and work unrecognizable within dominant frameworks. In the professions, success stories about individual women as tokens often imply that their achievements are the just reward for exceptional personal qualities rather than the result of cultural and structural privilege. Similarly, the illusion of free choice eschews how women’s decisions are framed by economic, educational, geographic, and other constraints that operate unevenly across class, race, ethnicity, education, and so on. By directing attention to the personal rather than the social, structural, or institutional, rhetorics of exceptionalism and choice are complicit in maintaining unequal life chances. As I argue throughout this book, such rhetorics of gendered labor function to increase divides among women and preclude alliances on the basis of gender.
As the breadth of utopian experimentation in the period attests, midcentury industrialization disrupted existing norms so as to simultaneously invite resistance and open a space of possibility. In this time of flux, intentional communities modeled alternative configurations of women’s work, modifying the value accorded housework, women’s access to diverse occupations, and interactions between work and family. Individually, the chapters to follow illustrate the gendering or regendering of particular kinds of labor in a unique space and time. Together, they give us a better understanding of what midcentury norms of gendered labor proved mutable or recalcitrant and what rhetorical-material factors facilitated and impeded change. On the whole, the constructs of gendered work during industrialism speak to gendered work today, especially insofar as attempts to reform or revise women’s work continue to falter along lines of race or class. Ultimately, the industrial telos towards specialization, hierarchy, and sequestration undermined the utopian projects of the age. Nevertheless, by examining the rhetorical contours of gendered labor in utopian communities, we gain a deeper understanding of both the enduring patterns that emerged in the Industrial Revolution and the communities that embodied a counter-narrative to these trends. The remainder of this introduction elaborates on the theoretical framework, historical background, and methodological approach of this study.
Contents List of Figures
Acknowledgements
“Michelle C. Smith’s history of utopian communities models a distinctly feminist and archival enactment of ecological, materialist rhetorics. This historical account is a must-read for everyone interested in industrialization, women’s domestic, professional, and reproductive labor, and class divisions among Northern U.S. white women during the period—not to mention how these rhetorical ecologies endure in the current culture of tidying up, leaning in, and having it all.”—Pamela VanHaitsma, author of Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education Acknowledgements
- Ecologies of Women’s Work: Feminist Historiography and Material Rhetorics
Domestic Rhetorics: The Invention of Housework at Brook Farm
Professional Rhetorics: Silk-Raising in the Harmony Society
Reproductive Rhetorics: The Work of Motherhood at Oneida
Arguments on the Landscape: Rhetorics of Gendered Labor Now and Then
Works Cited
“Utopian Genderscapes is an important contribution to feminist rhetorical studies, filling a critical gap in our understanding of intentional communities, labor conditions, and gender relations in the nineteenth century. Setting careful archival research within a theoretically rich ecological framework, Smith demonstrates how gender, class, and race were deeply imbricated with each other in the sites she studies, positing a challenge to utopian visions of reform, both then and now.”—David Gold, author of Rhetoric at the Margins
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