Description
Daring to Dream recovers for readers three full-length utopias never before reprinted in their entirety, four short utopian stories, and significant excerpts from five utopian novels, each carefully selected to maintain the integrity of the original. The book thus provides an overview of utopias by women in the United States from texts not otherwise easily available. Together they provide a foreground for, and feminist revision of, Edward Bellamy’s popular and influential Looking\Backward (1888), as well as the imaginative underpinnings for the late twentieth-century outpouring of feminist utopias.
A female narrator in 1870 dreams of a role reversal in a story in which men are confined to housekeeping and baby tending, and women run the country and enjoy all the privileges. In an 1885 short story, women emigrate from the eastern states to the Territory of Washington, where only women are voters. In the 1949 piece, “A Visitor from Venus,” the visitor, accustomed to an all female Venusian society, reports her dismay at Earth’s sex-biased arrangements.
In addition to these twelve selections, this new edition includes a valuable annotated bibliography of utopias written by United States women from 1836-1988.
About the Author
Carol Farley Kessler is a professor of English, American Studies, and Women's Studies at Penn State-Delaware County and is the author of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings.
October 1995