Abstract
This chapter introduces the concepts of utopia and communitarianism to readers, specifically highlighting the utopian thinker and advocate, Charles Fourier, whose writings inspired the creation of a series of communal experiments throughout the United States during the 1840s. Building upon prior research in the fields of history, sociology, and gender studies, this chapter explores past studies of communal experiments and advocates for an alternative approach to analyzing Fourierist communities. This new approach highlights the lasting impact of communal life, specifically on individual female community members, thus challenging the typical success/failure framework by expanding the analysis of communal impact beyond the existence of the communities themselves. This chapter also examines the underlying approach and arguments of the book, preparing the reader for an informed exploration of social reform activism and cooperative living experiments throughout the nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
Letter, Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, Oct. 30, 1840, in The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–1872, Vol. I, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (Project Gutenberg EBook, 2004 [1883]).
- 2.
Unlike other socialists of the period, Fourier did not see labor as inherently unappealing, but believed it could be made enjoyable, or in his words, “attractive.” See Charles Fourier, Selections from the Works of Fourier, trans. Julia Franklin (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901), 163–170.
- 3.
Thomas More, Utopia (1516).
- 4.
Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), xxii–xxiv. A clear summary of the definitions offered by communal studies scholars is also provided by Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yaacov Oved, and Menachem Topel, eds., The Communal Idea in the 21st Century (Boston: Brill, 2013): “All in all, communal societies have gone by many names depending on their time, place, and economic arrangements. All can be broadly defined as voluntary social units, whose members usually share an ideology, an economic union, and a lifestyle.” (6).
- 5.
See “Intentional Communities in the United States and Canada,” In Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World Vol. 1, eds. Karen Christensen and David Levinson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 762–763.
- 6.
Yaacov Oved analyzes the extent to which religious communities achieved total isolation from surrounding society, concluding that while retreat might be stated as a goal of the community, complete isolation was impractical as community members often had to engage in business dealings, land purchases, and petitioning the government. See Yaacov Oved, “Communes & the Outside World: Seclusion & Involvement,” Communal Societies Vol. 3 (1983): 83–92.
- 7.
The socialist-leaning intentional communities of the nineteenth century are often referred to as “proto-socialist,” or “utopian socialist” to indicate their distinction from Karl Marx’s “scientific socialism.” The notion of a utopian and scientific form of socialism was introduced by Friedrich Engels in his attempt to uplift Marx’s socialism as the truly modern, rational response to capitalism. Engels’s critiques of utopian socialism include the argument that the utopian vision was only gradual, implementing few people at a time who would join utopian societies based on the founder’s singular vision. Instead, Engels argued, Marx’s response to capitalism addressed the source of class struggle: the ownership of the means of production. Thus, only Marx’s response could alleviate the systemic exploitation of the working class. In addition, Engels contended that utopian socialists lacked an overarching theory of history that explained the trajectory of economic and social systems, thus making their plans short-sighted. Though these two visions differed in many ways, both offered critiques of capitalism and unregulated industrialization, and provided a blueprint for an alternative economic system. These alternative economic theories reveal that capitalism was not universally viewed as the inevitable global economic system during the nineteenth century, or even most of the twentieth. See Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1918 [originally published 1880]); see also Jonathan Beecher’s introduction of the term “romantic socialism” as an alternative to the terms “utopian” and “scientific” socialisms in Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), esp. pgs. 3–7.
- 8.
Robert P. Sutton, Heartland Utopias (Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 181.
- 9.
Otohiko Okugawa analyzes the interdependence of nineteenth-century communities through a variety of interpersonal ties among members. See Otohiko Okugawa, “Intercommunal Relationships among Nineteenth-century Communal Societies in America,” Communal Societies Vol 3. (1983): 68–82.
- 10.
The form of this book is inspired by the organization and writing style of Natalie Zemon Davis’s Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
- 11.
Fourier’s early adulthood during the French Revolution is chronicled by Beecher and Bienvenu in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, eds. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 3–7.
- 12.
Fourier’s first book was a meandering text called Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales, published in 1808. An English translation of the text was first published in 1857 titled Charles Fourier, The Social Destiny of Man, or, Theory of the Four Movements, by Charles Fourier, Henry Clapp, Jr. and Albert Brisbane, trans. (New York: Robert M. Dewitt, 1857).
- 13.
Charles Fourier, as quoted in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, 195.
- 14.
For more on Flora Tristan’s feminism, as well as her involvement with Fourier and his ideas, see Susan K. Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803–1844 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), esp. Chap. 8: “Flora Tristan and the Moral Superiority of Women,” 155–174. Véret was involved with both Saint-Simonian and Fourierist social circles as a means to promoting women’s equality. She founded The Women’s Tribune to enable female writers to offer women’s perspectives on social issues of the period. See Grogan, French Socialism and Sexual Difference, 100–103.
- 15.
For more on the Napoleonic Civil Code and its impact on women, see Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (New York: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. Chap. 5: “Tethering Cain’s Wife: The Napoleonic Civil Code,” 127–142.
- 16.
On Fourier’s feminism paired with his eccentricity, see Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, State University of New York, 1984), esp. 92–93.
- 17.
The terms “communitarian” and “Fourierist” are now used by scholars to describe Fourier’s followers and the communal experiments they initiated across the United States, though at the time these reformers primarily referred to their communal projects as experiments in “Association” or “social science.” See Carl Guarneri, “Importing Fourierism to America,” Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 43, No. 4 (Oct.–Dec., 1982): 583.
- 18.
Fourier describes the passions and passionate attraction in his first book, translated most succinctly as Theory of the Four Movements, eds. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 74–78.
- 19.
See Charles Fourier, Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier, trans. Julia Frankli (New York, Schocken Books, 1971); Charles Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, 49; Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 241–242.
- 20.
Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 65–66.
- 21.
John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Mount Tom Printing Press, 1870).
- 22.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).
- 23.
Donald Pitzer, “The Uses of the American Communal Past,” Presentation, National Historic Communal Societies Association Conference, New Harmony, Indiana, October 13, 1983. His critique found echoes in 1997 with the release of his edited volume America’s Communal Utopias.
- 24.
Donald Pitzer, “Introduction,” in America’s Communal Utopias, Donald Pitzer, ed. (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 1997), 12. Joshua Lockyer built upon Pitzer’s theory by advocating “Transformative Utopianism,” or an approach to analyzing intentional communities that highlights the ways their utopian idealism lives on as part of larger social movements. This book builds upon both theories. See Joshua Lockyer, “From Developmental Communalism to Transformative Utopianism: An Imagined Conversation with Donald Pitzer,” Communal Societies Vol. 29 (2009): 1–21.
- 25.
Donald Pitzer, “The Origins and Applications of Developmental Communalism from Amana to Zoar,” Presentation, Communal Studies Association Conference, Zoar, Ohio, October 6, 2017.
- 26.
While communal studies scholars have, in recent years, almost unanimously rejected longevity as the sole indicator of success, Kanter’s work is still commonly cited, and thus requires continued response. Many communal studies scholars continue to end their narrative of communities with the end of the collective communal experiment, implying its expiration, or irrelevance beyond this point. See, for instance, Sterling Delano’s Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia. For a critique of this success/failure framework within a contemporary study of intentional communities, see Jade Aguilar, “Assessing Success in High-Turnover Communities: Communes as Temporary Sites of Learning and Transmission of Values,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012): 35–57. This book builds on recent scholarship that has advanced Pitzer’s thesis, including that of Joseph Manzella and Paolo Magagnoli, who argue that memory, nostalgia, and the tie to geographic place stimulate continued bonds with the intentional community among former communitarians. Joseph Manzella, Common Purse, Uncommon Future: The Long, Strange Trip of Communes and Other Intentional Communities (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010); Paolo Magagnoli, Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Eagle Glassheim contributes to the discussion of nostalgia in his analysis of utopianism as a tie to a region, analogous to the German notion of Heimat. Glassheim, Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). The historical community that perhaps most upends the notion of longevity indicating the “success” or memorability of a community is arguably “Fruitlands,” the vegetarian, quasi-transcendentalist community founded by Bronson Alcott. This community is frequently referenced by historians as one of the most well-known and frequently studied of New England nineteenth-century communities, often placed alongside the other transcendentalist community, Brook Farm. But while Brook Farm existed as a community for six years, Fruitlands lasted merely seven months. Despite this brevity, it remains a paradigm of success today, if only in the level of historical research dedicated to it.
- 27.
A series of books on women’s history published in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries approached the topic of women’s involvement in social reform primarily through churches and clubs. See: Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Lori Ginzberg, Women in Antebellum Reform (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 2000); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Nancy Hewitt argues that the various social movements that women in Rochester, New York engaged with during the nineteenth century depended on their socioeconomic status, religious backgrounds, a geographic setting. See Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); While she focuses primarily on women of the late-nineteenth century, Lillian Faderman also analyzes women’s use of moral benevolence to further social reform while evading male dominance in To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America—A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999); Ellen DuBois briefly mentions the role of “utopian socialism” in the early years of the emerging women’s rights movement in “Woman Suffrage and the Left An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” in Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights, (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 254.
- 28.
Lisa Tetrault challenges the traditional timeline of the women’s rights movement in The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
- 29.
While this book focuses primarily on the period of the 1840s, the women’s rights movement can be traced back to anti-slavery organizations of the 1830s, including the Female Anti-Slavery, which advocated women’s equality as well as African American equality. As Bettina Aptheker argues, “By 1840, the American anti-slavery movement was committed to women’s equality, at least in organizational principle.” Aptheker, Woman’s Legacy, 20.
- 30.
Communal Studies scholars have claimed that as many as 100,000 people were involved in the communitarian movement of the mid-nineteenth century, though exact numbers are difficult to verify. See John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 22; Carl Guarneri, “Reconstructing the Antebellum Communitarian Movement: Oneida and Fourierism,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 16, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), 487–488.
- 31.
Georgiana Bruce Kirby, Years of Experience, 175.
- 32.
Ada C. Merrill, “Reminiscences of Isabella MacKay Town Hunter,” Milwaukee Sentinel, January 31, 1904, p. 4.
- 33.
James Stetson, as quoted in Letters from an American Utopia: The Stetson Family and the Northampton Association, 1843–1847, eds. Christopher Clark and Kerry W. Buckley (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 187.
- 34.
For example, in one letter, Dwight pines: “I have spoken to you perhaps of our domestic animals—our cats and dogs—who go from house to house and are equally at home in either—a thing I never observed in civilization.” Marianne Dwight, Letter to Anna Parsons, May 16, 1845, as printed in Marianne Dwight, Letters from Brook Farm: 1844–1847, ed. Amy L. Reed (New York: AMS Press, 1974), 98.
- 35.
This references an excerpt from Kathryn Lofton’s book. Lofton argues that by portraying our subjects as important to the historical narrative (or in her case, to religious studies scholarship), we have perhaps forgotten the ways their actions are reflective of larger systems of power and control: “I have become increasingly concerned that in our scholarly ambition to translate our subjects—to, as the phrasing often goes, take our subjects seriously—we have become sycophants to our subjects, reframing every act as an inevitably creative act.” Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (University of California Press, 2011), 16.
- 36.
The problem of the scholar’s objectivity is addressed by Donna Haraway in “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), 575–599.
- 37.
“Gender” in this instance refers to the public’s perception of these women’s gender identities as women, though the terms “sex” and gender” are complex and somewhat fluid across historical periods. Judith Butler discusses the performative role of gender in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
- 38.
The term “intersectionality” refers to the notion that individuals experience life through the lens of interconnected social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, and that these categories create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. The term was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique or Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum Vol. 1989, Issue 1, Article 8.
- 39.
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14.
- 40.
Two studies of Fourierist communities analyzed in comparison with other American communitarian projects were published in the 1870s. These works were meant to show the peaceful transition to social equality offered by these “communitarians” in the context of utopian societies, as opposed to the violent rejections of capitalism expressed by “communists.” William Alfred Hinds, American Communities (Chicago: C.H. Kerr Co., 1902 [1878]); Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States: 1794–1875 (New York: Hillary House Publishers, 1961 [1875]).
- 41.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Project Gutenberg EBook, 2005 [1848]).
- 42.
For more on the specifications of the “phalanx” and “phalanstery,” see Charles Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, esp. 240–242.
- 43.
Charles Fourier used a variety of terms to describe women’s liberation, including referencing women’s “freedom,” “privileges,” and “liberty,” and reversing their “subjugation.” See Charles Fourier, as printed in The Theory of the Four Movements, eds. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [originally published 1808]), 130–132. On the equal treatment of men and women, see “Constitution and Bylaws of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry,” as reprinted in Clark and Buckley, Letters from an American Utopia, 240; See also Constitution of Brook Farm Phalanx, adopted May 1, 1845, pg. 10, GEN MSS 1394, Box 1, Folder 3, A. J. Macdonald Writings on American Utopian Communities, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; On economic equity, see “Constitution of Trumbull Phalanx,” Ohio Wesleyan University Library, Cleveland, Ohio. Even when the terms “equality” or “women’s rights” were used by women, they could mean different things, as some women (particularly in the early 1840s) focused primarily on property ownership, child custody, equal access to education, or the opportunity to divorce. Others who discussed these terms (particularly in the late 1840s and 1850s) included suffrage in this discussion.
- 44.
On challenging the servitude of women, See Albert Brisbane, letter to Angelique Le Petit Martin, Sept. 28, 1846, Angelique Le Petit Martin Papers, Marietta College Library; On the degradation of women, see Angelique Martin, draft letter to Garret Smith, January 22, 1852, Angelique Le Petit Martin Papers, Marietta College Library; Also on the degradation and servitude of women, see Letter from Warren Chase, Senate Standing and Special Committee Reports, 1836–1945, Series 170 MAD 3/43/D5-6, Box 2, Folder 19, Wisconsin Historical Society; On the oppression of women, see Albert Brisbane, letter to Angelique Le Petit Martin, May 23, 1846, Angelique Le Petit Martin Papers, Marietta College Library.
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Hart, A. (2021). Introduction to Intentional Communities and Social Change. In: Fourierist Communities of Reform. Palgrave Studies in Utopianism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68356-6_1
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