At the Crossroads of Socialism and First-Wave Feminism

Abstract

This chapter situates Morris’s utopianism in relation to contemporaneous fictional constructions of the ‘New Woman’ and debates within the first-wave feminist movement about the ‘woman question’, political disagreements between socialist feminists and liberal feminists, and the potential (or otherwise) to prefigure non-capitalist social relations within the capitalist present. Situating Morris’s utopianism in the midst of a comparative discussion of contemporaneous ‘New Woman’ writing broaches the question of the relationship between ideology and choice of literary genre: the fictions of first-wave feminism were predominantly (but not exclusively) realist, charting narratives of personal struggle and self-transformation coterminous with the feminist project of Bildung. Morris, by contrast, employed prose romance as a narrative vehicle to experiment with the representation and consolidation of a collectivist structure of feeling.