1. Defining the Feminist Utopia

Feminist utopias have been envisaged in literature for centuries. Indeed, Annie K. Mellor has suggested that since a gender-free society has never existed historically, feminist thinking that posits a world of gender equality is inherently utopian. Usually specified as a sub-genre of speculative fiction or science fiction, feminist utopias in literature provide alternatives to patriarchal rule, or sometimes to the category of gender itself. Broadly, a feminist utopia can be defined as a “narrative about a society that is free from the patriarchal subordination of women” (Peel xv), or, even more broadly, as “feminist fabulation” (Donawerth and Kolmerten 1). Importantly, feminist utopias serve as vehicles for feminist thought: “No other genres so actively invite representations of the ultimate goals of feminism: worlds free of sexism, worlds in which women’s contributions (to science) are recognized and valued, worlds that explore the diversity of women’s desire and sexuality, and worlds that move beyond gender” (Helford). Common throughout the genre is the imagining of an alternate society, where patriarchal structures are weakened, reversed, or non-existent, and where new genders are imagined. Mellor locates three types of feminist utopias in the genre: all-female societies, non-binary definitions of gender, and egalitarian two-sex societies. However, as Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin point out: “One woman’s utopia is another’s nightmare; feminism itself takes on a range of meanings” (ix). Certain nineteenth-century literary utopias, for example, imagine worlds structured by contemporary racist and eugenicist thought; such worlds could not be considered utopias for the women excluded.

Stretching across historical periods and geographical contexts, most feminist utopias share an emphasis on “the imaginative freedom of alternate worlds, the crossing of generic boundaries, the didactic politics of the writing, and the overturning of gendered stereotypes” (Donawerth and Kolmerten 3). Despite their differences, these fictions can be said to “historically speak to one another” and “together amount to a literary tradition of women’s writing” (Donawerth and Kolmerten 1). Moving from thirteenth- to twenty-first-century works, this essay explores the major historical and generic patterns of literary feminist utopias, exploring commonalities and differences between the most famous works in the genre. The structure of the essay broadly corresponds to the “four main periods of greatest feminist utopian output”: from the early modern period, the long eighteenth century, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the 1970s and 1980s (Johns 177), finishing with a brief exploration of contemporary and Afrofuturist feminist utopias. The main examples are taken from texts in English; not because feminist utopias are found only in English-language texts, but because this is the author’s main working language. The entry should therefore be seen as representative of a specific tradition of literary feminist utopias, rather than an all-encompassing one.

2. Early Feminist Utopias

While the term ‘utopia’ was not coined until a century after its publication, French writer Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) presents potentially the first literary feminist utopia. An early formulation of feminist canon criticism, Pizan in this work asks why important women have been written out of world history, literature, and religion, and “why on earth it was that so many men, both clerks and others, have said and continue to say and write such awful, damning things about women and their ways” (5-6). She imagines a utopian City of Ladies where influential women from history reconvene, including figures such as the Egyptian goddess Isis, the Queen of Sheba, Assyrian ruler Semiramis, Mary Magdalene, Sappho, Dido the founder of Carthage, and a number of Amazon women. In this women-only city, built on “the Field of Letters” (that is, in the book itself), women are seen as morally and intellectually equal to men.

It took some centuries after Pizan’s work for further feminist utopias to emerge, with a number of influential texts written as part of early feminism, often part of an Enlightenment or ‘bluestocking’ feminism. English writer Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), which predates the feminist utopian texts of the eighteenth century, depicts a utopian kingdom ruled by an empress, a “blazing world” free of war and gender oppression (Leslie, 1996). Many more feminist utopias followed Cavendish’s work, including two more by English women writers: Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal (1694) and Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall and the Country Adjacent (1762) (Deveraux 2009). In a time when women’s access to education and political influence was strictly limited, these works focus on equality for women in terms of morals and rationality, and highlight the need for female education.

3. Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Visions

The mid- to late nineteenth century saw an upsurge in women’s rights activism across the world, with first-wave feminism coming to a high point in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Alongside this intense feminist organising, feminist literary utopias became especially popular, just as socialist literary utopias rose in popularity alongside the growth in labour and trade union movements at the time. The large number of feminist utopias published in this relatively short period demonstrates the crucial role played by literary works in first-wave feminism.

While the 1880s and 1890s saw the largest number of first-wave feminist utopias, two works stand out due to their relatively early publication: The Coming Race (1870) by English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Man’s Rights; or, How Would You Like It? (1870) by UK-born US writer Annie Denton Cridge. While Denton Cridge provides a satire of current relations through a series of dreams of gender reversal (men have been relegated to women’s duties), Bulwer-Lytton presents the reader with an underground society where a technologically advanced, peaceful, vegetarian race of humans live. In the latter narrative, the “coming race” described in the novel have expert use of electricity – advanced use of electricity being a common trope in late nineteenth-century utopian and science fiction, alongside vegetarianism – with women being taller than the men, and in control of the electric force. Following these earlier works, a few examples of the genre suggest some common themes. US writer Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1881) describes a women-only society with universal education, peace, and advanced technologies such as ‘videophones’ and parthenogenesis (the development of an embryo from an unfertilised egg, that is to say reproduction without men). In US writers Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant’s Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance (1893), the protagonist takes an ‘aeroplane’ to Mars, where he discovers two different societies in which gender equality prevails. Meanwhile, in English writer Elizabeth Burgoyne’s New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889), a future Ireland is inhabited by a race of technologically and biologically advanced (they live for hundreds of years) Amazon women. Here, women govern a society built on communalism, vegetarianism – and eugenics, the latter including the use of euthanasia.

Several supposedly ‘utopian’ works of the period demonstrate the exclusionary practices and ideals of some late nineteenth-century strands of feminism; these utopias deliberately exclude or eradicate large groups of women. Both Mizora and New Amazonia put eugenics, that is to say the genetic engineering of humanity via selective breeding, sterilization, and euthanasia, at the centre of their utopian visions. The place of eugenics in these works invokes a racist and ableist reading of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Adopting Francis Galton’s theories of eugenics, or “controlled evolution”, these women writers employ white supremacist politics to position themselves above other women (Richardson). The racist aspect of eugenics is clearly spelled out in Mizora: only white people live in this supposedly utopian society as the “dark-skinned races” have been – as one character in the book terms it – “eliminated” (Bradley Lane xxxi). The same racist eugenicist thinking returns in one of the period’s most famous feminist utopias, US writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), in which three male adventurers come into the all-women society of Herland, a land of peace, plenty, and parthenogenesis. As in Mizora, the women of Herland are all “of Aryan stock” (Perkins Gilman 81), that is to say white. In such works, people of colour, and disabled people, have been eliminated. Societies based on this kind of racist “eugenic feminism” could thus more aptly be termed dystopias (Seitler; Lukzak; Peebles Tavera). Indeed, one of the most famous feminist dystopias, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), incorporates such white supremacist eugenics into her portrayal of the patriarchal state of Gilead: in this society, white women are used for breeding, while people of colour have been forcefully moved to settlements elsewhere.

However, there are also feminist utopias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that criticise both patriarchal and racist or colonial world orders. While not perhaps at first glance a utopia, US writer and abolitionist Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) could be termed the first African-American feminist utopia. Set in the antebellum South, the narrative follows a young mixed-race woman as she tries to create an ideal society of gender and racial equality through education and community work. In M. Giulia Fabi’s reading, Iola Leroy is clearly utopian as it presents an “alternative, better social system” (56), one in which the main character’s blackness becomes a “cultural force of social change, a grand social mission to construct a new, more egalitarian civilization” (60), rather than a focus of oppression. The utopian impulse can be seen as a “radical this-world-liness” (Fabi), which imagines a utopian society while still being anchored in the author’s present reality. Presented as a dream sequence rather than a “this-worldly” narrative, Sultana’s Dream (1905), by Bengali writer and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain also posits an alternative to white feminist visions of the future. Hossain’s satirical utopia is one of gender reversal: while men are confined indoors, women govern society, which under their rule is a technologically advanced and peaceful society. As Ibsisam Ahmed explains, Hossain’s intent is multifaceted: while on the one hand she criticises the patriarchal order of her contemporary society, in particular the seclusion of women, she is “simultaneously critical of colonialism and its aggressive expansion” (Ahmed).

4. Second-Wave Feminist Utopias

Just as there was an increase in feminist utopian literary production during the first wave of feminism, the second-wave feminism of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s witnessed a similar upsurge in literary activity. There were also feminist utopias published in between these two periods, with authors such as Judith Merril, Alice Eleanor Jones, and Shirley Jackson prefiguring later feminist speculative fiction (Yaszek), as well as William Marston’s Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, which focus on the matriarchal all-female society of Paradise Island (Berlatsky). From the 1960s onward, however, the genre grew significantly (Bartkowski), with books such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) all highlighting in different ways the social construction of gender and other social categories. Octavia Butler’s authorship imagined worlds where not only gender but importantly also racial oppression is questioned.

While The Left Hand of Darkness might not be read as a strictly utopian novel (the society represented is not free from oppression on other grounds than gender), Le Guin’s creation of the genderfluid planet of Winter is clearly utopian in intent. The inhabitants of Winter are genderless most of the time, switching between genders temporarily, a state of being that provides glimpses of a society not based on gender oppression or anatomical sex:

Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable. The fact that everyone between seventeen and thirty-five or so is liable to be … “tied down to childbearing,” implies that no one is quite so thoroughly “tied down” here as women, elsewhere, are likely to be – psychologically or physically. Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make. … Consider: There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halve, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. (Le Guin 93-94)

Russ’s The Female Man describes the meeting of four women from different realities: Joanna is a 1970s feminist, Jeannine is from a world in which the Great Depression never ended, Jael is a warrior from a world of separate female and male societies, and Janet is from the peaceful and technologically advanced women-only utopia of Whileaway. In Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, after being committed to a mental hospital against her will, the main character, Connie Ramos, is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137 where gender and social equality are the norm; it is then up to her to save this advanced, non-binary future feminist utopia.

Other influential works of the period include Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1978), which describes a peaceful women-only society in the hills, where women have developed telepathic abilities and flying techniques. Similarly, Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986) presents a future women-only society: the Sharers of Shora live on an oceanic moon, where they have developed a peaceful and technologically advanced (parthenogenetic) society. Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1992) also envisages a women-only planet, but while the women in A Door into Ocean fight against invasion by other civilizations, in Ammonite it is the newcomers to the planet who must adapt to the women-led world. In the French-language tradition, Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969) portrays a world populated by warring women fighting for self-rule.

Some second-wave feminist utopias question the possibilities and forms taken by the utopian genre itself. US writer Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997), for example, examines both the “promises and problems” of utopias, their exclusions and complexities (Tabone 129). The notion of utopia as a necessarily forward-looking project is seen in a number of Octavia Butler’s works. In novels such as Parable of the Sower (1993), in which the main character attempts to start the utopian community of Earthseed, utopia is similarly expressed not as a present state but configured through the politics of hope and the possibility of change; as both a “utopian desire” and a “longing to transform” the world into an imagined ideal, a “utopian locus” (Melzer; Somay) to be worked towards. Noted theorists bell hooks and Audre Lorde affirm this idea of utopian desire as crucial to feminist thinking; as Lorde puts it: “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new relations across difference” (123).

5. Contemporary Feminist Utopias

As we have seen, some of the above noted feminist utopias fail to build imagined worlds that include the lives of all women (or indeed all human beings). Similar to the ways in which some imagined socialist utopias continue reproducing sexist oppression – William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890) is a prime example of this tendency – many feminist utopias have imagined Eurocentric, white supremacist worlds where people of colour are erased or sidelined. As Chardine Taylor-Stone notes:

[W]hat is usually represented as Utopian in mainstream science fiction is often culturally European with a story that frequently revolves around a white male character. Even when depicting “multiracial” future societies, culturally the tropes of that imagined culture are regularly not representative …. If we accept that all humanity will be present in the future, why is it that non-European cultures seem to disappear once we get through the Earth’s atmosphere? (Taylor-Stone)

However, a recent trend within feminist speculative and science fiction, often termed Afrofuturism, opposes this Eurocentric narrative in envisaging more inclusive utopian scenarios. Coined in 1993, the term encompasses literary texts, artworks, and films, and presents a framework for thinking about the contemporary world by taking an African/diasporic/black standpoint on the imagined worlds and technoscience of speculative fiction (Dery; Womack). The anthologies Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004) collect Afrofuturist essays and work in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror produced by people of African descent such as Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany. More recently, artists such as the US singer and actor Janelle Monáe have been connected with the term, for example in her “emotion video” Dirty Computer (USA, 2018), which offers glimpses of emancipatory black feminist formulations of sisterhood. Additionally, audiences across the world were shown an Afrofuturist utopia in Ryan Coogler’s Hollywood blockbuster, Black Panther (USA, 2018), in which the technologically advanced African state of Wakanda is depicted as an alternative society free of imperialism, and where women govern alongside men. Before Black Panther hit the screens, filmmakers from the African continent had produced works in an Afrofuturist feminist or woman-centred tradition, such as Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Kare Kare Zvako (Mother’s Day) (Zimbabwe, 2004), Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (Kenya, 2009), and C. J. Obasi’s Hello Rain (Nigeria, 2018).

Many Afrofuturist utopias are also, then, feminist utopias, or at least anticipate a feminist utopia. Some of these are collected in Marleen Barr’s Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory (2008), which examines black female science fiction writers including Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nnedi Okorafor, among others. Nalo Hopkinson is an influential Jamaican-Canadian writer, who has imagined utopian and speculative worlds in works such as Midnight Robber (2000), which merges Afro-Caribbean folklore with advanced technological imaginings, and Falling in Love With Hominids (2015), which collects short stories ranging from historical fantasy to post-apocalyptic visions; both these works envision new roles for women and men.

Conclusion

Feminist utopias can be said to speak to each other through history, forming a specific literary tradition. We see this in the use of parthenogenesis in both late nineteenth- and late twentieth-century works, for example, but also in the case of many other continuities and intertextual references. One recent feminist utopia, Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016), imagines a world where girls and women rule the world through their use of a supernatural electric power. This plot draws obvious parallels with Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1870) with its electricity-governed matriarchy. Octavia Butler’s works in particular have served as inspiration for many contemporary feminist speculative and science fiction authors, spurring new utopian visions such as those explored in the collection Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015).

Importantly, literary feminist utopias are political projects: as Ellen Peel argues, feminist utopian narratives attempt to persuade readers to adopt certain beliefs. As this essay has aimed to show, feminist writers through their literary world-building demonstrate the intricate relation between literature and political change: for feminist writers, the utopia is “a refuge or shelter wherein we may safely envision a changed society”, one offering alternative experiences that “spur us as readers to reevaluate and act upon our world” (Farley Kessler xv, xvii). Although “mere metaphor”, and hence located in no real place, as Carol Farley Kessler notes, “utopian ideals or ideas change minds: changed minds then change worlds” (xv). Feminist utopias can thus spur new ways of understanding and creating ourselves and the world: “Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless” (Imarisha and brown 3). Feminists throughout literary history have sought to express hopes of a different world through creating utopias, in response to past oppressions and present struggles, and through creating such utopias have changed and continue to change the world.

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Citation: Wånggren, Lena. "Feminist Utopias". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 November 2018 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19546, accessed 19 March 2026.]