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.