The utopias envisioned by Edward Bellamy and other novelists late in the nineteenth century were generally blueprints of government. As satellites of men, women were expected to share in the general improvement of society. The resurgence of the feminist movement since the late 1960s has produced a very different kind of utopian literature. Frances Bartkowski explores a body of work that is striking and vital because it reflects the hopes, fears, and desires of women who have glimpsed the possibilities of a bright new world freed from stifling patriarchal structures. Feminist Utopias is a comparative study of the utopian fiction of nine women writers in the United States, France, and Canada. Except for Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), the prototype for feminist literary utopias, all of the works were published between 1969 and 1986. Bartkowski discusses Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines, Christine Rochefort's Archaos, ou le jardin étincelant, E. M. Broner's A Weave of Women, Louky Bersianik's The Eugelionne, and two dystopian novels, Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale.

This book presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as well as the political, and of criticizing a patriarchal social order. Teslenko reveals feminists' attempt through fiction to envision a new political order.

An addition to the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series, Peel's book addresses how feminist utopian narratives attempt to persuade readers to adopt certain beliefs. Using three feminist utopian novels as her main examples, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five by Doris Lessing; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin; and Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig, Peel examines how belief-bridging and protean metaphor in these works persuade readers. Literary persuasion, often dismissed as propaganda, in fact works in subtle and profound ways. The book presents major techniques by which narrative literature exercises this sophisticated influence on beliefs. Ultimately concluding that the pragmatic works better than the static in utopian feminism, Peel shows how, in novels such as those under discussion, the narrative techniques support pragmatism. Inquiring how narrative form can shape political belief by affecting readers' responses, the author integrates topics that are rarely combined. The book investigates three theoretical issues: utopian belief, distinguishing the perfectionism of the static from the vitality of the pragmatic and showing how the latter creates narrative energy; the persuasive process, tracing narrative form and asking how implied readers match real ones and how readers are swayed by belief-bridging and protean metaphor; and feminist belief, a nuanced definition that accounts both for what links feminists and what makes them diverse. Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism explores the rhetorical and ethical power of narrative literature.

Sargisson explores current debates around feminist theory, utopian studies and deconstruction. She argues for utopianism as a way out of the dilemma of contemporary feminism, as well as a way of conceptualizing its current situation.

This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Michison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place.

Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow. Praise for Woman on the Edge of Time “This is one of those rare novels that leave us different people at the end than we were at the beginning. Whether you are reading Marge Piercy’s great work again or for the first time, it will remind you that we are creating the future with every choice we make.”—Gloria Steinem “An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral courage in contemporary society.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A stunning, even astonishing novel . . . marvelous and compelling.”—Publishers Weekly “Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”—Newsweek “Absorbing and exciting.”—The New York Times Book Review

Utopian writing offers a fascinating panorama of social visions; and the related forms of dystopia and anti-utopian satire extend this into the range of social nightmares. Originally published in 1988, this comparative study of utopian fiction by British and American women writers demonstrates the continuity of a well-established, but little-known, tradition, emphasising its range and diversity, and providing ample evidence of women’s aspirations and documenting the restrictions and exclusions in private and public life that their novels challenge. Historically, the growth of each national tradition is traced in relation to social and political movements, particularly the suffrage movement and contemporary feminism. Comparatively, the quite different responses of British and American women to what are in many instances the same social problems are examine in the light of changing expectations. Definitions of human nature and gender relationships are assessed on a nature/culture continuum as a means of understanding this change. Women’s attitudes to their social and political roles, their working lives, to sexuality, marriage and the family are reflected in their visions of fruitful change; and so also is the impact of two world wars, socialism and fascism, the debate on peaceful uses of nuclear energy and fears of a nuclear holocaust.

Using selections from writers like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree jr., and many others, this collection shows how the imagined worlds of science fiction create hold experiments for testing feminist hypotheses and for interpreting philosophical questions about humanity, gender, equality and more. Four main themes: Part 1, 'Human nature and reality', concentrates on whether there is an intrinsic difference between males and females. Part 2, 'Dystopias: the worst of all possible worlds', portrays misogynistic societies uncomfortably familiar to the early 21st-century reader. Part 3, 'Separatist utopias: worlds of difference', assembles stories that scrutinize both the virtues and vices of separatism. In Part 4, 'Androgynous utopias: worlds of equality', the authors create worlds that anticipate the consequences, good and bad, of perfect sexual equality in education, intelligence, capability, and reproduction.