ABSTRACT
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an intense period of international feminist organising and campaigning. Organisations such as the International Alliance of Women (1904), the Socialist Women’s International (1907), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1915) exemplified the transnational geography of the movement. This was also a time in which women’s writing moved in new ways, imagining speculative utopian worlds to accompany their radical gender politics. This article examines two literary feminist utopias from the early twentieth century: Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). While US writer Hopkins’s Of One Blood offers an early Afrofuturist or Black internationalist utopia that reflects women’s struggles, Hossain presents a simultaneously feminist and anti-colonial imagining of the world. Both these works, in an internationalist tradition, criticise both patriarchal and racist or colonial world orders, demonstrating the vital role played by literary utopian works in feminism of the early twentieth century.
Introduction
Feminist utopias have been envisaged in literature for centuries. Indeed, Anne K. Mellor suggests that since a gender-free society has never existed historically, feminist thinking that posits a world of gender equality is inherently utopian.Footnote1 Similarly, Audre Lorde affirms the idea of utopian desire as crucial to feminist thinking: “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”.Footnote2 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” or simply as “feminist fabulation”.Footnote3 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.
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”.Footnote4 These fictions speak to each other through history and “together amount to a literary tradition of women’s writing”.Footnote5 Feminists across time and space have imagined other futures than those presented by contemporary society, with French writer Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) often considered the earliest utopia in the genre. In this early formulation of feminist canon criticism, Pizan asks why important women have been written out of world history and literature, and imagines a women-only City of Ladies where influential women from history – including the Egyptian goddess Isis, the Queen of Sheba, Sappho, and Mary Magdalene – reconvene and are considered equal to men.
Importantly, as Elyce Rae Helford argues, 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”.Footnote6 Literary feminist utopias are thus profoundly political: 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”.Footnote7 Formulating hopes of a different world through creating utopias, in response to past oppressions and present struggles, feminist writers have changed and continue to change the world.
This article examines the vital role played by literary utopian works in feminism of the early twentieth century, as a form of imagining and enacting political change. While literary utopias exist throughout history, feminist utopias proliferate specifically during times of intense feminist campaigning, accompanying the practical politics of the movement.Footnote8 This is also the case during the first two decades of the twentieth century: during these years, international feminist organising went hand in hand with literary world-building. The article focuses on two specific utopias: Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). Both these works, in an internationalist tradition, criticise both patriarchal and racist or colonial world orders, challenging works and views by certain exclusionary white feminists of the period. Alongside wider social and political work, in their literary utopias, Hopkins and Hossain spurred new ways of understanding and creating themselves and the world, and relating to others across difference.
Feminist Internationalism in the Early Twentieth Century
The large number of feminist utopias published in the first two decades of the twentieth century demonstrates the crucial role played by literary works in the political imagination. At this time, women’s writing across the globe moved in new ways, imagining speculative utopian worlds to accompany their radical gender politics. Indeed, first-wave feminism came to a high point in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with an intense period of international feminist campaigning and organising. There was a decidedly international aspect to the movement: not only did many of these feminists travel and read each other’s work, but they also founded several international feminist organisations. Organisations such as the International Council of Women (1888), the International Alliance of Women (originally the International Woman Suffrage Alliance) (1904), the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1915), and international socialist women’s groups such as the International Co-operative Women’s Guild (1883) and the Socialist Women’s International (1907) exemplified the transnational geography of the movement.
While movements took on different forms for different women and in different locations, there was a shared concern regarding women’s oppression and their demand for equal rights and reforms, with a focus on the right to education, the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to national self-determination and selfhood. Due to a white European and US dominance in feminist historiography, scholars have until recently defined the early twentieth-century feminist movement (and first-wave feminism) as one primarily concerning middle-class or liberal white feminists’ concerns (such as the right to own property or the right to vote) in the Global North. However, feminism at this point stretched across continents and concerned not only women’s right to education and suffrage, but also labour conditions, anti-colonial struggles, and peace building. As Kumari Jayawardena has shown, during this period many women in Asia and the Middle East divided their time between or combined anti-colonial or national struggles with struggles for gender equality.Footnote9 Similarly, Latin American feminists combined struggles for independence and the abolition of slavery with those for the advancement of women’s rights.Footnote10 Socialist feminists across the world were involved in anti-imperialist movements: Sylvia Pankhurst in the UK loudly supported the first International Women’s Peace Congress in 1915 (organised by Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom), and in later decades worked against fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, while Olive Schreiner openly criticised imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes and local racist politicians in South Africa.
While many international feminist organisations had an overwhelming membership in the Global North, feminists from across the world were active members, including influential Egyptian feminists Huda Sha‘rawi – whose Egyptian Feminist Union (1923) was affiliated to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance – and Saiza Nabarawi.Footnote11 Similarly, Sierra Leonean feminist and nationalist Adelaide Casely-Hayford combined European, African, and US experiences in her writings and educational work.Footnote12 While in 1919 Egyptian women formed the feminist “Société de la Femme Nouvelle”, in the same year an “Association of New Women” was established in Japan with influential feminist Hiratsuka Raichō at the lead.Footnote13 It is clear that feminists across the globe at this time built international links while also engaging in local and anti-colonial struggles.Footnote14
Alongside this intense internationalist 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. Despite the diversity and radical nature of feminist movements and literature, the period’s most famous feminist utopia is US writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), in which three male adventurers come into a peaceful – but exclusionary – all-women society. Like certain other supposedly “utopian” works of the time, Perkins Gilman’s imagined world deliberately eradicates large groups of women: the women of Herland are all “of Aryan stock”, that is to say all white.Footnote15 Perkins Gilman’s novel is constructed along the contemporary racist and eugenicist politics of certain exclusionary strands of feminism prevalent at the time, and of which the author was a proponent. Adopting Francis Galton’s theories of eugenics, or “controlled evolution”, such women employed white supremacist politics to position themselves above other women or to justify imperialism and racial segregation.Footnote16 One other example of such exclusionary literary utopianism is Mary Bradley Lane’s 1880–1 novel Mizora, which clearly spells out that the “dark-skinned races” have been – as one character in the book terms it – “eliminated”.Footnote17 Literary worlds based on this kind of racist “eugenic feminism” could more aptly be termed dystopias. 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”.Footnote18
As noted above, the feminist movement of the early twentieth century was diverse and transnational. How come, then, that literary works such as Herland have taken centre stage in writing on feminist utopias of the time? Just as there has been a Eurocentric or Global North bias in feminist historiography, a similar bias has existed in Utopian studies. There has been “less scholarly attention paid to utopian expressions from underrepresented cultures and ethnicities”, possibly because the definitions themselves of utopia are too narrow. As Kenneth M. Roemer notes, “concepts of utopia inspired by Eurocentric literature may obscure the scholars’ ability to perceive these texts as utopian literature”.Footnote19
The remainder of this article will examine two feminist utopian works that address head on the kind of exclusionary, white supremacist and colonial processes that structure works like Herland, and that provide utopian alternatives in which difference is celebrated. While Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3) offers an early Afrofuturist or Black internationalist utopia that rewrites dominant “scientific” narratives of race while also reflecting women’s struggles, Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905) proposes a simultaneously feminist and anti-colonial imagining of the world where technologically advanced women live in peace. Together these two works present possibilities for change that include all, rather than just some, women, and provide a more representative image of transnational literary feminism in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Of One Blood: Internationalist Afrofuturism
US writer Pauline Hopkins (1859–1930) is most famous for her novel Contending Forces (1900) and for her work as editor (1902–4) of The Colored American Magazine. The first Black woman editor of a magazine in the US, Hopkins was a key figure at a time when periodicals such as the Colored American Magazine, Horizon, and Voice of the Negro saw as their task “to educate, missionize, inspire and stir people to action”.Footnote20 She was part of the Colored American Magazine (1900–1909) from the start, with a short story published in its first issue in 1900. Throughout her time at the Magazine, Hopkins fought to raise consciousness among and further the politics of Black people, especially Black women, in the US and beyond; in addition to non-fiction articles (including biographical series on great Black persons from history, such as Frederick Douglass, Toussaint L’Overture, and Harriet Tubman), she published short stories and three novels during her time at the periodical before leaving in 1904.Footnote21 She believed fiction could inspire change, as clearly stated in the preface to Contending Forces where she declares her intention:
[T]o do all I can in an humble way to raise the stigma of degradation from my race. […] No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.Footnote22
Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self (1902–3)Footnote23 was first published through serialisation in the Colored American Magazine, like many of Hopkins’s other works. At the centre of the novel is the main character medical student Reuel Briggs, a light-skinned Black or Mixed-race – but passing as white – man without known connections and money. At the outset of the novel, Reuel’s heritage is hidden, although hinted at by the narrator: “It was rumored at first that he was of Italian birth, then they ‘guessed’ he was a Japanese, but whatever land called him as a son, all vote him a genius in his scientific studies” (444). In an attempt to raise money to be able to marry his fiancée Dianthe, he joins a two-year scientific expedition to Ethiopia to locate and excavate a potential lost ancient African civilisation. Sceptical at first, this Afrofuturist narrative brings Reuel to a still living but hidden African city, full of splendour, arts, and advanced technology, to which he is the heir.
As noted in the previous section, exclusionary feminist utopias such as Herland imagined Eurocentric, white supremacist worlds where people of colour are erased. 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?Footnote24
The leader of the exhibition in Of One Blood is Professor Stone, a white British archaeologist who is determined to prove his pet theory: that a forgotten early Black civilisation is key to the origins of human culture. More specifically, he is looking to uncover traces of the ancient city of Meroe, the Ethiopian birthplace of later Egyptian glory. According to the Professor, this is the Black civilisation from which springs all human advancement and culture:
It is a fact that Egypt drew from Ethiopia all the arts, sciences and knowledge of which she was mistress. The very soil of Egypt was pilfered by the Nile from the foundations of Meroe. I have even thought […] that black was the original color of man in prehistoric times. You remember that Adam was made from the earth; what more natural than that he should have retained the color of earth? […] [A]ll records of history, sacred and profane, unite in placing the Ethiopian as the primal race. (521)
At first, Reuel is not convinced by Stone, instead complaining over the state of the North African geographies they traverse. However, the Professor’s scientific perspective is confirmed as Reuel discovers the ancient civilisation named Telassar, preserved in time waiting for its new heir – himself. This is “Meroe, the greatest city of them all, pure-blooded Ethiopian … [o]nce the light of the world’s civilization” (556), from where came “all the arts and cunning inventions that make your modern glory” (560). This utopian world, peopled by “direct descendants” of the inhabitants of Meroe awaiting the prophetic coming king who “shall restore to the Ethiopian race its ancient glory” (547), is a place of “bewildering beauty” that fills the visitors with “dazzling awe” (545) – a world of marble, silk, treasures, and technology unknown to twentieth-century populations. Accompanying Reuel on the expedition is his friend Charlie Vance, a rich white American: this situation means that an “Anglo-Saxon” is in place to answer Brigg’s earlier question to Professor Stone. When Vance shamefully explains to Telassar’s Prime Minister Ai that Africans have been treated as servants in the United States, he is harshly questioned by this dignitary: “And yet, ye are all of one blood; descended from a common father. Is there ever a flock or herd without its black member? […] Fair-haired worshippers of Mammon, do you not know […] that your course is done? that Ethiopia’s bondage is about over?” Through the use of the character Charlie Vance, Hopkins can thus directly address and criticise contemporary racist ideology, while inviting her readers to imagine another kind of social order.
Ethiopianism was a Black internationalist or Pan-African tradition popular mainly in the US from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, premised in the Bible’s Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (King James Version).Footnote27 Professor Stone in Of One Blood asserts that “the Biblical tradition is paramount to all […] for the affiliation of nations” (533), that is to say the theological tradition and words of the Bible prove the ethnic connection between all people on earth, that we are all of one blood. Ethiopianism’s key promise was the rise of a new social order featuring African (American) leadership, and the Professor adds that along with tales of great treasure hidden in the ruins of this ancient city, there is a prophecy stating that “from lands beyond unknown seas, to which many descendants of Ethiopia had been borne as slaves, should a king of ancient line […] return and restore the former glory of the race” (534–5). Indeed, the novel’s Ethiopianist narrative can be seen as a way of “summoning the theological hope” to envision alternatives to current realities.Footnote28 Through the white male scientist of Professor Stone – and, of course, Reuel himself is a scientific man – Hopkins in this way uses the discourse of science to simultaneously refute the racist eugenicist thinking of certain white contemporaries, while also arguing for a past and future utopia.Footnote29 Challenging and rewriting white supremacist notions of science, Hopkins employs not only historical but also biblical references that are part of a Black internationalist tradition rooted in the assertion of ancient African civilisations. Of One Blood in this way challenges racist social orders and histories, while it also questions the literary genealogy of exclusionary white feminism by building another kind of world across difference, thereby widening definitions of early twentieth-century utopian writing. The novel’s serialised and periodical context is crucial: episodes are published in the Colored American Magazine alongside non-fiction articles by Hopkins and others on Ethiopianism, great Black men and women through history.Footnote30 As Hazel V. Carby notes, the historical premise of Of One Blood is presented in her series “Famous Women of the Negro Race”, which had been published five months before the novel’s first instalment. Here, Hopkins asserts that we can “trace the light of civilisation from Ethiopia to Egypt, to Greece, to Rome, and thence diffusing its radiance over the entire world”. The May/June 1903 issue contained the anonymous article “Venus and the Apollo Modelled from the Ethiopians”, citing scientific proof that classic sculpture was modelled from ancient Ethiopian beauty ideals. There are also reports from Pan-African political activity, and the link between ancient Ethiopia and current Black Americans is strengthened by a series of documentary articles in the magazine (by A. Kirkland Soga) entitled “Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century” running concurrently with Of One Blood. In short, there is a “network of relationships” between the novel and other non-fictional articles on Ethiopianism and Black internationalism, available to readers.Footnote31 Hopkins also later, after leaving the Colored American Magazine, ran a series of articles on “The Dark Races of the Twentieth Century” in Voice of the Negro (Feb–July 1905) as well as publishing A Primer of Facts Pertaining to the Early Greatness of the African Race and the Possibility of Restoration by Its Descendants (1905), the latter arguing for the recognition of Ancient African civilisations in the history of the world. As in Of One Blood, she uses a male scientific expert persona when giving her narrative, providing historical evidence and inspiration for the uplifting of Black people. Seen in the context of this wider work of the Colored American Magazine and other writings reimagining the African continent as “a past and future utopian landscape”,Footnote32 we can place Of One Blood in a utopian tradition of Black internationalist nation-building, and as an early work of Afrofuturism or Black speculative fiction.
Many Afrofuturist utopias are also feminist utopias, or at least anticipate a feminist utopia. While Of One Blood’s main concern seems to be the uplifting of people of African descent and their history, culture, and current state, there is a specific gendered – feminist – framing of the story. The novel’s title “of one blood” does not only signify the common origin of all humanity, but also refers to the sexual violence and rape that were part of slavery.Footnote33 Reuel sees in this “the accumulation of years of foulest wrongs heaped upon the innocent and defenceless women of a race” (594), while his grandmother Aunt Hannah simply states: “Dese things jes’ got to happen in slavery” (605). Black women’s experiences of sexual violence under slavery are not shied away from, but put centre stage in this narrative; indeed, the plot depends on it. At the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Reuel, Dianthe (his wife, a singer), and their friend Aubrey (who has tried to murder Reuel out of lust for Dianthe) are all siblings – Reuel and Dianthe, who are light-skinned, are children of the enslaved Mira who was raped by Aubrey’s enslaver father. Here we find a clearly feminist perspective: Dianthe embodies this trauma of sexual violence and incest, as it is “through women’s bodies and giving birth, albeit often reluctantly, that this trauma replicates itself”.Footnote34 As Aiesha L. Turman notes: “Although Dianthe is born after Emancipation, she is enslaved due to the trauma that she carries with her”.Footnote35 Turman makes the case that even the mental instability of Dianthe – who goes in and out of mesmeric trances throughout the novel – in Of One Blood can be linked to her “trauma […] manifested physically in her body” not only by her light skin but also her extra-sensory visions (which include seeing into the future) which place her in a position of power.Footnote36 Turman indeed suggests that the novel’s hero is not Reuel, but instead the Black women in the text – Dianthe, her mother Mira, and Aunt Hanna, who share visions and/or spiritual power:
It is through them that I viewed Hopkins’ text as Afrofuturistic. From the intergenerational trauma of enslavement and sexual abuse, the use of the Black woman’s voice, particularly via song, and the use of Black spiritual practices suggest recasting Black women as not only magical beings who unfortunately come to this magic by way of trauma, but also as power holders.Footnote37
Of One’s Blood rewrites the past without ignoring the history of violence in it, and through this action imagines new futures. Katherine McKittrick states: “To be black is to live through scientific racism and, at the same time, reinvent the terms and stakes of knowledge”; it is “to recognize and enervate the fictive perimeters of you, Science, and notice […] the conditions to concoct a different story altogether”.Footnote39 Through creative work Black scholars and artists such as Hopkins create new engagements with scientific concepts and world-making outside of white supremacy. As seen, not only does Of One Blood through its use of Ethiopianist politics and theology question notions of race, boldly denying narratives of white superiority, but this Black internationalist utopia also has a specifically feminist framing though its focus on Black women’s generational trauma from sexual violence during slavery. Considering Hopkins’s novel in this light, together with her other non-fictional political work, opens a door to alternative ways of viewing the world, and of challenging exclusionary literary traditions of utopian writing in the early twentieth century.
While Reuel came to the continent on a colonial expedition, the novel concludes by briefly condemning the continued European colonisation and exploitation of African peoples in the early 1900s. At the end of Of One Blood, Reuel resides in the Hidden City, teaching the inhabitants about modern culture, and with a mighty Ethiopian queen by his side. While his days “glide peacefully by”, Reuel however “views, too, with serious apprehension, the advance of mighty nations penetrating the dark, mysterious forests of his native land” (621). While not offering specific ways of countering colonial projects in Africa, Hopkins points out that, although her literary utopia can offer ways of imagining otherwise, racist colonisation is not a thing of the past but ongoing. In the next section, Hossain’s utopian short story presents an even clearer anti-colonial and anti-militarist standpoint in her feminist narrative.
Sultana’s Dream: Anti-colonial Gender Reversal
Sultana’s Dream (1905)Footnote40 by Bengali writer and social reformer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (also known as Begum Rokeya; Begum being an honorific term used for a respected Muslim woman) posits an alternative to patriarchal white supremacist visions of the future, while also providing an anti-colonial framework. Hossain is now regarded as a “foremother” of Indian feminism who “contributed to the cause of women’s awakening globally, and in germinating the seeds of multiculturalism and anti-colonial nationalism in South Asia”.Footnote41 At the time of Sultana’s Dream’s publication, Hossain was known as an essayist and social reformer, having published a number of articles critical of the patriarchal oppression of Bengali Muslim women, specifically the enforcement of purdah (a practice that includes veiling, dressing modestly, gender segregation, and the seclusion of women in the zenana or women’s quarters).Footnote42 Hossain was an outspoken critic of the excesses of this practice, and 1929–31 published in the monthly Mohammadi a series of forty-seven reports on the hardships of women and girls forced to live in seclusion (these reports were later published in book form as Aborodhbashini (The Secluded Ones) (1931)).Footnote43 While most of Hossain’s writings are in Bengali, Sultana’s Dream was written and published in English, in the Madras-based English-speaking Indian Ladies’ Magazine (ed. Kamala Satthia and Sarojini Naidu).Footnote44 Her satirical utopia Sultana’s Dream is one of gender reversal: while men are confined indoors, women govern society, which under their rule is a technologically advanced, environmentalist, and peaceful one.
Presented as a dream sequence rather than a “this-worldly” narrative, Sultana’s Dream opens with the main character and narrator, Sultana, falling asleep in her chair: “One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood. I am not sure whether I dozed off or not. But, as far as I remember, I was wide awake”. (159) As she wakes up, a character called “Sister Sara” leads her on a tour around the utopian Ladyland, to see its green nature, clean streets and air, renewable energy, and state of peace and efficiency. While certain scholars have noted Hossain’s engagement with international literary traditions such as linkages to Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels (1926), she has been mainly left out of a global international literary discussion.Footnote45 However, Hossain’s use of a dream sequence to frame her utopia links her to a wider intertextual feminist tradition. Dreaming and dream sequences, or even trance-like states, are recurring ideas in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist writing. Olive Schreiner, a key figure in women’s writing of the time, in her collection Dreams (1890) and elsewhere wrote allegorical and lyrical “dream sequences” in order to represent alternative societies or states of being. In Schreiner’s short story “Three Dreams in a Desert” (1890), the narrator experiences in three dreams an allegorical journey from slavery to emancipation: the narrator encounters a woman lying in the sand, bound by chains, and weakened by ages of subordination, but she rises and continues towards emancipation. In the utopian setting of Schreiner’s Third Dream, there “walked brave women and brave men, hand in hand […] and they were not afraid”.Footnote46 Schreiner’s dream sequences enabled “envisaging a utopian world and the melioration of the human race”: “For many contemporary women, dreams were a means of escape”.Footnote47 This is true also for Sultana in Hossain’s story, and probably for her readers.
Hossain in in Sultana’s Dream reverses the gender segregation that she had criticised in her journalism. Rather than deploying the practice of zenana, in which women are kept hidden from the rest of society, in Ladyland the men are kept in “mardana” (men’s quarters; indoors) away from the public eye. Men do the work traditionally done by women (cooking and other housework), while the women live and work in public: they study in universities and work in “factories, laboratories and observatories” (168). With the mardana system in place, Sister Sara tells Sultana, “there has been no more crime or sin; therefore we do not require a policeman to find out a culprit, nor do we want a magistrate to try a criminal case” (166). Indeed, Sultana’s guide is shocked that in other societies “[m]en, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women shut up in the zenana!”: “How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?” (161) Confining men to the indoors and removing restrictions for women, Hossain’s Ladyland thus enacts a gender reversal of purdah.
Ladyland is not only a peaceful society free from violence and crime; it is also a world of incredible scientific and technological advancements. The country’s queen, who Sultana meets, supports women’s education, and has prohibited the practice of early marriage. Thanks to the high degree of female education, and women’s work in universities, Ladyland has mastered the use of solar heat and light, water collection from the clouds (for use at home, but also to prevent rains and storms), electricity for tilling the fields and other hard work, and for their “aerial conveyances”. Sultana gets a ride in an impressive “air-car” which combines hydrogen balls (used in order to overcome the force of gravity) and electricity-driven whirling wing-like blades to fly across the land (166–7). Roushan Jahan argues that the emphasis on science and technology in Ladyland should be seen not only as stressing the need for female education, but specifically the need for a curriculum including science and mathematics, to enable women to excel in science.Footnote48
While Sultana’s Dream primarily criticises the confining of women in zenanas, and what this practice entails, it also carries an anti-colonial and anti-militarist vision. There are no wars in Ladyland; indeed, there is no military. The inhabitants oppose the idea of governing a society through the tools of intimidation used in the earlier society, tools which could be seen as emblematic of colonial governance. They are not interested in colonial expansion or of in any way exploiting other peoples’ lands and resources. The queen asserts: “We do not covet other people’s land, we do not fight for [a] piece of diamond though it may be a thousand-fold brighter than the Koh-i-Noor, nor do we grudge a ruler his Peacock Throne” (168). The Koh-i-Noor refers to the large diamond taken from Indian rulers by the British in 1850, and which still is part of the British Crown Jewels, while the Peacock Throne refers to a splendorous throne taken out of India by the Iranian conqueror Nadir Shah, and since lost.Footnote49 Through mentioning these real life examples of colonial theft and mismanagement, Hossain clearly criticises “the imperialist tendency of funneling the unjustly appropriated wealth and resources of colonized nations” into the colonising country.Footnote50 As Samadrita Kuiti notes, Sultana’s Dream in this way uses the well-known utopian framework but transforms it into “a twofold critique” of both local patriarchal systems and British colonial injustice that “dually displaced colonized women” from the mainstream of social and political life; she does so by fronting the subjectivities of decolonised women while reimagining a decolonised nation based on the ideals of gender equality and religious harmony.Footnote51 While on the one hand Hossain criticises the patriarchal order of her current society, on the other she simultaneously constructs a world free from imperialist invasion and from devastation of nature.
The focus on advanced technology in Hossain’s utopia can be seen also from a specifically anti-colonial perspective, given that modern technology was (and still is) often used by imperial forces to “justify” their presence in colonised lands. While modern technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is often used as “an emblem of emancipation” for women, as a sign of her newness and progressive character – see the New Woman’s use of the bicycle – this is only one side of the coin: modern technology was often used as a “reason” for imperialist nations to colonise other nations, “‘bringing’ the railway to various parts of the world; indeed, the term ‘civilisation’ is still today associated with technological development”.Footnote52 Similar to the way in which narratives of white supremacy sneaked into the writings of eugenic feminists such as Perkins Gilman, there was also a certain “imperialist feminism” in which imperialist narratives become part of feminist literary work.Footnote53 Hossain, however, turns this pattern around, showing a highly technological, matriarchal, and decolonised world order, where scientific advances flourish without imperialist intervention. She frames technological advancement as directly opposed to expansionist militarism: “While the women were engaged in scientific research, the men of this country were busy increasing their military power”. (163) It is the men’s focus on war and expansion, while the women carry out scientific research, that in the end leads to the establishment of the “mardana” system in Ladyland.
The green surroundings, renewable energy, and thriving nature in Ladyland also provide an anti-colonial framing. Sultana’s Dream was published at a time when the British were rearranging the agricultural practices in India, and Vandana Sharma argues that the environmentally friendly air travel, clean roads and air, and use of solar power in Hossain’s decolonial world in Ladyland “hints at ecological mismanagement in colonial India”.Footnote54 The queen explains to Sultana, after noting their antipathy to expansionism, that instead of such imperialist endeavours, “We dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems that Nature has kept in store for us. We enjoy Nature’s gift as much as we can”. (168) Sultana’s dream thus transforms into an “ecofeminist’s vision”Footnote55 which enfolds a critique against capitalist or colonial domination over both women and nature.
Conclusion
Feminist utopias speak to each other through history, forming a specific literary tradition, seen in continuities and intertextual references that spur new utopian visions. Published ten years before Perkins Gilman’s Herland and engaging with established Black internationalist and feminist conventions (such as Ethiopianism and dream sequences) to imagine utopias, the two works examined in this article illustrate the diverse and transnational character of the feminist movement of the early twentieth century. Hopkins and Hossain present a distinctly internationalist and anti-imperialist approach to feminist literary world-building, as a form of imagining and enacting political change through literary texts. In this way, these two texts challenge earlier established literary genealogies of feminist utopianism – its key writers and themes – and potentially also the ways in which we understand both utopianism and political action.
As noted in the introduction to this article, Lorde claims that in order to imagine a future, women must be able to find new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. Her quotation continues: “The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us”.Footnote56 The texts examined here do exactly that: offer potential alternative imaginary worlds or ways of telling (hi)stories in which patterns of domination are challenged, and where differences – of gender, religion, nation, and race – are both celebrated and bridged. If older definitions of utopian world-building are not wide enough, it might be time to widen and reconstruct these definitions. Literary feminist utopias can accompany the practical politics of such a movement, suggesting alternatives, dreams, hopes, and possibly even strategies. A call for new definitions and new formations of solidarity and sisterhood do not apply only to literary scholarship or feminist historiography of the early twentieth century: in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, we need it in our theory and practice today.
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Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lena Wånggren
Lena Wånggren is a researcher and teacher at the University of Edinburgh. She works on nineteenth-century literature and gender; literature and science/technology/medicine; feminism, intersectionality, and social justice. Her publications include Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (2015), Gender, Technology and the New Woman (2017) and Working Conditions in a Marketised University System: Generation Precarity (2023).
Notes
1 Mellor, “On feminist utopias”, Women’s Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal, 9.3 (1982): 241–62.
2 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), pp. 114–123, 123.
3 Ellen Peel, Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2002), p. xv; Jane L. Donawerth and Carola A. Kolmerten, Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), p. 1.
4 Jane L. Donawerth and Carola A. Kolmerten, Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference (Syracuse University Press, 1994), p. 3.
5 Donawerth and Kolmerten, Utopian and Science Fiction by Women, p. 1.
6 Helford, “Feminism”, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works and Wonders, ed. Gary Westfahl (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005), pp. 289–91.
7 Carol Farley Kassler, ed., Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women before 1950, 2nd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. xv, xvii.
8 Alessa Johns notes that there are 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 (“Feminism and utopianism”, The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 174–199, 177). Contemporary twenty-first century and Afrofuturist feminist utopias can be considered a fifth period (Lena Wånggren, ‘Feminist Utopias’, The Literary Encyclopedia 3.1, www.litencyc.com (2018)).
9 Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986).
10 Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanvover: University Press of New England, 1991).
11 Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 4–5.
12 Rina Okonkwo, “Adelaide Casely Hayford: Cultural Nationalist and Feminist”, Phylon, 42.1 (1981): 41–51; Adelaide M. Cromwell, An African Victorian Feminist: The Life and Times of Adelaide Smith Casely Hayford 1848–1960 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).
13 Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, 13.
14 Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell, Documenting First Wave Feminisms: Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).
15 Perkins Gilman, “Herland”, Herland and Related Writings, ed. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck (Peterborough: Broadview, 2013), p. 81.
16 Dana Seitler, “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives”, American Quarterly 55.1 (2003): 61–88; Stephanie Peebles Tavera, “Her Body, Herland: Reproductive Health and Dis/topian Satire in Charlotte Perkins Gilman”, Utopian Studies, 29.1 (2018): 1–20.
17 Bradley Lane, Mizora: A Prophecy, ed. Jean Pfaelzer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. xxxi.
18 Falk Jones and Webster Goodwin, eds, Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. ix.
19 Roemer, “Foreword: Utopia Beyond the Pale”, Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society, ed. Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019), pp. v–xv, xi.
20 Sabina Matter-Seibel, “Pauline Hopkins’s Portrayal of the African-American New Woman in Contending Forces and the Colored American Magazine”, Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Ann Heilmann (London: Pandore, 2003), pp. 76–86, 80.
21 Matter-Seibel, ‘Pauline Hopkins’s Portrayal’, p. 81.
22 Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Boston: The Colored Co-operative Publishing Co., 1900), pp. 13–14.
23 Hopkins, “Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self”, The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 439–621. Citations to this work are given in the text. Of One Blood as printed in The Colored American Magazine 1902-3 has been reprinted by Negro Universities Press (New York, 1969), and is available online through HathiTrust Digital Library: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006720046.
24 Taylor-Stone, “Afrofuturism: where space, pyramids and politics collide”, The Guardian, 7 January 2014, www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jan/07/afrofuturism-where-space-pyramids-and-politics-collide
25 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose”, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham; NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 179–222; Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013). The anthologies Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, 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, while Marleen Barr’s Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory (2008) examines specifically Black female science fiction writers including Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nnedi Okorafor. While African films and visual culture have employed Afrofuturist tropes for decades, the genre entered mainstream media with Ryan Coogler’s Afrofuturist Hollywood blockbuster Black Panther (USA, 2018) in which the technologically advanced African state of Wakanda is a utopian society free of imperialism, where women govern alongside men.
26 Indeed, Valerie Babb draws a clear link between Of One Blood and Black Panther, stating that Hopkins ‘created an earlier Wakanda in her novel’ (Babb, “The Past is Never Past: The Call and Response between Marvel’s Black Panther and Early Black Speculative Fiction”, African American Review, 53.2 (2020): 95–109.
27 Christine Hedlin, “Ethiopianist Fiction and the Politics of Theological Hope”, Political Theology 22 (2021): 266–78, 276.
28 Hedlin, “Ethiopianist Fiction”. For further details on historical and biblical/theological contexts to the novel’s Ethiopianism, see Vanessa Davies, “Pauline Hopkins’ Literary Egyptology”, Journal of Egyptian History 14 (2021): 127–44; Nathaniel Williams, “Reconstructing Biblical History: Garrett Serviss, Pauline Hopkins, and Technocratic Exploration Novels”, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 34.4 (2012): 323–40.
29 Mandy A. Reid, “Utopia Is in the Blood: The Bodily Utopias of Martin R. Delany and Pauline Hopkins”, Utopian Studies 22.1 (2011): 91–103.
30 Hazel V. Carby, “Introduction to the Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins by Pauline Hopkins”, The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. xxix-l; Amber Foster, “The Serial Novel, Nation, and Utopia: An Intratextual Re-reading of Pauline Hopkins”, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self’, Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society, ed. Patricia Ventura and Edward K. Chan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019), pp. 41–58.
31 Carby, “Introduction”, pp. xliv–xlvii.
32 Foster, “The Serial Novel”, p. 42.
33 Anna Pochmara, “‘In the Tangled Lily-bed’: Rhizomatic Textuality and Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood”, New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives, ed. Ewa Barbara Luczak, Anna Pochmara, Samir Dayal (Warsaw; Berlin: De Gruyter Open Poland, 2019), pp. 43–58.
34 Aiesha L. Turman, “There’s Always Been An Afrofuture: Black Women’s Literature as Technology of Protest” [PhD dissertation], Cincinnati: Union Institute & University, 2019, p. 79.
35 Turman, “There’s Always Been”, p. 79.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid, p. 84.
38 Matter-Seibel, “Pauline Hopkins’s Portrayal”, p. 84.
39 McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham; NC: Duke University Press, 2021), p. 186.
40 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat (1880–1932), ed. Mohammad A. Quayum (Leiden; Boston: Brill; 2013). Citations to this work are given in the text.
41 Mohammad A. Quayum, “Introduction”, The essential Rokeya: Selected works of Rokeya Sakhawat (1880-1932), ed. Mohammad A. Quayum (Leiden; Boston: Brill; 2013), pp. 1–17, 16–17.
42 Roushan Jahan, “‘Sultana’s Dream’: Purdah reversed”, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: Sultana’s Dream, A Feminist Utopia and Selections from The Secluded Ones, ed. and trans. Roushan Jahan (New York: The Feminist Press, 1988), pp. 1–6, 1; Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, “Futuristic Technologies and Purdah in the Feminist Utopia: Rokeya S. Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s dream’”, Feminist Review, 116 (2017): 144–53, 144.
43 Hossain, The essential Rokeya, 24–36.
44 Ibid, p. 159 [note to text]. The story was later published in book form (Calcutta: S.K. Lahiri & Co, 1908) and translated by Hossain herself into Bengali for her Motichur (A String of Sweet Pearls) Vol. II (1922).
45 Sonita Sarker, “Larger than Bengal: Feminism in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Global Modernities”, Archive orientáini, Quarterly Journal of Asian and African Studies, 68.3 (2000): 441–56.
46 Schreiner, Dreams (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1890), p. 73.
47 Stephanie Forward, “Introduction”, Dreams, Visions and Realities, ed. Stephanie Forward (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2003), pp. xi–xxxii, xvii. Indeed, Schreiner’s allegorical visions later became a source of inspiration to the suffragettes in their utopian vision, with records of imprisoned suffragettes reading Schreiner to keep up their spirits. It is worth noting that Reuel’s medical specialism in Of One Blood is hypnotism or mesmerism, and he uses this ability or “visions” to communicate with others or sense danger. In addition, as noted earlier, both Dianthe and Mira have visions and premonitions.
48 Jahan, “Sultana’s Dream”, p. 5.
49 Hossain, The essential Rokeya, p. 168 [note to text].
50 Samadrita Kuiti, “Decolonizing the Feminist Utopia: Interfaith Sisterhood and Anticolonial Feminist Resistance in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag”, Utopian Studies, 33.2 (2022): 240–56, 247.
51 Kuiti, “Decolonizing”, pp. 241, 244.
52 Lena Wånggren, Gender, Technology and the New Woman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 6.
53 Iveta Jusová, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005).
54 Vandana Sharma, “Feminist Utopian Consciousness vis-à-vis Dystopian Speculative Vision”, The IUP Journal of English Studies, 15.2 (2020): 68-74, 70.
55 Fayesa Hasanat, “Sultana’s Utopian Awakening: An Ecocritical Reading of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream”, Asiatic 2.2 (2013), 114–25, 117.
56 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class”, 123.