Similar texts did emerge in the United States as the New Woman utopian genre reached prominence in the United Kingdom and its colonies. Perhaps the most famous of these are Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora (1880) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). Both novels read very similarly. In Mizora, an exiled female traveler comes across the titular utopian world, while in Herland a group of male explorers do so. In each novel, the central society is a literal, absolute matriarchy--no men exist, and thus women occupy all social roles. The social depiction in each book recalls New Amazonia, with a focus on women’s practical clothing and appearance. Both novels depict women as reproducing through parthenogenesis and maintaining an “idealized” (i.e., white and very healthy) race.
As I have mentioned throughout the anthology, these American texts are much more radical in some respects than their English counterparts. In particular, none of the included English texts depict parthenogenesis. Men still exist in every society, and, largely, they are not harmed or unhappy, even if their political power and masculine role has been diminished. In addition, the concept of race in the English works tends to operate more subtly than that of the American texts, in which whiteness as the most “ideal” quality is explicit (there are notably exceptions, of course, like Coleridge’s “The White Women”).
Nan Bowman Albinski, writing in Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction, addresses some possible factors for such a diversion in the texts. She writes that British utopian writers were often more “secular, often socialist”, which recalls the generally radically socialist leanings of the British New Women (Albinski 4). Unlike New Women writers, perhaps American feminist writers were more devoted to ideologically pure feminism and less so regarding establishing solidarity between their movement and that of socialist workers. Thus, men are not included in their novels. In addition, according to Albinski, American women were perhaps slightly better off: “There were fewer legal and political disabilities to chafe them, and educational and professional pathways were easier to open...American women were regarded as the ‘guardians of culture’” (4). It seems odd, of course, to assert that American women became more radical and ideologically pure despite facing fewer challenges, but such idea is the case. Perhaps, as I have discussed throughout, this difference results from, again, the extremely poor reception that New Woman writers received in England, and, subsequently, their potential softening of their message in order to gain a larger audience.
The New Woman movement was not necessarily an exclusively British phenomenon, in spite of its origins--self-proclaimed New Women did live and work in North America. That said, I would not characterize the works of Lane and Gilman (the two most major American feminist utopian writers of the 19th century) as New Woman writers; their works diverge too strongly in their treatment of men and ignorance of broader progressive issues.
