Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century

by Barbara Taylor

Socialism and Feminism in the 19th century.

Genres: History, Feminism, Nonfiction, Politics, British Literature

402 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Barbara Taylor is a British historian specialising in Enlightenment history, gender studies, and the history of subjectivity. She has taught at the University of East London since 1993, and held visiting posts at the universities of Amsterdam, Indiana, and Cambridge. She was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame in 2009.

Her publications include Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century (1983), which received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize; Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (co-edited with Sarah Knott, 2005), and On Kindness (co-written with Adam Phillips, 2009). Her writings have been translated into seven languages. She is the Reviews Editor of History Workshop Journal, and reviews regularly for the London Review of Books.

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this history of early feminism. It was so interesting to read all the debates about how marriage was very much in need of reform and how people objected to it. It reminded me a lot of similar debates today around equal marriage for LGBT people. The book focused on the early 19th century and in particularly looked around a lot of the women who were involved in the Owenite movement. I remember quite liking the Owenite movement when I first came across them in school and this book reminded me of all the things they did well.

One of the things that I liked was how the women writers were arguing back then that gender was a social construct. That all the things men saw as "womanly faults" or part of a woman's nature were just because she'd raised to be submissive and less valued than men. This book made me angry and proud at the same time. Angry that so recently things had been so bad and proud to see so many people and women writing about how it was unfair and wrong. In many ways it's appalling to read about how little rights women had in the 19th century. Everyone tends to think of Chinese a misogynistic culture but there women had a lot more rights, particularly over property. In England they were literally the slaves of men, could own nothing (including any wages earned), had no rights over their children, could be beaten, sold, raped legally by their husbands. It was really horrible. Anyone talking about "traditional" marriage should make you shudder!

The book followed different women who were speaking out for women's rights as well as the overall opinion in the different organisations. How attitudes towards women working was criticised in the trade unions because they were seen as taking work away from men. There was a lot of fascinating history in this book. I would very highly recommend it to anyone interested in women's history and gender issues. I found it randomly in a second hand bookshop for £2 and even though it is now several decades old it is still terribly relevant.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent analysis of the relations between feminism and socialism in early 19th century Britain. One of the quite proper criticisms of E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class is that it pays too little attention to women in late 18th and early 19th century radical politics: this book is an excellent antidote to that shortcoming. Although the specific focus is a concentration on Owenite (or as Engels labelled it, utopian) socialism, the key role that the Owenites played in polticial activism - Chartism and so forth - and in re-imagining the culture of capitalist life as well as new communalist and socialist ways of living means that this book takes us right inside the key developments in early 19th century British working class life. Essential social history weaving socialism and feminism into a sceptical, critical study of the kind we should continue to be envious and aspire to.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taylor has written a fascinating history of the development of socialist feminism in 19th-century England. Focusing largely on the Owenites, especially Owenite women, it shows the efforts to deal with the ramifications of the industrial revolution and the changes and intensifications of gender roles that accompanied it. It shows how Owenite women were at the forefront of proposing radical changes to marriage, sexual relations, domesticity, and gender constructs. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons which Taylor illustrates, it didn't work out so well. Taylor also convincingly does away with the notion of continual progress regarding women's rights and shows how the Owenites' radicalism was hindered by later movements such as Chartism.