SOURCE: “Looking Forward Together: Feminists and Edward Bellamy,” in Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 1, January, 1981, pp. 120-34.

In the following essay, Leach discusses the role of nineteenth-century feminists in the egalitarian Nationalist movement inspired by Bellamy's writings.

Since the late nineteenth century a majority of American feminists have been drawn to the state to achieve greater equality. At the same time, however, by relying on the power of the state and especially on the power of the modern technocratic, welfare state, feminists have often found themselves supporting practices that threaten to subvert the democratic-egalitarian core of feminism. No episode in the history of feminism better illustrates or sheds greater light on this contradiction than the brief feminist involvement with Edward Bellamy's Nationalism movement, an indigenous socialist movement that projected so clearly and remarkably the essential features of the corporate, welfare state. American feminists were attracted to Nationalism, with its strong...