SOURCE: “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia” in “Looking Backward,” 1988-1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy, edited by Daphne Patai, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 68-90.

In the following essay, Strauss claims that Bellamy's feminist leanings were limited by his nationalist and bourgeois presuppositions.

In 1888, when Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was published, the woman question was seen as the key to whether the progress of the nineteenth century could be sustained in the twentieth. The woman question preoccupied scientists, philosophers, essayists, novelists, and politicians. Women's voices were being heard on a scale heretofore unknown. Social reformers, both male and female, believed for ideological and practical reasons that woman's sphere must be enlarged. Conservatives sought inducements to keep women in their traditional domestic sphere, fervently believing that the preservation of civilization depended on it.

Bellamy acknowledged that the late nineteenth century was a crucible for women. He himself looked forward...