SOURCE: "A Paradise Like Eve's: Three Eighteenth Century English Female Utopias," in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 9, 1982, pp. 263–73.

In the following essay, Schnorrenberg contrasts Scott's Millenium Hall with other utopian novels written by women in the eighteenth century.

There is general agreement on what utopias are and why they are written. They all share certain characteristics, though one aspect may be dominant in any particular work. Utopias are satires of current conditions, blueprints for how a society might be better formed, or descriptions of a dreamland that can never really be achieved. All however share a desire for improvement in the human condition.¹

It is, therefore, perhaps surprising that none of the better known utopian proposals were written by women.² Surely women have often needed the dream, the hope of change, more than men. Utopias written by men have talked of equal status for women, though most...