SOURCE: "Mothers and Monsters in Sarah Robinson Scott's Millenium Hall," in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, edited by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten, Syracuse University Press, 1994, pp. 54-72.

Below, Dunne argues that in Scott's utopian novel, Millenium Hall, healthy mother-daughter relationships are the paradigm for the most nurturing kinds of human relationships, while the monster motif in the text represents women's actual plight in patriarchal society.

As the feminist project of recovery and reevaluation of women's writing advances, certain key texts are emerging that contain elements that make them especially relevant to the construction of a social and literary history that can inform and reform the present. Sarah Robinson Scott's Millenium Hall, originally published in 1762, is such a book. As a Utopian description of an idealized community of women, which is partially based on the personal life of the author, Millenium Hall...