SOURCE: “Feminist Socialists: Some Portraits,” in Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 57-82.

In the following essay, first published in 1983, Taylor surveys the principal nineteenth-century feminist proponents of Robert Owen's socialist thought.

Until the late 1820s, adherence to Owenite views was almost entirely confined to a small number of radical intellectuals. But in the 1830s and 1840s support for the New Science of Society mushroomed. ‘Little knots of Socialists appeared in almost every part of the country,’ one journalist on The Whitehaven Herald observed in 1842, describing how even in his own small city the Owenite presence had swelled from two or three individuals to a band of several hundred, ‘of whom a considerable proportion were females …’¹ Women appear to have taken an active part in this development right across the country. In 1833 a visiting Saint Simonian reported seeing...