Reading Hilda's Home: gender, print culture, and the dissemination of utopian thought in late-nineteenth-century America.(Hilda's Home: A Story of Woman's Emancipation)(Critical Essay)

American women published dozens of utopian novels between 1836 and 1900, yet little is known about the readers who consumed them. Hilda's Home first appeared as a serialized story in Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, a weekly filled with letters from rural and working-class readers troubled by the social ills caused by late-nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization. Adopting a reader-centered perspective, this essay explores the novel's publication history and readers' responses to its author's vision of cooperative households, sexual equality, and scientific breeding. The testimony of Hilda's Home readers confirms that novels did play an important role in transmitting nineteenth-century utopian visions to rural and working-class readers and that those readers recognized print culture's power as a tool for achieving social change.

**********

"A friend who takes your paper kindly sent me the papers commencing with the first chapter of 'Hilda's Home,'" wrote a rural Kansan named Ella Slater to the editor of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer in April 1897. "I have a daughter just coming into womanhood.... I will not tell her not to marry but I will educate her so that she will not want to marry." (1) Slater represents just one of the many rural and working-class readers who devoured this serialized free love novel, believing that its message would foster the establishment of a more egalitarian world. Written by a working-class Pittsburgh woman named Rosa Graul, Hilda's Home: A Story of Woman's Emancipation is one of at least sixty-three utopian novels produced by American women between 1836 and 1900. Its content, which critiques patriarchal marriage as an oppressive institution and portrays a communitarian solution to the social control of women, is not all that unusual for the period; however, the availability of responses from rural and working-class readers provides rare insight into the role such works played in their lives. (2)

Utopian literature struck a responsive chord among late-nineteenth-century Americans as many struggled to find their places in a world forever changed by industrial capitalism. Critiquing government policy, monetary systems, and industrialists, the authors of utopian fiction appealed to middle-class wage earners who recognized that they had fewer and fewer opportunities to attain economic independence and to farmers resentful of bankers, railroads, and the middlemen who increasingly controlled their lives. Feminist utopian fiction gained popularity as the campaign for women's rights languished and as growing numbers of female college graduates encountered a world that was not yet ready to receive them as equals. According to literary historian Jane Tompkins, nineteenth-century authors of feminist utopias expected their work to contribute to a "social evolution, if not revolution" by raising awareness of women's experience in marriage, lack of educational and employment opportunities, and a moral double standard. (3)

Adopting a reader-centered approach, this essay explores the diffusion of feminist utopian ideas to and among late-nineteenth-century rural and working-class Americans. By rural, I am referring to women and men living on farms and in communities of 2,500 or less. Working-class readers include both skilled and unskilled male workers as well as women who made their living as dressmakers, clerks, and boardinghouse keepers. (4) Drawing upon readers' letters published in Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, the text of the serialized novel Hilda's Home, and manuscript population census records, I argue that women's enthusiastic response to the social feminist content of Hilda's Home and their use of this text to promote the idea of gender equality demonstrate the existence of grassroots support for a broadly defined vision of women's rights. The print-based interpretive community that emerged from the commingling of their voices in Lucifer played a critical role in shaping these rural and working-class readers' identities and sustaining their commitment to equality and the freedom of expression. United by a shared sense of oppression and alienation, those who responded to Hilda's Home found their voices by writing to Lucifer and, in the process, learned that they could use print culture to exercise agency. The different ways in which men and women interpreted this text's utopian vision, however, confirm the pervasiveness of the hegemonic cultural standard they sought to reform.

Yearning for a Better World

Rural and working-class Americans struggled and suffered during the 1890s, a decade characterized by economic panic and depression, labor protest, and third political party agitation. As one eighth of the nation's population controlled seven eighths of the nation's wealth, factory workers toiled an average of sixty hours per week to earn less than one-third of the $1,500 to $2,000 needed for a family of four to live a comfortable middle-class life. As the Panic of 1893 turned into a prolonged economic depression, industrial unemployment ranged from 20 to 25 percent, while farm prices in the already hard-hit rural sector dropped by more than 20 percent. Frustration mounted as desperate Americans voiced their discontent by joining Coxey's Army of the unemployed, striking such powerful employers as the Pullman Palace Car Company and throwing their support to the Populist party. The publication of Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives and Hamlin Garland's Main Traveled Roads further heightened awareness of poverty and inequality, two by-products of late-nineteenth-century industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism. (5)

Yearning for a better world, Americans turned to such utopian works as Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) and Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward (1888). Inspired by the latter work, readers in 27 states formed more than 150 Nationalist Clubs, but their enthusiasm waned in the wake of the Panic of 1893. Nonetheless, the utopian dream persisted, and Bellamy's book became so popular that by 1900 only Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold more copies. While Americans may have lost faith in Bellamy's specific vision, they remained open to the possibility of other utopian visions. (6)

It is in this context that a working-class Pittsburgh woman named Rosa Graul wrote Hilda's Home. Little is known about her identity, but we do know that this "poor, hardworking, unlettered" woman refused to use a pseudonym and based Hilda's Home and its characters on her lived experiences and on people she knew. (7) Told from the perspective of Imelda Ellwood, the story features fallen women, unhappily married couples, adulterers, criminals, unwanted children, and working women, all victims of a capitalistic society that has made the ownership of property its god. Befriended by a socialist and free lover named Margaret, Imelda attends meetings of radicals and learns about the liberating potential of cooperative households. Financial necessity forces the orphaned Imelda to accept a position as…