ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies utopian feminism as a distinctive period within the history of feminism. Utopians were most influential from the late 1 820s to the repression that the European revolutions of 1 848. They did not, however, call themselves 'utopians' ; that was Marx's term for them and is explained less by their other-worldliness than by Marx's determination to gain political advantage by deriding his competitors. The groups themselves either identified by their leaders' names (Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, Cabetians, Owenites, for example) or used the new word 'socialist' , invented at this time, to distinguish their programme from that of the late eighteenth century Revolutionaries.
