ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies Utopian feminism as a distinctive period within the history of feminism. Utopians were most influential from the late 1820s to the repression that ended the European revolutions of 1848. 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.
