ABSTRACT

The American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1909) and the Irish author and reformer Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) both wrote science fiction in which an element of time travel served for an exploration of ideas about the potential for women’s rights in the future. Hosmer’s play 1975: A Prophetic Drama envisions the world in 1975; two men, mysteriously mummified in 1875, wake up in the Egyptian rooms of the British Museum a century later, finding a world with a female British prime minister, a female American president, and a variety of technological developments which have transformed the way people conduct war and communicate. In Cobbe’s novella 1877 The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century people in 1877 receive via “prospective telescope” a newspaper from 100 years in the future. Culkin’s essay explores the ways in which Hosmer’s and Cobbe’s science fiction relates to their advocacy for women.