edward bellamy looking backward 2000 1887

The fundamental principles on which our society is founded settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation” (208). Leete explains that “we have nothing to make laws about. Perhaps this is a challenge that no utopian writer has yet conquered: creating a society that everyone thinks is utopian. In fact “the higher positions in the feminine army of industry are intrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers, as they alone fully represent their sex” (261). And finally, to see how little society’s respect for women has “progressed,” we learn that their main role and value is still as producers of children. Leete explains, “We have given them a world of their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I assure you they are very happy in it” (259). One sees the condescension even more clearly when Dr. In other words, they permit them to work because it makes them prettier.

Leete says that “they permit them to work at all only because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind” (257). Further discourse shows that rather than seeing women as deserving of work just as they are, men “let them” work as long as it does not interact with their “serious” industry. “Under no circumstances is a woman permitted to follow any employment not perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex” (257). The men discuss it as if the women are playing at work. Being “inferior of strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in special ways” women work within an entirely separate labor structure (257). However, they are still treated as quite secondary to men. The fact that women have jobs outside the home is exciting and progressive. But when one looks more closely at gender roles, “utopia” becomes a bit more blurry. I do not imagine many people would argue the merits of the eradication of poverty and war.

In Bellamy’s Boston in the year 2000, many things have changed from how they were in 1887, and the consensus among the book’s characters is that they have changed for the better.

Edward bellamy looking backward 2000 1887