Eve and the New Jerusalem is a study of the Owenite movement in nineteenth century Britain. It is an uncovering of the socialist feminism of Owenism and a revindication of its Utopian vision.

The Owenite vision was one of a society freed from the deformations of both class exploitation and sexual oppression. The Owenites believed that the source of women’s oppression lay within the institutions of marriage and the family and that only a complete transformation of family life and sexual attitudes through the creation of a New Moral World- would free women. This commitment to a collectivised family life and female equality set them apart from most other radical movements of the period.

Owenism was never a mass movement. It did not have the same following as Chartism. Nevertheless women were actively involved in the movement in large numbers and, according to Barbara Taylor, the majority of these women came from the upper working class. The women who joined Queenswood, a Hampshire Owenite community, for example, were mostly the wives and daughters of skilled factory operatives. Before entering the community they had worked as dressmakers, straw-bonnet-makers, weavers and domestic workers.

Hundreds of women attended Owenite lectures on women’s rights and scores wrote to its press on women’s issues. A number of feminists toured the country, speaking at public meetings on the principles of Owenism. One such publicist, very popular with working class audiences, was Emma Martin. Audiences of two or three thousand were not unusual for Emma, and when the subject was ‘marriage and divorce’ they were often much larger. Emma specialised in an inverted evangelical mode which, for men and women raised on the Bible, was a form which was easily accessible and entertaining. In 1843, when she debated with a Baptist minister in Hull, so many wanted to attend that the tickets were sold and resold at vastly inflated prices. The audience on this occasion divided itself into two camps, each indicating their response to the speakers with cheers and heckling. By popular approval Emma won the day and the local paper sadly reported that ‘the infidel, as a debater, was an overmatch for the Baptist’.

Barbara Taylor does not idealise the Owenites. Her study shows that competing views on women and sexual relations fought for an ideological foothold in the movement and that the initial intransigent attitude towards the family dissolved into a range of positions. She explains also that the lack of female leadership in the Owenite branches was symptomatic of underlying ambiguities in Owenite thinking which were never resolved.

Despite these deficiencies, Barbara Taylor argues that we have lost something with the failure of Owenism. She argues that there is an assumption within the socialist movement that there has been ‘a steady progress in socialist thought, from the primitive utopianism of its early years to mature, scientific socialism’. She challenges this assumption and contends that the displacement of the humanist vision of the Owenites by a Marxist analysis of the class struggle ‘did not raise the socialist project onto a higher terrain but contracted it around a narrow programme which left little space for women’s needs, or women’s demands.’ She calls for today’s socialist feminists to reclaim the Utopian vision as our own heritage.

How should socialist-feminists respond? Like Engels, we should ‘delight in the stupendously grand thoughts’ of the Utopians. We can acknowledge also the weaknesses in today’s socialist movement’s vision of the future. This same criticism of the movement was raised by E P Thompson in his work on William Morris. Thompson argued that, after Morris, the later Marxist tradition lacked ‘a moral self-consciousness or even a vocabulary of desire’ and was unable to project any images of the future. Hilary Wainwright in Beyond the Fragments also argued the need to ‘project a vision of socialist society as part of the struggle to create a mass socialist consciousness.”

But Barbara Taylor is arguing for something more than this. She suggests that Marxism cannot deal adequately with the tasks of women’s liberation. She allows Marxism a place and recognises that Owenism’s strategic weakness was its belief that the capitalist system was a transitory, fragile form of socio-economic organisation. The Owenites did not recognise that ‘capitalism itself had become the terrain on which the struggle for its own suppression would have to be fought.’ She acknowledges that ‘the new conceptual tools of Marxism gave the struggle for socialism a clearer direction.”

But she argues that Marxism also stranded women’s independent aspirations outside the revolutionary agenda- an agenda now dominated by the class-based struggles of the (male) industrial proletariat. ‘Sex oppression and class exploitation increasingly became viewed not as twin targets of a single strategy but as separate objects of separate struggles.’

Barbara Taylor counterposes the vision to questions of strategy. Marxism did not analyse the failure of Owenism as the failure of vision. The failure, according to Marx and Engels, lay in its analysis of how to change the world so as to make reality accord with that vision.

If the fading of the Utopian vision has left socialism morally impoverished, then we need to look further than Marxism itself for our explanations, We should understand the negative example of Stalinism in Eastern Europe but we should pay particular attention to the dead weight of social democracy on the socialist movement in Britain. If Denis Healey or Neil Kinnock fail to inspire large numbers of people with a vision of a socialist future, it’s not surprising. They are not the agents for such a future. Even Tony Benn, a supporter of the women’s movement, is not the agent for the kinds of changes that the Owenite feminists desired.

Barbara Taylor says that ‘most present day socialist thinking on feminism assumes that struggles involving women’s status and women’s freedom are somehow less revolutionary in their implications than those based on class’.

This is hardly an accurate description of  present day socialist thinking. But it also leaves out of account that whole strand of socialist-feminist thinking which has been involved in elaborating a Marxist analysis of the nature of women’s oppression. This acceptance of class as the primary category has not at all hindered them from exploring a vision of a future society freed from both class exploitation and sexual oppression.

Barbara Taylor says that the Owenites failed in their endeavour to transform the whole order of social life and in so doing transform relations between the sexes. She says that we must take up this endeavour again only this time we must not fail’! Yet it is through Marxism that we can revive the link between women’s freedom and class exploitation. The Owenite vision is insufficient.