Chapter 3 details the connection between the utopian novel and vegetarianism. It argues that vegetarianism plays an important role in the two most significant texts in the development of the genre in the late-nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It suggests that while H. G. Wells’s conflicted personal views on vegetarianism means that the subject is treated with a marked ambivalence, ultimately benefiting the fiction, the wholehearted endorsement of vegetarianism in Bellamy’s Equality is one element amongst several that reduces the text to little more than didactic screed. Here the important connection between women’s writing and vegetarianism and veganism is brought to the fore in a discussion of the British writer Mrs George Corbett and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian fiction dramatizes her reform agenda, which turned on redressing an “unnatural” division back in human history that resulted in the excessively feminine women and humanized men who defined the norm in her own day. Her 1915 novel Herland challenges by flipping traditional gender hierarchies and roles even as it retains while naturalizing other forms of privileged status. Throughout her career, Gilman grounded her politics in the domain of biological existence, initially endorsing the view that natural laws and processes left unimpeded would inevitably work to facilitate the progressively meliorative course of evolution. But the more she became convinced that humans had deviated from this course, the more ardently she advocated for an interventionist, biopolitical approach. By the time she wrote Herland, she was diagnosing a nation’s “health and vitality” based on the extent of degeneracy and impurity she detected in the social body under examination and prescribing drastic cures as needed. Herland thus reveals the author’s conservative tendencies; these increased as she aged and soured on the prospect of sweeping social reform, but they had been there all along, even in her seemingly radical theories of gender.

Chapter five examines the work of American writer, lecturer, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. While not a children’s author per se, Gilman foregrounded motherhood and childcare in her polemical works and her fiction. She also included unexpected borrowings from New Thought in her novels and life writing. For instance, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), which appeared serially in her self-published Forerunner Magazine (1909–1916), resonates with Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875). Gilman's all-female utopia, in which parthenogenesis has replaced sexual reproduction, resembles Eddy's imagined future in which “there will be no more marrying nor giving in marriage” and women and men will increasingly resemble one another in body and mind. The Herlanders’ worship of a loving “Mother Spirit,” their reverence for maternity, and their practice of communal child-rearing likewise mirror Eddy's androgynous “Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” and her emphasis on maternal feeling. Herland thus fulfills Eddy's millennial predictions as well as Gilman's feminist ideals.

Co-operative housekeeping, the socialisation of housework through new built environments and housing for women, was widely discussed in the suffrage movement yet has caught the attention of only a few historians of ‘first wave’ feminism. Although these projects claimed to do away with the ‘servant problem’, this did not mean the end to domestic service but simply that servants would be employed by the community at large rather than by individual mistresses. This chapter uncovers the working conditions and organisation of domestic service in feminist-inspired plans for co-operative housekeeping. It examines blueprints put forward by Jane Hume Clapperton and Clementina Black, alongside schemes that were put into practice in Henrietta Barnett’s Waterlow Court and Alice Melvin’s Brent Garden Village. By focusing on the degree to which the boom in co-operative housekeeping was framed by the ‘servant problem’, I trace previously unrecognised connections between the housing schemes of middle-class feminists and the campaigns for public facilities. These working-class campaigns were informed not only by a critique of conditions endured by unwaged housewives, but also, I argue, by an awareness of the struggles of servants such as those involved in the Domestic Workers’ Union (DWU).