Open-Access Edition of Utopian Genderscapes by Michelle C. Smith

FAIN: DR-292377-23

Southern Illinois University (Carbondale, IL 62901-4302)
Amy J. Etcheson (Project Director: November 2022 to March 2025)
Kristine Priddy (Co Project Director: February 2023 to March 2025)

In Utopian Genderscapes, author Michelle C. Smith explores the interconnected rhetoricity of gender, class, and work through the case studies of three nineteenth-century utopian communities: Transcendentalist Brook Farm, the Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community. By looking at the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that defined women’s work in these distinct communities, Smith reveals how labor was not only gendered but also raced and classed. These communities offer evidence of how industrialization differentiated labor across gender, class, and race and what gender reforms were thinkable in the mid-nineteenth century. This innovative rhetorical history advances valuable lessons for contemporary discussions in the discipline of teleological rhetorics, rhetorics of exceptionalism, and rhetorics of choice.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Utopian Genderscapes
Year: 2022
ISBN: 9780809393008
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Author: Michelle C. Smith
Abstract: Utopian Genderscapes focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members. This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor. An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible.
Primary URL: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/siupress_rhetoric/1/
Primary URL Description: Southern Illinois University Press
Secondary URL: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF5LZXLQ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=352TLTS43HT5J&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.CWK7Hk2DdEpzndt-1-Kp3j9rcOTva46Okm65MFn0e_c.Wp-lhtZqC087T_OpY2TNwBqChqIHwsyNVOfVAo73cos&dib_tag=se&keywords=kindle+open+access+Utopian+Genderscapes&qid=1730152425&sprefix=
Secondary URL Description: Kindle
URL 3: https://books.apple.com/us/book/utopian-genderscapes/id6737488026
URL 3 Description: Apple
Type: Single author monograph

---