EVE AND THE NEW JERUSALEM

...But always there remained the suggestion that these were merely "relative virtues," developed not to meet women's own expanding needs but those of their husbands and children...

...In 1836 the branch purchased a "delightfully toned seraphania" to accompany its congregational hymn-singing...

...In addition, 22 branches held regular classes, 9 had day schools, and 12 operated regular Sunday schools where both adults and children received elementary and "social" instruction...

...It made my heart glad to see so many of the wives and children of our married members there, all enjoying themselves, more than they had done since the pleasing days of courtship...

...198...

...Special emphasis was placed on women's attendance at all membership discussions, partly to coach them in Social Science (like the men, all women members of the Rational Society were supposed to pass a test in the Social principles before admission), but also to give them a forum in which to discuss their own condition...

...New Moral World, March 16, 1844.] The cost of membership was twopence a week, and another a penny for those wishing to contribute to a "health insurance fund" for themselves and their families—an echo of the old Female Friendly Societies...

...We should strive to create virtuous dignity in females, and respectfulness toward them in males, and this, it appears to me, we do not if we allow the familiarity of the waltz...

...The drive for collective self-improvement was a keynote of Socialist life...

...Fired by this experience, he and his fellows had "determined upon attempting to elevate the character of the working classes...

...Socialist temperance propaganda always played on this theme of male selfishness and female misery, and since most Owenites were temperance supporters there was rarely any drink served at Social functions...

...Theirs was the tyrant's ceremony—let yours be the people's ceremony...

...Its members, according to some male supporters, were "consistent demonstrators of our principles, living exponents of the superiority of morality and intellect over the stupid negative requirements of theology" —a reminder that one of the other functions of education for women was to wean them away from pious "superstition...

...Naming rituals, for example, were often the occasion for a little diatribe against the doctrine of original sin, while funerals were not only displays of mournful appreciation of a lost brother or sister, but also infidel demonstrations on a large scale...

...the men are in their turn flattered that they are the producers of all wealth...

...Discussions were wideranging, moving between "abstract rights, and the principles of political and social economy" to topics that conventional society would have deemed most improper for feminine ears...

...The Institutes were established by philanthropic industrialists who aimed to provide male workers with the skills and, more important, the disciplined work attitudes required in the expanding manufacturing sectors...

...his letter concluded...

...This familiarity arose, she went on to add, because of the "pernicious error that industry is a badge of disgrace, which subjects every milliner, dress-maker, and servant, or factory girl, to the rude touch and offensive speech of any vagabond...

...Even the working women of the 1834 unions had often met in pubs, but by the 1840s few Socialist women would have done likewise...

...The men who seceded from the Manchester Mechanics Institute in 1830, for example, urged women's classes on the grounds that "young women should be taught the duties of housewifery," and a decade later the founders of the Manchester Hall of Science were defending their own decision to provide instruction for women on the basis that "numerous scenes of domestic thriftlessness, discomfort and contention" would be thereby eliminated...

...Apparently these admonitions were necessary, since complaints of dirty clothes and rowdy behavior at Owenite events were fairly common...

...Fellow-feeling and mutual respect were the emotional foundations on which Socialism would be built—including mutual respect between the sexes, which was encouraged in a host of little ways, from censure of obscene language (Robert Dale Owen was "girlishly sensitive to the coarse and ribald jests in which young men think it witty to indulge at the expense of a sex they cannot appreciate") through to constant reminders to male Socialists to smarten up before attending Social functions, and always to remove their hats...

...The enforcement of moral discipline was in itself a modest version of feminism, as the high level of female involvement in the temperance movement and later "social purity" campaigns demonstrated...

...That is the keystone of the arch...

...We have had to delete numerous footnotes that provide evidence in support of her contentions.—Ens...

...Political and religious disputation was prohibited, and radicals who persisted in trying to initiate such debates were often expelled...

...Classes like the one held in the Huddersfield branch, modeled on the Methodist class system, were adopted elsewhere, as a method of ensuring women's active participation...

...YET WITHIN OWENISM there were others willing to defend women's intellectual development on those higher grounds as well, including a number of feminists who demanded education precisely in order to free women from the narrow boundaries of domestic concerns ("the stupid, mind-destroying, mill-horse routine of domestic slavery" as one woman called it...

...Commence, where possible, private classes, lyceums, reading rooms and other means of instruction and innocent recreation...

...No one ever suggested, for example, that the way to prepare men for the New Moral World was to have them teach children or perform child care at branch meetings...

...If there had been opposition from local clergy, huge mobs of curious or hostile townspeople would also arrive, sometimes to jeer, occasionally to stone or attack the procession, but often to stand awed by the solemn scale of the event...

...Proud was he to say that they had succeeded to a considerable extent...

...To be a good wife, nowadays, means nothing more than to be a good drudge," George Fleming told the 1840 Rational Society Congress, but under Socialism all this would change: The Socialists want women to be educated equal to themselves...

...In 1840 one of the leading activists in the Manchester branch told the story of his early years as a radical organizer in that city, when the only meeting venues were pubs whose inebriated clientele indiscriminately cheered progressive orators and reactionary opponents alike...

...When we see how the leisure hours are employed . . . by the masses of people . . . it is lamentable enough," one Cambridgeshire Owenite sighed in a letter to a community newspaper there...

...Charity day schools, most of them church-sponsored, provided a rudimentary literacy training, heavily supplemented by courses in needlework, cooking, and 195 so on...

...Hornblower) also sat on the local branch executive...

...In the Salford Social Institution, for example, "a good book of music was formed, singers were drilled, a hymn book published, a form of service arranged . . . [for] the Sunday meetings" when a sermon would be delivered on some Social topic...

...cheers...

...1st...

...It was only with the rise of the moral reform movements— conservative and radical alike—that alcohol and respectable womanhood came to be seen as wholly incompatible...

...The improving spirit, in other words, could take many directions, and in the Owenites' case the route chosen was usually fiercely independent, democratic, and class-conscious: a style of working-class respectability that soon became as detestable to its upper-class opponents as the cries of an angry rabble...

...the branches were exhorted in 1840, Let every institution forthwith have its Sunday and Day school, distribute tracts and works explanatory of the Social System with unsparing liberality, let the lecture rooms be made as attractive as possible, and be as seldom empty and unused...

...In the Owenites' case, all these impulses were further stiffened by their faith in the revolutionary power of Correct Character Formation...

...To make Socialism, it was emphasized, it was first necessary to Copyright ® 1983 by Barbara Taylor...

...Articles defending women's innate mental equality ("are the sensations of woman weak . . . ? All persons affirm just the contrary...

...Within a few months, the Hall was able to offer its members a rich agenda of activities, from evening classes and Sunday schools ("for interested persons of both sexes"), to dances, picnics, day-outings and an occasional Grand Social Festival with dinner and dancing...

...In every case the building became the focus of a cultural life whose closest equivalent, in Old World terms, was undoubtedly the plebian chapel...

...By such conduct the best fruits of their own knowledge would be lost...

...The Sheffield Hall was established after a local Socialist leader had been sacked from his post as the Mechanics Institute's secretary for placing Socialist books in the Institute library...

...This project, it should be noted, was in sharp contrast to the integrationist and disciplinarian goals of other would-be "improvers" of the working class in the same period, although the means employed were often strikingly similar...

...First, it drew on strands within working-class culture that were traditionally associated much more closely with women than with men...

...Let us begin with the recreation issue...

...Two years later delegates to the Seventh Annual Congress were able to report that 29 branches had "Social Institutions" of which 8 seated over 1,000...

...A number of the Owenite Halls of Science were founded by men who had either been expelled or seceded from a local Institute, including the Halls in Manchester, Coventry, and Sheffield...

...The whole drive toward sober, family-oriented leisure activities within the Owenite movement was fuelled by an underlying belief that the type of emotions and experiences associated with domestic life were the ones that should be nurtured in the collectivist environment of the branches...

...2nd...

...It was to this end, they assured the women, that they offered the class their heartfelt support...

...In 1844 the secretary of a London branch wrote to the New Moral World bewailing the collapse of all activities in his branch except dance sessions, which were held three or four times a week...

...New Moral World, January 19, 1839.] In creating an atmosphere of cheerful respectability within their branch meetings, then, the Owenites not only provided women with "a foretaste of the pleasures to come" in community life, but also allowed them the more immediate satisfactions of sober husbands and courteous treatment...

...Community dress" was sometimes worn at these functions, as a way of symbolizing the connection between present comradeship and future communalism...

...Christian holy days, no matter how solemn, were celebrated with a blasphemous gusto that would have made even hymn-singing suspect to most Methodists...

...When one considers the reasons proffered by some Owenite leaders for this female instruc196 tion, however, it is difficult to see how even the staunchest sexual conservative could have objected...

...He went on to list "alehouses, race courses and skittle alleys" as a few of the "low and debasing" amusements that absorbed the time and money of workers—or rather of working men, since none of these were female pleasures...

...In 1830 a fierce struggle developed over democratization of the Manchester Mechanics Institute, in which female admission was one of the reforms demanded...

...Socialist texts were weeded out of Institute libraries and sometimes even destroyed...

...make Socialists, and nearly every item on the movement's internal agenda was geared to this task of cultural "elevation": a collective bootstrappulling operation on a grand scale...

...and when I consider that those who were now so sober and courteous might, but for the circumstances of our festival, have been similarly situated to the individuals around me, the good moral results of these kind of institutions, and the general want of them appeared to me clear and self-evident as light amid darkness...

...Excess, intoxication and noisy revelry have too often attended the banquetings of the 'old world,' " the secretary of the Socialist London District Board noted in 1841, "but these we have put from us," thereby also allowing them to terminate "the old practice of excluding the ladies" from such gatherings...

...on you depend mainly the peace and happiness of the community circle...

...The education of the females of the lower classes, in many cases, does not extend even so far as a knowledge of their letters," one woman complained bitterly to The Pioneer in 1833, "in the agregate [sic] to sew and read (and that but very indifferently) is the sum of their acquirements...

...The Socialists' attempts to order their branch activities in ways that met women's particular needs became inextricably connected with a wider cultural redefinition of female needs themselves...

...3rd...

...Elevate women everywhere, and the effects will speedily show themselves throughout society...

...The class began with a few women in March and quickly grew to over 60 members...

...The Formation of Character...

...these solemn and catching ceremonials," James Morrison wrote after one such funeral in 1834 (The Pioneer, February 22, 1834), "they make a powerful impression on the public mind, and produce more permanent and decided results than the most eloquent speeches...

...and . . . an address suitable for the occasion, recommending strict adherence to the great principles of our profession...

...Social Pioneer, March 16, 1839.] The "self-improvement" of women would lead to the moral regeneration of society as a whole...

...This was the philosophy behind the multifunctional Social Institutions established in most branches whose aim, in the words of the prospectus for the Worcester Social Institution, was to provide "large public rooms wherein the working class might assemble with their wives and children to acquire and communicate useful knowledge, and wherein they might have innocent recreation and rational amusement at so trifling an expense as to be within the means of the poorest...

...the working classes were now determined to be elevated...

...Twenty branches had libraries of their own...

...In insisting that meetings be held outside pubs so that women could attend, the Owenites were actually helping to enforce new standards of female temperance...

...Finally, the Owenites' campaign for moral and cultural improvement led to an immediate enhancement of women's social status, if only by providing them with respectable and respectful male companions...

...Women were usually encouraged to participate on an equal basis in all these educational activities, from the sexually integrated class in chemistry held in a hired room over a pub at Dalkeith branch, to the separate "female classes" offered in many branches from 1830 on...

...The intrusion of radical elements into these Institutes was therefore viewed as a highly dangerous development...

...The new Hall announced its independence with a defiant inscription over the door: "Under the Patronage of Nobody...

...Throughout the first half of the 19th century most workingclass girls acquired what little schooling they could in dames' schools (schools run in the homes of local women who were often minimally educated themselves) or Sunday schools, which generally provided children with only enough education to allow them to carry out their religious duties...

...But even this was beyond the reach of girls whose home duties or paid employment left them no time for daily attendance...

...Our friends have paid by far greater attention to their lower than their upper understandings," he concluded dolefully...

...This pilfering of the sacramental rites did not increase the Socialists' popularity with the clergy, particularly when these ceremonies were then invested with "blasphemous" content...

...why it was said the plan was preposterous...

...By taking an active part in the business of the Branch, and assisting each other in times of affliction...

...By acquiring a practical knowledge of the science of human nature, the science of the formation of character and the science of society, as developed in the outline of the Rational system of society...

...The Socialist who had died an unrepentant free-thinker ("No fearful terrors—no false hopes, depressed...

...they are the bees, the rich the drones...

...Dance classes, balls, and concerts were all very well attended...

...Nor, of course, would most of their husbands, and no doubt many women found the benefits of a teetotaling husband outweighed the loss of their own drinking rights...

...We are glad to hear of...

...197 4th...

...This policy soon elicited protests from Owenite feminists...

...When the Mechanics Institutes finally did begin to admit women in the mid-century, it was for exactly these reasons, since "the absence of a systematic provision for female instruction" had proved to be "a fertile source of improvidence and domestic unhappiness" in the homes of working men...

...excited him...

...The intellectual preparation for Socialism, in other words, involved not only mental enlightenment but a change in those characteristics thdught feminine: instead of "false delicacy" there would be frank discussion...

...as one journalist in a radical newspaper noted, "yet few of them take any trouble to create in their wives this taste for reading, fearing that it would lead to all sorts of problems with dirty homes and untended kitchens...

...The autodidacticism so central to the lives of radical working men usually played little part in the busy daily lives of their womenfolk...

...On one occasion, for example, a Mr...

...Tea parties (to which "female members are particularly invited") were frequent and popular, and often provided the occasion for a short lecture on women's rights by a local speaker...

...Here again the question of drink is an obvious case in point...

...Certainly there were few other contemporary milieus that offered as much to women, intellectually and socially, as the Socialist movement...

...The wife to an almost unbounded extent determines the happiness of her husband and children," the men of the A 1 Branch reminded their sisters in a solemn public address, "If she is ignorantly selfish . . . she is a drawback upon his improvement, a poison to his existence...

...Like most Female Friendly Societies also, the class was selfgoverning, with its own elected executive whose president (first a Mrs...

...so well attended, in fact, that they encouraged further sneers from the opposition, who accused the Owenites of turning their Halls of Science into dance halls with political speechifying as a mere "tax on admission...

...Most working men now feel to read a newspaper is a want as urgent almost as the desire for food...

...The most important self-help aspect of Owenism was its internal educational program...

...In all cases, opposition to women drinking was bound up with a higher valuation of their significance as wives and mothers, and this was as true of the Socialists as it was of other moral improvement campaigners...

...In 1839 the women of the Manea Fen community were addressed by a leading male resident there: Sisters of the community...

...Before the dancing began at one Social Festival in Liverpool, for example, John Finch rose to remind those assembled of the natural equality of all mankind...

...how easy it would be for them to get instruction for themselves and their children, and how much more enjoyment there would be in the family circle if they joined in music and song at home, instead of the son being at the publichouse, the daughter roaming the streets, and the poor mother breaking her heart at home...

...Skelton and then a Mrs...

...If a certain confusion between comradely courtesy and conventional etiquette was evident in all this,* at least the motivating impulse was always the same, for "each individual [to] do all in his and her power to . . . increase the general happiness...

...Arguments veered back and forth...

...Long have the rich excluded the poorer classes from knowledge: will the poorer classes now exercise the same odious power to gratify the same anti-social propensity—the love of domination over the physically weaker half of their race...

...they want to place women in such a position, as that the lectureroom, the ball-room, the study of the stars and earth, might be to her, as to others, a source of amusement and pleasure...

...The practical implications of this idea were most obvious in the Socialists' policies with regard to women's education...

...They therefore called the working classes together, and explained...

...Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc...

...Even the communities themselves reflected similarly divided and ambivalent attitudes toward the women's role—but here such problems were further complicated by a series of practical and political crises that not only made feminist reform difficult, but eventually undermined the Socialist movement as a whole...

...Throughout the early 19th century, male alcoholism wreaked havoc on poor homes and the lives of women within them, soaking up wages that were desperately needed for family necessities and often leading to the wife-beating for which Englishmen were notorious...

...They wished her no longer to be the inhabitant of the cellar and the kitchen...

...make a new ceremonial for yourselves—a rival ceremonial —which shall win the people on your own side, by the very same arts by which kings and generals, bishops and monks, have in all ages secured popularity to themselves...

...and a discussion of the question of Miracles...

...A good deal of this propaganda, whatever its particular line, was produced by the lower-middle-class wing of the movement, but it was generalized to apply to working-class women as well, who were alternately exhorted either to educate themselves for home duties or to prepare for "a wider sphere of action...

...Teetotalism, educational reform, and "rational recreation" were campaigns that engaged both Socialist and bourgeois-philanthropic energies in the 1830s and 1840s...

...The Owenites' role in relation to the Mechanics Institutes is a good example of how the question of women's education arose in the context of a wider struggle over the control of working-class education...

...But as it concerns the liberation of women, none was more energetic than that of the Owenites in England (who were among those roundly condemned as "unscientific" by Friedrich Engels...

...She writes: "One hundred and fifty years later, however, it is precisely this aspect of Owenism—its theoretical and practical commitment to women's liberation—which is least remembered...

...you who have all to gain and nothing to lose,—you who have been counted politically dead in law,—you whose rights have never been recognized except by the social system, remember, I say, you must get knowledge...

...Even the zealous friends of female education are afraid to press its claims on other than utilitarian and comparatively low grounds [one feminist complained in the mid-century...

...The pub in particular had acted as a focus of radical organization throughout the early 19th century, and the Owenites' decision to abandon it in favor of their own institutions was a deliberate step toward a feminized form of political development...

...and I believe it was the wish of us all that the time may speedily come, when we shall be enabled to meet in community, where we shall enjoy these and much greater pleasures, without measure and without end...

...you, the chief cornerstone that the builders rejected, have become the bulwark of our peace and unity...

...Ellis was brought in to deliver a lecture on "The Duty of Man as a Father" in which he dwelt at some length on the transmission of moral and physical diseases—the evils of near alliance—the want of a proper knowledge of anatomy, physiology, etc., and trusted much to the effects of the Ladies' Class to remove the existing false delicacy which prevented its acquirement...

...A letter from Sir Charles Shaw to Lord Ashley, written in 1843 in response to his lordship's request for information on the state of the lower orders, informed him that the "best legally conducted people" to be found in the working population were "the Socialists, who are all teetotalists and readers" yet no less abhorrent for that: "all know their morals to be bad for society...

...By the cultivation of social and industrial pursuits, and the taste for literary and scientific pursuits,—including the song and the practice of the pianoforte...

...the women are told that they live in slavish dependence upon the men...

...The Connection between Women and Civilization...

...One report from Manchester complained of members talking during lectures and lounging about in the aisles "as in a promenade...

...Classes in reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, and history were reported to go so well that "an advance from this elementary instruction to the more arduous studies of moral and physical science" was urged, "for the time when woman shall, by equality of education, assume her rightful place in society...

...To Robert Owen and his followers, particularly his feminist followers, socialism represented a struggle to achieve 'perfect equality and perfect freedom at every level of social existence.' " In this book, Barbara Taylor has rectified a gap in historical scholarship, including that of the left...

...We had country dances, quadrilles, hornpipes, marches, recitations, glees, songs, etc...

...In town after town, Owenites invaded local agencies of moral improvement in an attempt to convert them into vehicles for Social Regeneration, and in town after town this led to acrimonious meetings, the expulsion of Socialist agitators, and often the establishment of Owenite counter-institutions, such as the Halls of Science, which were founded as radical alternatives to the bourgeois-sponsored Mechanics Institutes...

...Similar halls were established in more than two dozen Owenite centers by 1842, although in some cases (as in the Worcester branch) they were really only small workshops that had their fittings altered, benches added, and a plaque hung proudly ove the door, "Hall of Science" —"not that we had much science," the local Social Missionary in Worcester, George Holyoake, recalled, "only a preference for it...

...They were founded by Robert Owen, a Welsh manufacturer who first experimented with a kind of anticapitalist "social engineering" in his own mills, then turned to organizing a general movement for the betterment of men and women— and to this Barbara Taylor directs her primary interest in a richly detailed book, Eve and the New Jerusalem, from which we excerpt a brief section below...

...The popularity of these classes and lectures among women was at least partly caused by the very low level of educational opportunities available to them elsewhere...

...ONE OF THE TWO MAJOR PRONGS of this Owenite improving campaign was a drive to create a new style of working-class recreation...

...The attendance of females is larger than formerly...

...The alternative to these masculine entertainments that he and others urged was a sober, gentle, family-oriented social life that allowed for the maximum participation of women and children...

...would often be followed to the grave by hundreds or even thousands of comrades...

...Yet these females are to be the bosom friends of the most useful portion of our population...

...it not only produced works of literary imagination but abounded in significant, organized movements in Europe, some of them exported to this country, aiming to mobilize communities on egalitarian principles...

...Adult women were no better served...

...When the Bradford branch introduced an orchestra into its menu of entertainments as a way of luring women, they met with great success: soon female attendance was "uncommonly numerous...

...instead of "foolish giddiness," intellectual courage and moral strength...

...Nevertheless, the lack of female leadership in the branches was symptomatic of underlying ambiguities in Owenite thinking that were never resolved...

...A breakaway Institute was eventually established that immediately initiated classes for women and urged radicals in other towns to do likewise...

...192 Such events usually attracted (in the words of one Manchester man) "many who have hitherto held aloof from us," particularly many women...

...A fierce competition then developed between these radical Halls and the Institutes, in which the question of women's education became one lively point of dispute, along with issues of democratic control, class aims, and political affiliation...

...Second, this was a much more accessible form of political culture than the one it was trying to replace, based almost entirely on the male domains of workshop and pub...

...It would be injudicious to bring families to a public house, but this is only another reason why a society should have *The line that divided mutual respect between the sexes from high-minded prudery was a very fine one indeed, and Socialist feminists occasionally crossed it...

...The Mechanics Institutes established by middleclass educationalists for working men in the early decades of the century did not admit women either, probably for similar reasons...

...Hymns were sung and sermons delivered (the chosen text on one occasion being "Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge in the grave whither thou goest...

...they were determined no more to be slaves...

...cheers) They wished women to be free—to assert their own dignity . . . as the wives and daughters of free men, enjoying equal benefits with them...

...At first everyone said it was a mad trick—it was the greatest absurdity to talk about the working classes having halls of their own— schools of their own—music halls of their own—libraries of their own...

...Educate...

...partly, it was claimed, because of the hostility of their husbands who, in Frances Morrison's words, "tremble at the idea of a reading wife...

...and by giving all possible assistance to the establishment of Communities of mutual interest...

...but he and his friends were determined that the poor should have them too...

...New Moral World, April 20, 1844.] This class was obviously considered a model of its kind...

...With the collapse of the Consolidated Union in 1834 "the area to which first principles could be applied in [Socialist] branch life was narrowed from everyday working life" to "leisuretime . . . alone" where Socialist activities competed with a host of other, less edifying recreations available to working people...

...And although in principle these values and emotions were supposed to be generalized across the membership as a whole, in practice they fre194 quently devolved on to the women alone...

...From Eve and the New Jerusalem...

...Women are to be educated . . . in order to qualify them for the duties of wives . . . and servants...

...Educate...

...Without you the superstructure would be unfinished...

...Christmas Day 1839, for example, was observed by the London Owenites with a party whose "entertainments" included "music, dancing, singing," and various "scientific" experiments with laughing-gas, electricity, "electro-magnetism, chemistry, geology, phrenology, optics...

...Attempts to prefigure the egalitarian social relations of the New World within the boundaries of Old World existence were obviously going to run into practical limitations set by women's existing needs and responsibilities...

...A Huddersfield Socialist on his way home from a Social Festival there could not help but contrast the sobriety and civil manners of those who had participated in our "feast of reason" with the brutal language and bullying conduct of the unfortunates who were reeling from the public houses...

...Let us not be outstripped in the endeavour...

...A band was formed that practiced during the week for its regular Sunday morning performances...

...In the Manchester Hall of Science, it was reported, "the evils of marriage are among the favourite topics...

...How rarely is it argued that women should be educated in order that whatever capacities they possess may be permitted to grow to their full height...

...But cultural puritanism and moral discipline, although they served to protect women from some of the harsher features of male dominance, also had the effect of policing women themselves...

...But if the social medium occasionally drowned out the Social message, in general the opposite was true: not only did these playful events attract women and men for whom lectures would have been too dry an initiation, but they also provided an important training ground in Socialist principles...

...On the same day the Liverpool branch also held a Social Festival that was duly reported in the New Moral World [January 5, 1839]: A good band was in attendance...

...On the other hand, if she is enlightened . . . she pacifies and improves him, and sweetens the paths of domestic life...

...Would you improve intellectually and socially the men of the industrious classes, improve the women also," William Thompson urged in an early article supporting workingclass control of the Institutes, Let your libraries, your models, and your lectures . . . be equally open to both sexes...

...Other branches rehearsed choirs and held regular Sunday services, while some even provided their own funerals and child-namings, in addition to the weddings...

...Educate...

...Published by Pantheon Books...

...But whereas most Owenites saw these reformist endeavors as "stepping stones to a New Social System," their competitors fervently hoped they would lead working people into sober, industrious 190 behavior within the existing system—a difference in political emphasis that led to numerous clashes between, for example, Socialist temperance advocates (who urged that the money saved through abstinence from alcohol should be invested in communities) and Evangelical temperance advocates (who banned Socialists from their meetings and tore up their temperance tracts...

...FOR FEMALE SOCIALISTS, this style of social life had a threefold significance...

...Feminism and socialism were not always partners but they did come together, the author argues, in the Owenite movement...

...Fatherhood was never the ground on which men entered political life...

...Socialist speakers were banned...

...By the circulation of useful, practical information...

...In at least one case the accusation came uncomfortably close to the mark...

...appeared in the Socialist press alongside letters explaining that women ought only to be trained in nonanalytical subjects, since their concerns were with "matters of the affections" rather than "the cold calculations of masculine intellect...

...Instead, the "moral preparation" of children was seen as women's prerogative and one of their central contributions to the building of a Socialist society...

...New Moral World, October 1840.] 191 By 1840 the Manchester Owenites had built their own Hall of Science (an enormous Gothic edifice with "Doric columns" and seats for 3,000) with funds raised by selling one-pound shares to local working men who (in the words of one) "having tasted the sweets of education, sobriety, and strictly moral habits are desirous of facilitating the means of imparting the like character . . . to their brother workmen...

...To sit covered in the presence of one female is a breach of decorum...

...Then I argue that they ought all to admit . . . that the associative power infused into her ideas is also equal...

...An agenda of discussions in the Ipswich branch for example, included: "The Emancipation of the Female Sex...

...A puritan zeal for personal reform, combined with a burning thirst for "useful knowledge" and social respectability, were typical of the upper working class in general and of radical workers in particular, whose radicalism almost invariably implied an overt rejection of the more debasing features of popular culture...

...In 1841 Margaret Chappellsmith wrote a letter to the New Moral World (September 18, 1841) in which she criticized certain branches for allowing waltzing at their Social Festivals, thereby encouraging an extension of "that revolting familiarity which has arisen from large numbers of boys and girls being congregated in the same workshop, without anyone to check impropriety or sustain modesty...

...This was most evident in activities modeled on the plebian church, which had long been a center of feminine sociability, but it could also be seen in all the other gentle and genteel "entertainments" on offer, which appealed to well-established female tastes...

...New Moral World, June 20, 1840.] It was this blend of ideals—the emancipationist and the "utilitarian"—that lay behind the classes that Owenite women themselves organized, of which the best-documented example was the Ladies Class established by the women at the London Al branch in 1844...

...193 a house of its own . . ." an early article in The Co-operator explained, "why should females be so studiously excluded from cheerful and friendly meetings...

...on you mainly depends the character of our youths...

...The issue of drink serves again as an example of this process...

...Its goals were laid out in a statement of "Objects and Laws": To promote the individual and collective happiness of every man, woman and child, without regard to country, colour, or class...

...Before the early 19th century, working-class women's presence in pubs, either alongside men or in all-women groups (like the Female Friendly Societies), had usually been taken for granted...

...but it is important to see how the selfimprovement mentality of the movement could actually serve to promote narrowed definitions of feminine respectability...

...Have not women an equal right to that happiness which arises from an equal cultivation of all their faculties that men have...

...Delighted, the local branch provided them with classrooms and instructors and then used the incident as a handy stick with which to beat their middleclass competitors...

...By 1840 the Owenite reputation for supporting reforms in this area was so well known that when a group of women petitioned the Birmingham Mechanics Institute for classes and were refused ("such a thing would ruin the Atheneum in a month," the directors told them), they immediately turned to the Owenites...

...You will not, therefore, be found quizzing each other's dresses, language and manners," he urged them, but "will treat each other with the greatest kindness, like children of one family...

...the second was the development of an alternative educational program...

...May the Fogs of Religious Animosity be speedily dispelled by the Genial Sunshine of Universal Charity...

...it was the rich, and the rich alone (it was said) for whom these things were intended...

...In many ways Owenite branch life represented a genuine attempt to come to terms with those conditions and offer women an improved status within them...

...instead of religiosity, rationality...