Feminist utopias in the early twentieth century

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw an intense period of international feminist organising and campaigning. Organisations such as the International Alliance of Women (1904), the Socialist Women’s International (1907), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1915) exemplified the transnational geography of the movement. This was also a time in which women’s writing moved in new ways, imagining speculative utopian worlds to accompany their radical gender politics. This article examines two literary feminist utopias from the early twentieth century: Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–3) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1905). While US writer Hopkins’s Of One Blood offers an early Afrofuturist or Black internationalist utopia that reflects women’s struggles, Hossain presents a simultaneously feminist and anti-colonial imagining of the world. Both these works, in an internationalist tradition, criticise both patriarchal and racist or colonial world orders, demonstrating the vital role played by literary utopian works in feminism of the early twentieth century.