Reading Hilda's Home: Gender, Print Culture, and the Dissemination of Utopian Thought in Late-Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

American women published dozens of utopian novels between 1836 and 1900, yet little is known about the readers who consumed them. Hilda's Home first appeared as a serialized story in Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, a weekly filled with letters from rural and working-class readers troubled by the social ills caused by late-nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization. Adopting a reader-centered perspective, this essay explores the novel's publication history and readers' responses to its author's vision of cooperative households, sexual equality, and scientific breeding. The testimony of Hilda's Home readers confirms that novels did play an important role in transmitting nineteenth-century utopian visions to rural and working-class readers and that those readers recognized print culture's power as a tool for achieving social change.