Is Utopia still a Man's World?

In many ways it is jarring to devote an entire class day to reading about how females interact and relate to the idea of utopia. Hopefully, many females in 2013 feel that they are decades away from the distinct oppression felt by our grandmothers and those that came before them. For most of us, I assume that unless we are taking a feminism class or another course that deals heavily with gender that we typically aren’t focusing on the differences between the two. I am well aware that gender inequality still exists in many other countries, but for the most part I’d like to believe that it is something of our own personal past. 

When considering the texts written about utopia between the years of 1890 and 1919, you cannot help but allow yourself to be transported back in time. What was it really like for women during those years? What kind of woman would I have been had I been conceived one hundred years earlier? If I had written about a utopia in the year 1900, would I have felt the necessity to conform my writing to mirror the male conventions? I’d like to think that I would have been a rebel and that my utopia would end with the female strong and independent, succeeding and being happy without a man at her side. But in all reality, I am aware that the pressures felt by females past were heavy and that taking a stand sometimes looked more like the intention of standing tall. 

In our brief overview of female presence in utopian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we see that there is tension created by attempting to give the female a strong or independent role. Sometimes, as with the example of Elodia, the heroin appears too much like a male thus defeating the purpose of giving her a figurative place of her own.  How then does the female fit into utopian literature today? I am increasingly anxious to read later works and to see where the female has landed all of these years later. Now that women are both in the home and the workplace where do they fit in a utopian society? And do both the women and the men see the woman in the same place? If not, how far have we really come in creating equality? Or perhaps more importantly, the perception of equality?

Image #1:  http://www.genderandeducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/VFA.jpg

Image #2: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3E_3RVv4Q7US1LpsoFKNmuQSdkggaRkWiWfb93ofFHHhTYE6VZNk0UTDCqqiG549GJqPYu_PFuLYmBmlMdkD0jqQI_4Muz2nQP-PSVkczUQpTu2wOAdkzpiCG7_n_skgu7L16eMOiLSI6/s400/Woman+Writing+Letters+by+Charles+Dana+Gibson.jpg

Image #3: http://media.salon.com/2011/08/gender_equality_means_more_sex.jpg