Editor's Introduction: Marie Howland—19th‐Century Leader for Women's Economic Independence

• Published date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12127
• Date: 01 November 2015

The AMERICAN JOURNAL of

ECONOMICS and SOCIOLOGY

Published Q U A R T E R L Y in the interest of constructive

synthesis in the social sciences, under grants from the FRANCIS

NEILSON FUND and the ROBERT SCHALKENBACH FOUNDATION.

Founded in 1941

Volume 74 November 2015 Number 5

Editor’s Introduction:

Marie Howland—19

th

-Century Leader for

Women’s Economic Independence

Introduction

What can we learn from the social biography of Marie Howland, a 19

th

-

century novelist, women’s rights activist, and social theorist who has

been largely neglected by both historians and feminists? Holly Blake

has used the life of this remarkable woman to tell a complex story that

raises a wide range of issues that remain pertinent in our own time.

One place to begin is with a short list of “f‌irsts,” by which I mean

achievements of which Marie Howland was one of the f‌irst. (This is not

about bragging rights. It is about which voices are ignored in our under-

standing of historical antecedents.)

Howland was among the first white working-class women to

write a novel and almost certainly the first to have written a

utopian novel.

Howland was one of the first working-class women in the

women’s rights movement.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 74, No. 5 (November, 2015).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12127

V

C2015 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Howland was a modern feminist at least four decades before

that term came into use. Cott (1987: 4) argues that modern femi-

nism began, both “the name and the phenomenon,” around

1910, but Howland exemplified by the 1870s the entire breadth

of feminist thought of the 1910s and 1920s: socialism, economic

equity, an end to “separate spheres” for men and women, liber-

ation from sexual oppression and double standards, and alter-

natives to traditional marriage. A recalibration of the history of

feminism is thus called for.

These insights into the distinctive contribution of Howland derive

from the painstaking work that Holly Blake has undertaken to create

a rounded picture of this unusual woman. Her major sources of informa-

tion were Howland’s novel and a few short stories, her correspondence

found in several archives, newspaper articles and newsletters that How-

land wrote, and, f‌inally, a handful of articles written about Howland.

Pulling all of those strands together, Blake has created a full social biog-

raphy of Howland.

Because of the arbitrary ways in which disciplinary boundaries are

drawn, social biography is not often regarded as a proper sociological

method. (C. Wright Mills ([1959] 1967: 162–163] recommended the use

of social biography, but he warned that it could not substitute for

examination of social structures.) It should be one tool among many in

the f‌ield of sociology. In this case, it involves portraying Howland in

relation to major surrounding events: working in a mill at beginning of

industrialization, working for a phrenologist when skull measurements

were starting to be used to classify race and gender, working in an

urban slum as poor immigrants settled in them, living with bohemians

as they developed a critique of bourgeois values, writing a reformist

novel when most other women wrote romances as diversions from an

isolated existence, becoming a Theosophist when Christianity was

being questioned, becoming a women’s rights activist just as the door

was closing on political activism, and starting a community based on

the principles of Charles Fourier three decades after that philosophy

had been declared dead. In short, a social biography gives us a picture

not only of an individual, but of competing ways of life in the second

half of the 19

th

century in the northeastern United States. The one giant

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