Class and Gender
Owen, however, remained a marginal figure, partly because he believed that women should work outside the home, and that domestic work should be socialized. Most Chartists and unionists were tradesmen who hoped to increase male wages.
Many felt that women's proper place was in the home, where they could tend to family members rather than flooding the labor market and undercutting their own wages.22 Marx and Engels urged their followers away from feminist socialism toward what they called scientific socialism. A hundred years later, trade union activists would continue to warn their members against the witcheries of utopian wish lists.23Owen denounced the traditional patriarchal family ever more stridently after 1840. But his approach to gender inequality was, at best, incomplete. He believed that women should be educated to become ‘‘superior companions” rather than ‘‘family slaves’’.24 He set up a patriarchal rather than democratic system of authority within his organizations, making it difficult for anyone to challenge him.25 He seemed almost unconcerned about legal restrictions on women’s property rights or their access to the vote. What bothered him most were the greedy allegiances of family life:
The children within these dens of selfishness and hypocrisy are taught to consider their own individual family their own world, and that it is the duty and interest of all within this little orb to do whatever they can to promote the advantages of all the legitimate members of it. With these persons it is my house, my estate, my children, or my husband... No arrangement could be better calculated to produce division and disunion in society.
Owen’s critics were quick to warn of the risks that free love posed for mothers and children.27 But Owen was convinced that male misbehavior, such as indulgence in prostitution, resulted only from the galling constraints of indissoluble marriage.28 He never considered the possibility that other contractual obligations might be necessary for the support of dependents. He took both child care and child support as a given. Even in New Harmony, women's responsibilities for children extended above and beyond the ‘‘real work” they contributed to the collective.29
Like many of his left-leaning precursors Owen worried less about lust than greed. In his Lectures on the Marriages of the Priesthood of the Old Immoral World, published in 1841, he called celibacy a ‘‘great crime, necessarily leading to disease of body and mind.’’30 ‘‘True chastity” he defined as ‘‘the intercourse of the sexes where there is a pure and genuine sympathy or sincere affection between the parties.’’ The book was written after his wife had died; one wonders if a lover sweetened his old age.31 Perhaps he was swayed in other ways by the younger generation.