Conservative apologists for the status quo often stigmatize their opponents as “utopian.” But socialists and feminists shouldn’t be afraid of the term, since utopian thought can play an important role in helping us develop practical alternatives.

“Under no system of social arrangements founded on individual competition for individual wealth can women enjoy equal happiness with men.” Thus Irish socialists William Thompson and Anna Wheeler linked gender-based and economic oppression in their book-length feminist retort to James Mill, published in 1825. Such arguments would become fundamental, even obvious, to latter-day Marxists.

Yet Karl Marx himself criticized the movement from which Thompson and Wheeler emerged. They were followers of Robert Owen, one of the nineteenth-century “utopian

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