“For the rest, so far is marriage from being an interference with a woman’s career,” Dr. In the utopian society, the highest respected women are wives and not mothers, not single women who excel at their jobs. In the year 2000, an assumed inequality between the sexes still exists. Leete reflects a nineteenth-century belief in the fragility of womanhood, where women could not perform the same laborious tasks as men. Leete states, “Women being inferior in strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in special ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for them, and the conditions under which they pursue them, have reference to these facts” (151). Leete, who represents the voice of Bellamy, explains to Julian everyone is assigned a task based on what occupation best applies to them. While Bellamy credits his utopian society with creating economic equality between men and women, his nineteenth-century ideas of gender taint his view of the role of women in the “advanced” nation.ĭr. One group of people largely missing from the novel, except for a brief description towards the end, is women. Bellamy realized the radicalism of his ideas and attempted to soften his tone by appealing to some aspects of nineteenth-century elite society. In Looking Backward: 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy proposes some radical changes to society to promote equity among the citizens of the United States.
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