Alexandria Digital Research Library

Laboring for Global Perfection: The International Dimension of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Fourierism

Author:
Bowman, Megan Perle
Degree Grantor:
University of California, Santa Barbara. History
Degree Supervisor:
Patricia Cline Cohen
Place of Publication:
[Santa Barbara, Calif.]
Publisher:
University of California, Santa Barbara
Creation Date:
2013
Issued Date:
2013
Topics:
History, Modern and History, United States
Genres:
Online resources and Dissertations, Academic
Dissertation:
Ph.D.--University of California, Santa Barbara, 2013
Description:

This dissertation examines the United States-based communitarian socialists known as the Fourierists as a piece of the larger international Fourierist movement, highlighting the numerous points of contact between Fourierists and their counterparts on each side of the Atlantic. My goal is to understand Fourierism as a multinational movement that sparked an international conversation among its members, which made it one of the most cosmopolitan of the reform movements to emerge from the social tumult in the 1840s. Its Janus-faced focus on the U.S. reform landscape and fixed connection with European Fourierists made Fourierism arguably the most dynamic reform movement of the nineteenth century. It is a story of connectivity among individuals who believed they possessed a new moral framework for remaking the world.

The theories of the French social philosopher Charles Fourier also helped change the course of antebellum reform in the United States by introducing important themes and an entirely new vocabulary to the reform lexicon. The strength of the Fourierist press in the United States, especially the celebrated journal The Harbinger, highlights the movement's fingerprint on the course of American journalism. I will explore how and why this movement spread so far from the 1830s-1850s, and how these activists transcended national identity in order to realize the plan of perfecting the world's ills through the adoption of Fourier's experimental living arrangements.

As a movement based on experiment, exchange, and collaboration, Fourierism intermingled freely with other mid-century reform movements including abolition, women's rights, free love, as well as workingmen's and other socialist movements. Traveling Fourierist leaders, the growth of Fourierist journalism, and the community of early Fourierists in New York City fostered complex identities in those at the heart of the movement. Their involvement in multiple causes demonstrates the international roots of mid-nineteenth-century reform. While adherents in each nation adapted Fourier's message to their own specific national context, the fluidity of the larger philosophy transcended borders, helping create an international reform identity in an age usually best known for a parochial nationalism.

Using archival sources and published journals and periodicals from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this dissertation follows a chronological analysis of the movement's international layers. I examine the period from the movement's inception in the 1830s to its height in 1846, focusing on Fourierism's importation to the United States and its evolution from a cosmopolitan group of European and Francophone expatriates in New York City to a more Americanized version championed by Horace Greeley and Albert Brisbane with intentional appeal to workingmen. I also focus on the decline of Fourierism in the late 1840s, the pivotal year of the French Revolution of 1848, and the growth of the Free Love movement from Fourierism's ashes in the early 1850s.

This dissertation compels scholars to look closer at the Fourierist movement as a case study in successfully changing the vocabulary of social reformers, bringing attention to the problems inherent within industrial capitalism, offering an inclusive approach to labor reform which included women's rights, and an alternative to the bourgeois home. Fourierism was at the center of a dialogue on gender norms and sexuality that would ultimately include members of the organized women's rights movement and advocates of the controversial free love movement. The Fourierist movement's communal ethos promised to improve the lives of women by ameliorating the drudgery of housework and providing shared child-rearing opportunities. Additionally, Charles Fourier's highly controversial theories on sexual liberation and marriage reform led some Fourierists to challenge reigning sexual mores. Studying the works of the Fourierists reveal new insights into the attitudes about gender and sexuality within the larger world of mid-nineteenth-century reform in the United States and Europe. Fourierism inspired a debate about gender, marriage, and religion that changed the language and tactics of mid-nineteenth-century reform.

Physical Description:
1 online resource (325 pages)
Format:
Text
Collection(s):
UCSB electronic theses and dissertations
ARK:
ark:/48907/f3wm1bh9
ISBN:
9781303537738
Catalog System Number:
990040924140203776
Rights:
Inc.icon only.dark In Copyright
Copyright Holder:
Megan Bowman
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