Hilda's Home.
Scarce Feminist Utopia
Graul, Rosa. Hilda’s Home. A story of woman’s emancipation. Chicago: M. Harman and Co., 1899.
8vo.; brown cloth, stamped in gilt.
First edition of this 19th-century feminist utopia, original published serially in the anarchist free-thought journal Lucifer the Light-Bearer. Not in Wright, Negley, Lewis, or Sargent.
The publisher offers, in a four-page preface, the motivation of this book:
…the central aim of “Hilda’s Home” is the emancipation of womanhood and motherhood from the domination of man in the sex relation. “Self-ownership of woman” may be called the all-pervading thought of the book now offered to the impartial and truth-loving reader….
A colleague notes, this was written
By a working-class woman from Pittsburgh who “refused to use a pseudonym and based the book and its characters on her lived experiences and on people she knew.” …[It] follows the career of a similarly working-class heroine as she falls under the welcome influence of socialists, free lovers, freethinkers and anarchists; she eventually establishes a commune for like-minded converts in the countryside near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As Joanne Passet has pointed out in her critical essay on this work, Hilda’s Home enjoyed a comparatively wide audience through its serialization in Lucifer, which unlike most radical periodicals boasted a large rural readership. Thus one imagines this novel, all but lost to modern readers, may have had disproportionate influence in spreading feminist and emancipator views into the American heartland. (Lorne Bair)
Genuinely scarce, and surprisingly sound: This it the third copy we can trace in commerce in fifteen years (only four copies are institutionally held), and M. Harman and Company issued their titles in small runs, hastily produced for consumption, not longevity.
(#4654248)
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