“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 socialists” that Marx and Friedrich Engels discussed in the Communist Manifesto. According to the Manifesto, figures like Owen produced “fantastic pictures of future society” that lacked a grounding in real class struggle.

As Barbara Taylor showed in her classic history Eve and the New Jerusalem, Marx and Engels’s assessment was unfair to the Owenites, whose thinking on vital questions like the emancipation of women placed them surprisingly close to the more compelling among today’s feminist views, compared with the Owenites’ progressive contemporaries and even later socialist movements. More generally, the argument for the superiority of “scientific” over “utopian” socialism, to use the terminology of Engels, depends on questionable premises and ultimately obscures the value of utopian thought for the project of social transformation.