Howland, Marie

HOWLAND, MARIE (1826-1921). A successful writer of many stories and several novels, Howland was a chief promoter of collectivism, mainly the ideas of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1782-1837). Fourier had advocated the reorganization of society as associations of producer cooperatives. Howland endorsed Fourier’s vision of class harmony, particularly as a complement to gender equality.

Growing up as Hannah Stevens, Howland traced her origins to a poor farm family in Lebanon, New Hampshire. She aspired from an early age to become a teacher, but her father’s death in 1848 delayed her plan. Her mother and siblings desperately needed even the paltry income she could earn in the nearby textile mills that were still hiring young women and girls from the New England countryside. Her first job was at the Amoskeag mill situated along the banks of the Merrimack River in Manchester, New Hampshire. Two years later, she found a better position as a weaver at the huge mill complex in Lowell, Massachusetts. There, among the intellectually and politically active community of women operatives, she acquainted herself with topics of contemporary reform. At the time, the worker-run Lowell Fourier Society, founded in 1846, routinely discussed the shortcomings of the “omnipresent power of Corporate Monopoly.”

Howland further enriched her knowledge of Fourier in the mid-1850s after moving to New York City and meeting his chief American popularizer, Albert Brisbane (1809-1890). She took a teaching position at the Five Points Mission, a Methodist charity, and worked toward reaching her long-term goal by enrolling in a teacher’s college, taking evening classes that ultimately resulted in a degree. Equally instrumental in her development was her new living arrangement. She secured housing on Bleeker Street, where she consorted with freethinkers, free-lovers, and theatrical folk, all notorious for eschewing contemporary sexual norms and especially for disdaining domesticity as the singular path for women’s achievement. They met together in “The Club,” a popular salon that provided Howland an introduction to her first husband, Lyman Case, a follower of Brisbane and a marriage reformer himself. At age twenty-one, she married Case, a Harvard graduate, and they joined the Unitary Household, a cooperative living arrangement that The New York Times at the time described as “practical socialism.” Case, also a believer in free love, encouraged Marie to pursue an amorous relationship with his Harvard classmate, Edward Howland (1832-1890), later remembered as “an elegant scholar.”

In 1863, Marie and Edward Howland traveled to France and lived for a time in the familistere established by Jean-Baptiste Andre Godin (1817-1888) in Guise. Godin’s “social palace,” a grand Fourierist experiment in communal living and a workers’ cooperative, pleased Howland. She appreciated its accessibility to ordinary factory workers and its emphasis on the home as the center of collective labor, a unit where all shared in the wealth they produced. In her assessment, the familistere offered an amenable solution to the pressing problem of Capital vs. Labor and at the same time advanced women to positions of financial independence.

With her husband, Howland moved back to New York City and then to New Jersey to take part in the political movements coming into shape in the early 1870s. She established a small private school and resumed teaching, her major avocation. Meanwhile, she became active in the nascent women’s club movement and joined the National Woman Suffrage Association led at the time by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Howland also advocated for woman’s rights at local chapters of the Grange and the Marxist International Workingmen’s Association, which divided sharply over this question. Discouraged by this turn, she nevertheless retained her faith that the socialist reconstruction of society must include a transformation of labor in the domestic sphere, a collective solution to housekeeping and childcare, and a recognition of the value that women ordinarily contributed to this enterprise.

In 1874, Howland brought these ideas together in her major work of fiction, The Familistere, first published as Papa’s Own Girl. The protagonist, Clara Forest, grows up with a freethinking father who encourages her to think boldly and strive for economic independence. Clara eventually marries a highly educated and very wealthy gentleman similarly infatuated by visions of utopia, and together they plan a Social Palace or familistere dedicated to cooperative living, social justice, and woman’s rights. Thus, their New England mill village evolved into a model of Fourierism, wisely assisted in its transformation by “papa’s own girl.” The novel allegedly inspired the formation of several communities and was reprinted in 1885 and 1918.

Marie and Edward Howland lived for a time in the socialistic colony at Topolobampo, Mexico, where they edited the community newspaper, the Credit Foncier. In her later years, now a widow, she retired to the single-tax colony of Fair Hope, Alabama, where she served as a librarian. Marie Howland died there at age eighty-five.

Blake, Holly Jacklyn. “Marie Howland –19th Century Leader for Women’s Economic Independence.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 74 (November, 2015), pp., 878-1190.

Gaston, Paul M. The Women of Fair Hope. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

Hayden, Dolores. "Two Utopian Feminists and Their Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses." Signs. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 274–290.