Looking back on the history of intentional communities in the United
States in 1870, Oneida Perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes argued that for
Fourierists, as for Owenites, the "main idea" had been "the enlargement
of home--the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle
to large corporations." For Noyes, Fourierism merited study as a precursor
to his own community. For late-twentieth-century students of gender and
labor, Noyes's observation provides an opening into questions about the
ways utopian communities manipulated the boundaries of "public" and "private"
that were so much a staple of nineteenth-century gender ideology. This
paper examines such manipulations in Fourierist communities (or phalanxes)
of the 1840s, with particular attention to the consequences of plans to
pay women for housework.
Such plans raise questions about the relationship between family and economy, a relationship obscured in the dominant culture through the ideological separation between the "private sphere" and the "public sphere." On the one hand, one might follow Noyes and view the phalanxes as privatized, familial spaces in which Fourierists sought to dissolve artificial divisions between home and work. On the other hand, one might notice the Fourierist preoccupation with compensation and individualism. Fourierists argued that everyone should be paid for their labor and that everyone--women, men, and children--should be treated as individuals by the communities, without families as intermediaries. Such principles suggest that one might view Fourierist phalanxes as economies, or "public" spaces in the parlance of separate spheres ideology. These Fourierist economies made visible household labor that was hidden in the official economy of the dominant culture by the ideological separation between home and work.
Ideally, the economic individualism extended to women within Fourierist communities would give them autonomy unavailable to them in the world outside the phalanxes. In practice, the phalanxes encountered a variety of obstacles when they tried to extend this autonomy to women. Some of the most insurmountable were women's own tendency to privatize some of their labor within their families and men's tendency to protest the costs to them of paying women for housework. Such difficulties suggest that the phalanxes were neither the entirely privatized spaces described by Noyes nor the entirely public ones envisioned by Fourierists. Rather, the Fourierists' manipulations of the boundaries between private and public point to a plasticity that has significant implications for historical study of the public sphere.