![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Annie Denton Cridge, Man’s Rights: Or, How Would You Like It? Comprising Dreams (1870)
The first five ‘dreams’ of this work were published in book form in 1870 and the additional four dreams were printed in *Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly* later that year.
The dreams are the visions of a married woman who sees an alternate society, one in which men stay at home and care for children and do the housework. Men are preoccupied with their dress, adding frills and furbelows to their outfits and torturing themselves with corsets. Their main aim in life is to marry well, to a woman who can support them.
Women work outside the home, act as legislators and judges, reserve for themselves the universities and colleges. They dress in sensible, plain robes and assume the privilege of power.
This alternate reality is eventually revealed to be…. Life on Mars!
The narrator sees a burgeoning men’s rights movement which seeks the vote for men. She notes how men are mocked as unmanly for trying to speak up in public for this right. The narrator can float through time as well as space so she observes the progress of the movement over time.
Most of this is a straight world upside down story with the sexes swapped. The section I found most interesting is the first dream which deals with the difficulties and dreariness the men face in cooking and cleaning individually in their homes and addresses the way it steals their time away from serious reading of women’s literature (real literature). The proposed solution is to industrialise the process and create automatic kitchens which will serve food in communal dining halls. She imagines a kind of bain marie on wheels of vulcanised rubber which will swiftly and silently serve the food.
The argument is made that previous generations of men had made their own cloth at home but that now this process is outsourced to mills where cloth can be made more swiftly and to a better quality. Similarly, Denton Cridge argues that cleaning clothes could be outsourced to large laundrettes where machines could be used and cooking to large, automated kitchens. She is basically seeking an industrial revolution for cooking which I can totally understand for an age where washing clothes took at least two full days per week (wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday) and cooking involved, at best, unreliable wooden stoves which required constant blackleading.
This strand of utopian thinking – making food preparation communal – has, I think, been suggested many times(1) but the only example I know of where it has been tried are kibbutzes. Or, I guess, contemporary big cities where inner suburb housing is built without kitchens on the assumption that the owners will buy all their meals at restaurants.
I would definitely appreciate comments on the communal food preparation in utopia aspect of the book.
1 William Morris and Catherine Gilmore Perkins were contemporary sf&f writers who suggested it.
The first five ‘dreams’ of this work were published in book form in 1870 and the additional four dreams were printed in *Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly* later that year.
The dreams are the visions of a married woman who sees an alternate society, one in which men stay at home and care for children and do the housework. Men are preoccupied with their dress, adding frills and furbelows to their outfits and torturing themselves with corsets. Their main aim in life is to marry well, to a woman who can support them.
Women work outside the home, act as legislators and judges, reserve for themselves the universities and colleges. They dress in sensible, plain robes and assume the privilege of power.
This alternate reality is eventually revealed to be…. Life on Mars!
The narrator sees a burgeoning men’s rights movement which seeks the vote for men. She notes how men are mocked as unmanly for trying to speak up in public for this right. The narrator can float through time as well as space so she observes the progress of the movement over time.
Most of this is a straight world upside down story with the sexes swapped. The section I found most interesting is the first dream which deals with the difficulties and dreariness the men face in cooking and cleaning individually in their homes and addresses the way it steals their time away from serious reading of women’s literature (real literature). The proposed solution is to industrialise the process and create automatic kitchens which will serve food in communal dining halls. She imagines a kind of bain marie on wheels of vulcanised rubber which will swiftly and silently serve the food.
The argument is made that previous generations of men had made their own cloth at home but that now this process is outsourced to mills where cloth can be made more swiftly and to a better quality. Similarly, Denton Cridge argues that cleaning clothes could be outsourced to large laundrettes where machines could be used and cooking to large, automated kitchens. She is basically seeking an industrial revolution for cooking which I can totally understand for an age where washing clothes took at least two full days per week (wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday) and cooking involved, at best, unreliable wooden stoves which required constant blackleading.
This strand of utopian thinking – making food preparation communal – has, I think, been suggested many times(1) but the only example I know of where it has been tried are kibbutzes. Or, I guess, contemporary big cities where inner suburb housing is built without kitchens on the assumption that the owners will buy all their meals at restaurants.
I would definitely appreciate comments on the communal food preparation in utopia aspect of the book.
1 William Morris and Catherine Gilmore Perkins were contemporary sf&f writers who suggested it.
