American utopianism peaked in the antebellum era, allied with abolitionism
Evidence
The real heyday of American utopianism was not in the sixties but rather in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, which saw the blossoming of hundreds of communities, the names of some of them at the heart of our cultural history (Brook Farm, the Shakers, the Icarians, Oneida, Amana, to mention a few of the best known). Socialist and, in the case of the Owenite communities, feminist egalitarianism were crucial to these utopian communities. … It is clear that nineteenth-century utopianism and abolitionism shared the universalist, Enlightenment ideals of human equality and freedom so central to the modernity that is so deeply problematized in the sixties and in postmodernity. I would argue that Radical Reconstruction, including most notably the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865–72), hoped and even attempted to realize the goals of utopianism and abolition, and that the destruction of Reconstruction marked the defeat, at least for that historical moment, of the social goals and visions of both. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 889
Categorization
- XREF: Ties to the later claims about the Freedmen’s Bureau evoking the failed utopian goals of Civil Rights, Black Power, and early second-wave feminism. — connects to: Women’s liberation consciousness made the utopia-maternal link explicit in fiction — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 905; Quaker egalitarian theology was poised to grow into abolitionism.