Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence: Utopia, Women, and Marriage

Lillian M. Purdy

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2018, vol. 77, issue 5, 1209-1242

Abstract: Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1836) is the first attempt by an American woman to create a literary utopia. With this work, Griffith begins a literary conversation on women and marriage, including women’s rights and gender equality, and she imagines new laws and reforms that strengthen marriages, married life, and family satisfaction. Griffith’s work situates marriage as an integral part of a successful environment and imagines solutions to national concerns regarding women that will be addressed later in the century. Griffith tackles slavery, alcoholism, and divorce laws, as well as issues that directly affected married women, particularly white married women. In the novel, women have earned equality without negatively affecting domesticity or female purity. Women’s daily lives are improved, educational opportunities are opened to women, children’s lives are valued in the new community, and order in the home and community serve as the basis for utopia. Griffith’s vision is bold even as it is limited because, while women are often the creative minds behind the utopian improvements that are described, in the plot itself, women are silent. Other weaknesses in the plot include the oversimplified solution to slavery and the ambiguous resolution of the fate of Native Americans within the utopia. Tragically, in her vision, Griffith has eliminated both groups from the community. Griffith mixes futuristic technological improvements with biting commentary on contemporary social issues and the treatment of women. Griffith uses the genre of utopian vision to present solutions to many challenges facing 19th‐century white women.

Date: 2018
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