“Gold Would Cure That”: Economic Feminism in Olive Harper’s A Fair Californian

Abstract

In 1889, Minerva Press published a lost-race fantasy entitled A Fair Californian, by the controversial journalist, author, lecturer, and poet Olive Harper (Ellen Burrell D’Apery, 1842–1915). The novel incorporated its author’s beliefs about “economic feminism”, which advocated expanding economic opportunities for women, rather than on achieving women’s suffrage. There are obvious similarities between the novel and contemporary feminist utopian fiction, but Harper’s emphasis on economic opportunity for women (in particular, the novel’s protagonist, Dolores) clearly distinguishes A Fair Californian from the far more politics-focused work of more widely known feminist utopian writers.

Keywords

• lost-race
• utopian literature
• feminist literature