"The last twelve years of the nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented outpouring of utopian literature, spurred in part by the incredible success of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Bellamy's novel described an America that had abolished poverty, labor unrest, and sexual inequality by means of socialized and centralized economic production. Although not all the utopian writers agreed with Bellamy's visions-indeed there existed considerable diversity among the proposed social and economic solutions-there was a definite trend in most toward the creation of a society that possessed a centralized economy, was directed by experts, and yet was in some (often very vague) manner subject to the wishes of the citizenry."
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Margaret S Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (1981)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Looking_Backward%3A_2000%E2%80%931887
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Looking Backward: 2000–1887
Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian science fiction novel (1888) written by Edward Bellamy, a U.S. journalist and writer. It was the third largest bestseller of its time. Over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas, in the U.S. alone, stimulating an almost instant political mass movement.
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