'The challenge', wrote Marilyn Lake — describing Women's Liberation as ‘The Great Awakening’ — ‘was to invent new frames of reference, new forms of knowledge, new modes of living’. Late twentieth-century feminists could, and did, readily produce critiques of the current positioning of women, of ways of thinking about women, of relations between women and men. But at least some of the most compelling emotional potency of such critiques emerged when they were positioned in contrast with a vision of an entirely different cultural, political and social order, an imagined ideal, a utopia.

Activist feminists from a century earlier in Australia understood this well. Henrietta Dugdale, for instance, elected president of the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society in 1885, was also the author of a short novel titled A Few Hours in a Far- Off Age. It depicts a society called Alethia, several centuries in the future, that vantage point providing a position for perception and analysis of the evils of the late nineteenth-century present. Most of the action takes place in a city of clusters of huge buildings that are ‘truly works of art’. Dugdale held that the key to women's emancipation was education, so, not surprisingly, these buildings are Instruction Galleries, each alcove equipped with a display cabinet and books demonstrating some aspect of past life among humans. There, young people of both sexes from the age of seven to early adulthood are taught by their parents for two mornings a week. The substance of that education, which occupies most of the novel, involves a thoroughgoing critique of ‘what was once called the “Christian Era,” subsequently designated by historians as “The Age of Blood and Malevolence”’, lasting — presciently if over-optimistically — until the twenty-first century.

The principal target in the present that Alethia's future perspective identifies was, Mrs Dugdale declared, ‘what has been, during all the ages, the greatest obstacle to human advancement; the most irrational, fiercest and most powerful of our world's monsters — the only devil — MALE IGNORANCE'. The work illustrates this dictum, encapsulating Dugdale's conviction that women were more morally and emotionally intelligent than men, as well as more technologically competent, in its account of a kind of technological innovation that would come to be considered characteristic of twentieth-century science fiction.