Sunday, 26 July 1896 was a day of inclement weather in London. In the early afternoon the skies opened on the big peace demonstration that preceded the week-long International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress. The Congress itself was dominated by well-known male names in labour politics, and turned out to be a chaotic event given over more to arguments about who among the 768 delegates from 20 countries was really entitled to attend and to vote than to the matter at hand, namely the abolition of the capitalist state. Seven of the delegates were from the US; they included the social economist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose work on economics, domestic labour and the design of feminist utopias is the focus of this chapter. Gilman’s work touches on many of the themes which run through this book. Other delegates were a city planner called Mary Kingsbury (later Simkhovitch) and a distinguished economist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Emily Balch. A fourth American woman, the writer and suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch, was married to an English businessman and living in Surrey at the time. Gilman (then known as Stetson) was there as a delegate of the Alameda County Federation of Trades, having read the membership card for the Congress and discovered that she couldn’t pretend to be an international socialist since she disagreed with the theory and method advanced by the followers of Marx. At the peace demonstration she found herself sharing a speakers’ wagon with August Bebel and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw, as a Fabian, was much more to Gilman’s political liking, although she observed his curious dress: he and other male Fabians sported knee-breeches, soft shirts, woollen hose and home-made sandals. She was herself a keen analyst of clothing as a social issue, later producing a text on dress reform in which she reasonably contended that the liberation of women required their release from the uncomfortable bonds of feminine fashion.

During her stay in England, Gilman met various other English Fabians, including Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Beatrice had enjoyed Gilman’s poetry – a volume called In this our world had been published three years earlier.