Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

Ghodsee (Red Valkyries), a professor of Russian and Eastern European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a spirited and thought-provoking survey of “social dreaming” and the thinkers and movements that have tried to reenvision home life to promote greater harmony and happiness. Focusing particularly on utopian experiments that treated women as equals and shared property among community members, Ghodsee examines the long history of non-family groups living together, from ancient Buddhist and medieval Christian monastics to contemporary communes in Maine and Denmark; income and property sharing models proposed and practiced by John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and the Hutterite, Shaker, and Bruderhof Christian enclaves of North America; and the centralized childcare arrangements of Israeli kibbutzim. In the book’s most moving sections, Ghodsee buttresses her argument that the nuclear family has historically divided women from their own familial care networks and made them and their children more vulnerable to intimate violence with the story of how her high school English teacher took her in for a crucial period after her parents’ abusive marriage split up. Clear-eyed yet exuberant, wide-ranging yet intimate, this is an inspiring call for imagining a better future. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)