Red Love, For All

Let us begin by abolishing our kitchens. For the 19th-century silk merchant and socialist philosopher Charles Fourier, utopia was the kitchenless house. Men and women would live collectively, cooking instead in open common kitchens and free canteens, serving up marmalades and pastries and lemonades in abundance. The Fourierist communities that arose in the mid-19th century US built their homes just as he imagined. Their communal life would relieve women – in the words of the radical feminist and utopian architect Alice Constance Austin – of “the thankless and unending drudgery of an inconceivably stupid and inefficient system by which her labours are confiscated”. By Austin’s calculation, those labours amounted to the preparation of 1,095 meals a year for their husbands and children.