A Future to Her Taste
A Future to Her Taste The Gender Politics of Diet in Late Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction By Lucy Coleman Abstract In this dissertation, I argue that the speculative fiction of the 1880s encodes cultural anxieties about the shifting status of women through representations of diet. Drawing on Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), I examine how vegetarianism is linked to feminine passivity in early feminist utopias such as Mary Lane’s Mizora (1889) and Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia (1889), where meatless diets support peaceful yet emotionally restrained societies. These texts present carnivorism as a masculine practice, reaffirming a historical myth which also influences the dystopian responses to women’s rights literature. The anxieties expressed in these dystopias are grounded in the ideals articulated by early feminists like Lane and Corbett. In William Butler’s Pantaletta (1882), the success of the s...