author
Marie Stevens Howland
1836–1921
A working-class feminist and utopian novelist, she wrote about cooperative living, women’s independence, and fairer social arrangements long before those ideas were common. Her life moved from mill work to reform circles, and her fiction reflects both hard experience and bold imagination.
1 Audiobook
Papa's own girl: A novel
by Marie Stevens Howland
About the author
Born in New Hampshire in 1836, Marie Stevens Case Howland left school young after her father died and worked in the Lowell, Massachusetts, cotton mills. That early experience of labor and economic hardship shaped the social questions that ran through her writing and reform work.
She became associated with nineteenth-century utopian and feminist movements, and is best known for the 1874 novel Papa's Own Girl. The book imagines a cooperative community and explores women’s economic independence, marriage, labor, and domestic life. Later in life, she was also linked with reform communities in Topolobampo, Mexico, and Fairhope, Alabama.
Howland died on September 18, 1921. She is remembered as an American feminist writer whose work connected everyday working women’s lives with larger hopes for social change.