author
Marie Stevens Howland
1836–1921
A bold 19th-century feminist and utopian thinker, she wrote fiction and essays that imagined women with real economic independence. Her life moved from factory work to radical reform circles, and she later helped build community life in Fairhope, Alabama.
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 worked in the Lowell mills after her father died, an experience that shaped her lifelong interest in labor, women’s work, and social reform. She later became a teacher and principal, then entered reform circles influenced by Charles Fourier and other utopian social thinkers.
She is best known for Papa's Own Girl (1874), a utopian novel that used fiction to argue for cooperative living and greater freedom for women. Sources on her life also connect her with experiments in communal and single-tax living, including the Topolobampo colony in Mexico, and later with Fairhope, Alabama, where she became an important local figure.
In Fairhope, she helped found what became the Fairhope Public Library, which reportedly began in her home. She died on September 18, 1921, and is remembered as a writer and activist who linked feminist ideas with practical plans for reshaping everyday life.