Sarah Scott, Florence Dixie, Fay Weldon, İdeology, Gender

Sarah Scott's A Description of Millenium Hall (1762), Florence Dixie's Gloriana; Or, The Revolution of 1900 (1890), and Fay Weldon's Darcy's Utopia (1990) criticize patriarchal policies that legitimize the power and privileges of ruling patriarchs. Having been influenced respectively by the mid-eighteenth-, late-nineteenth-, and late-twentieth-century feminist movements, Scott, Dixie, and Weldon challenge the oppressive patriarchal ideology and discourse in their feminist utopias through their female protagonists. Treating gender discrimination as a socio-political problem, the heroines contend that women's perceived mental and physical inferiority is enforced through such social institutions as religion, education, and marriage. They also draw a similarity between the domination of women and the subordinated social, racial, and religious classes. The dissertation refers mainly to Foucauldian and feminist arguments to discuss the issue of the subjugation and exploitation of women in Scott, Dixie and Weldon, and it aims to explain that although gender issue is treated from different socio-historical perspectives, the protagonists maintain that the oppression of women is ideological, and it is not related to women's alleged biological, mental, or moral inferiority. It is also revealed that they claim that the subordination of women is enacted by patriarchal state, which advocates the concentration of power in the hands of the upper-class, Christian, white men. The dissertation concludes that Scott's, Dixie's, and Weldon's heroines argue that the conventional social, economic, political, religious and moral discourses should be reformed to emancipate women from men's domination.