Marie Stevens Howland was an American feminist writer and activist closely associated with nineteenth-century utopian socialist movements. Born in 1836, she was forced to leave school at age twelve to work in a Massachusetts cotton mill following her father's death. She later relocated to New York City, graduated from the New York Normal College, and became a teacher. Her early personal life was defined by her involvement in radical circles, including residence at Stephen Pearl Andrews's co-operative Unity House. Following a divorce from her first husband, Lyman Case, she married writer and editor Edward Howland, with whom she shared a commitment to free-love philosophy and social reform.
Howland's life and literary career were deeply intertwined with her experiences living in various utopian communities. In 1864, she and her husband lived at the Fourierist "Familistère" in Guise, France, established by Jean-Baptiste Godin. This experience inspired her best-known novel, Papa's Own Girl (1874), which was later republished as The Familistère. The book, which depicts an independent businesswoman living in a cooperative New England community, was both controversial and highly popular. Howland also translated Godin's Solutions sociales into English as Social Solutions in 1886. Her work is considered a potential influence on Edward Bellamy's famous utopian novel Looking Backward.
After returning to the United States, the Howlands settled in the planned community of Hammonton, New Jersey. In the late 1880s and 1890s, Howland became involved with Albert Kimsey Owen's Topolobampo colony in Mexico, where she edited the community's periodical until the experiment's end in 1894. She spent her final years in the planned community of Fairhope, Alabama, serving as the town's librarian and writing for its newspaper until her death in 1921.
