"Wives of High Pasture": Worth Tuttle Hedden and Her Novel of the Oneida Community (Critical Essay) (Biography‪)‬

I During the last few years, novelist and essayist Worth Tuttle Hedden (1896-1985) has joined the list of rediscovered writers of interest. As a young woman in the early 1920s she wrote a series of articles and short stories on feminist and civil tights issues. After a hiatus of nearly 20 years devoted to marriage and motherhood, she wrote three highly praised, but--until recently--forgotten, novels. The first of these, Wives of High Pasture, takes as its subject a utopian community based largely on the nineteenth-century Oneida community established by John Humphrey Noyes. This article is intended to serve as an introduction to Hedden and her first novel for utopian scholars, particularly those with interests in intentional-community or feminist history and/or narrative theory.