I have just returned from the Women’s March on Washington D.C., an apt moment at which to introduce the essay I wrote on feminist utopias. To a degree I didn’t dare imagine, the March represented at least a utopian moment: a moment when women embraced all the marginalised, trivialised, overlooked, undervalued of the earth. Cynics would ask: what was the programme, what was the strategy, who are the leaders? There was no programme except: turn up. Be counted. Don’t be afraid. And don’t be silent. For many women, that in itself represents utopia: seeing and hearing one another and making an impact. Yes we did.

If you ask most women what their concept of utopia might be, they’ll mostly scoff and look at you as though you’re crazy: we raise the world’s children, wash the world’s clothing, take the world’s parents to the doctor. What makes you think we have time for daydreams? Since the poor of the world are disproportionately female, dreaming of intellectual utopias is a luxury few can afford.

So the literature of utopian thinking by women is sparse and the best of it does not present as idealism. Rather it charts the discovery of joy and vision that women attain through work, through real life – not away from it. The three women who’ve most captured my imagination were tough, rigorous thinkers who found their ideals in life, not away from it. Their utopian dreams aren’t toy cities with make believe rules but conceptual spaces in which they could find freedom. The freedom to be taken seriously. The freedom to think for themselves. The freedom to value what they loved, not what they could own. In their friendships, in their writing and in their work they crafted places and spaces where they could achieve the female utopian ideal: being themselves.