69

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, prominent at the turn of the century as a social critic and

lecturer, thought women could be a moving force in the re-organization of society. Although

primarily a non-fiction writer, her novels and short stories have earned her the name of

literary foremother of such feminist writers as Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia

Plath, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. Carrie Chapman Catt, who presided over the

National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900-1904 and 1916 -1920, ranked

Charlotte first on her list of the twelve greatest American women,

because there was a period in the women’s movement when she brought out first

one book and then another... which were scientifically done and widely read by

all classes of people. And I credit those books with utterly revolutionizing the

attitude of mind in the entire country, indeed of other countries, as to woman’s

place (Ceplair 2).

She was best known as the author of Women and Economics (1898) - a Bible for many

a suffragist and for feminists. An examination of woman’s place within the economic

sphere, the book earned her wide recognition and for several decades she was considered the

leading intellectual of the women’s movement (Degler xv). It was the iconoclastic nature of

her ideas which made her stand out among other writers of her time. Zona Gale says in her

Foreword to The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 1 In the long, slow development of

our social consciousness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has flamed like a torch (Gilman,

Foreword xiii). Gilman preferred to be called a humanist (Ceplair 8); in spite of this fact
 70

Elaine R. Hedges describes her as an ‘active feminist’ in her Afterword to The Yellow

Wallpaper (Hedges Yellow Wallpaper 38). Explaining Gilman’s ideals Peyser writes -

Although Gilman called herself a humanist and disavowed the title of feminist,

suggesting a refusal to grant priority to the nature of one sex over another, her

work shows that she took that still centre to be woman herself - not woman as

historically constituted, not an oppositional figure moulded by the accumulated

force of millenia of oppression, but woman as a direct manifestation of natural

law. Gilman’s ideals are not so much an opposition to a patriarchal order as they

are its discontented mirror (Peyser 2).

Between her death in 1935 and the mid-1950’s, Gilman^ name and reputation virtually

disappeared. Although she continued to receive a brief mention and portions of her work

appeared in anthologies, it required the growth of the women’s movement and feminist

scholarship, the sale of her papers to the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the

History of Women in America (in 1971) and reprints of her major work, to open the path to

more sensitive treatment of her (Ceplair 4)

Quite early in her life Gilman displayed the independence she later advocated for women

in her lectures and writing. She insisted on. remuneration for her household chores. As a

young woman she paid her mother for her room and board, supporting herself as a teacher

and commercial artist. Like her great-aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman was a reformer.

At an early age she recognized the plight of her mother and many New England housewives.

Soon after Charlotte was bom, her father Frederic Perkins deserted his wife. During

adolescence Charlotte worked to support herself - by painting commercial cards and acting

as a governess. By age twenty-one she was writing poetry that described the limitations of
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being female in late nineteenth century New England. Her reputation as a forceful writer and

lecturer was established when she published a series of satiric poems in the Nationalist. She

also began lecturing on woman’s economic status. At twenty-four she married a young artist,

Charles Walter Stetson (1884). Following the birth of her daughter, she became increasingly

despondent. A well-known Philadelphia neurologist, S.Weir Mitchell, prescribed the ‘rest

cure’ following her postpartum depression, - complete bed rest and limited intellectual

activity. This experience very nearly drove her to mental min and occasioned the writing of

her most famous novella, The Yellow Wallpaper. Written in 1890, but not published as a

separate work until 1899, this is a partly autobiographical story of a woman artist’s nervous

breakdown. Charlotte eventually left her husband. Travelling with her daughter to California,

she supported herself by lecturing and writing. While in California she helped to edit feminist

publications, assisted in the planning of the California Women’s Congresses of 1894 and

1895, and founded the Women’s Peace Party. She lectured in the U.S and in England on the

socio-economic status of women. In 1900 she remarried, this time her cousin Houghton

Gilman. In 1909 Gilman began a seven-year editorship of her own monthly periodical, the

Forerunner. The periodical contained articles on social and economic issues, mostly about

women. Two of her novels. What Diantha Did ( 1910) and The Crux (1911) appeared in the

Forerunner. Her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), gives us

insight into her life, work and death. Suffering from inoperable cancer, she committed

suicide by chloroform.

Her autobiography was written within the context of her conflict with social norms. Her

divorce and renunciation of motherhood labelled her as an unnatural woman. In late

Victorian America, by denying the social definition of herself as wife and mother, first with a
 72

scandalous divorce, then by abandoning her child to her father, she was considered almost an

outcast. Her second marriage to George Houghton Gilman, her first cousin, was happier.

Her writing helped in utterly revolutionizing the attitude in her country as to woman’s

place in society. Edith Houghton Hooker, chairperson of the National Woman’s Party, felt

that Gilman created more feminists in her generation than any other writer (Ceplair 2). She

was one of the most widely read women of her day. Gilman herself disliked being called a

feminist. She preferred to be thought of as a humanist. She felt the path to emancipation of

women was through economic independence. The working girl, the working wife and

mother became the ideal which she preached. Why can’t a woman be a mother and have a

career too? Such a question was of crucial importance in the latter half of the nineteenth

century. To Gilman, women struggling against the restrictions and prejudices in society were

the heroines of her sex.

II

Non-Fiction

In 1893, a small volume of poetry appeared entitled In This Our World. The poems

outlined her economic and social views and were considered to be a classic statement on the

women’s movement. Her contention that women did not realize their potential is expressed

beautifully in these lines-

Slow, advancing, halting, creeping

Comes the woman to the hour!

She walketh veiled and sleeping,

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For she knoweth not her power.

An admirer of Walt Whitman, she carried a copy of Leaves of Grass whenever she

travelled. She rewrote one of his poems from a feminist perspective. It is called ‘Wedded

Bliss’.

‘O come and be my mate! ’ said

the Eagle to the Hen,

‘I love to soar, but then

I want my mate to rest

Forever in the nest! ’

Said the Hen, ‘I cannot fly,

I have no wish to try.

But I joy to see my mate

careering through the sky! ’

They wed, and cried, ‘Ah, this

is love my own! ’

And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone! ( Gilman In This Our World 157)

Women and EconomicsflS98). originally titled Economic Relation of the Sexes as a Factor

in Social Development, was a witty, bitingly satirical analysis of the situation of women in

society. Like Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Gilman believed that sexual

oppression originated in prehistoric times when men used their superior strength to subjugate

women and use them as domestic labour( Gilman, W & E 51). The book was based on her

studies of Darwinism and the sociology of Lester Ward. She argued that women’s secondary

status in society, and especially women’s economic dependence on men is not a fact of
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nature, but the result of culturally enforced behaviour. In questioning whether there were

fundamental differences in potential between the sexes, Gilman was not expressing new

ideas, it was the way she expressed her ideas which was new. Carl N. Degler, in his

introduction to Women and Economics, writes:

The question that engaged the interest of Charlotte Perkins was how to achieve full

equality for women in an industrial society. A half century before Simone de

Beauvoir wrote that woman has been ‘a being apart, unknown, having no weapon

other than her sex’, Charlotte Gilman explored the idea in Women and Economics.

Sixty years before Betty Friedan argued for outside interests for married women and

Morton Hunt reminded us of the diverse potentialities of woman, Women and

Economics canvassed the same issues (Degler viii).

In analyzing the position of women in society she wrote ‘ We are the only animal species in

which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex

relation is also an economic relation.’(Gilman, FT <£ E 5). She compared the labour performed

by women within a household to the labour of horses or of peasant women ‘ Their labor is

the property of another, they work under another will; and what they receive depends not on

their labor, but on the power and will of another ’(7). Marriage was considered woman’s

proper sphere, her natural end. Deploring the enforced attitude of the woman toward

marriage she says that, for the young girl, ‘...marriage is the one road to fortune, to life...

what she has to gain even as a child is largely gained by feminine tricks and charm.’(86). The

tricks and charms are to be used to secure a husband. ‘If she does not succeed in being

chosen, she becomes a thing of mild popular contempt, a human being with no further place

in life save as an attach^, a dependent upon more fortunate relatives, an old maid’ (88).
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Gilman strongly felt that once women were allowed to develop and make use of faculties

other than those of sex, they would ‘choose not to marry, preferring what they call “their

independence” - a new-born, hard-won, dear-bought independence’(91).

In my opinion Gilman is the best example of a writer who recognized the presence of

a feminine consciousness, and who realized the part that it played in bringing together the

woman’s movement. In her own words -

The woman’s movement rests not alone on her larger personality, with its tingling

sense of revolt against injustice, but on the wide, deep sympathy of women for

one another. It is a concerted movement, based on the recognition of a common

evil and seeking a common good (139).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman became the leading intellectual in the woman’s movement in the

US during the first two decades of the twentieth century (Degler xv). According to Gilman,

the woman’s movement ‘should be hailed by every right-thinking, far-seeing man and

woman as the best birth of our century’ (144) and ‘no sociological change equal in

importance to this clearly marked improvement of an entire sex has ever taken place in one

century’(151). Enthused by the changes taking place in women’s lives she wrote:

In body and brain, wherever she touches life, woman is changing gloriously from

the mere creature of sex, all her race-functions held in abeyance, to the fully

developed human being, none the less true woman for being more truly

human (158)..

Her views were corroborated by a paper published in the Forum November, 1988, entitled

“Our Better Halves”, in which noted sociologist Lester F. Ward clearly showed the biological

supremacy of the female sex (171). She set forth her views in a lucid, non-academic style, so
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that although her work was didactic, it was immensely readable, sometimes punctuated with

humour, as evident in the following lines-

Is it not time that the way to a man’s heart through his stomach should

be relinquished for some higher avenue? The stomach should be left to

its natural uses, not made a thoroughfare for stranger passions and

purposes (236-237).

She argued that a woman’s confinement to her duties as a cook and housekeeper made her

less qualified as a mother. She suggested that women should work outside the home to

develop their potential fully.

The more absolutely woman is segregated for sex functions only, cut off

from all economic use and made wholly dependent on the sex relation as

means of livelihood, the more pathological does her motherhood become

(182).

Motherhood, according to Gilman, required proper training just as any other field of

specialized activity. Women entered into motherhood without knowing the correct method

for the upbringing of children. The children of humanity are being brought up by

untrained mothers who base their work not on experience, but on brute instinct.

So the children of humanity are bom into the arms of an endless succession of

untrained mothers, who bring to the care and teaching of their children neither

education for that wonderful work nor experience therein (195-196).

A mother economically free, a world servant instead of a house - servant; a

mother knowing the world and living in it, - can be to her children far more

than has ever been possible before...[she] will make that world a different place
 77

for her child (269).

Thus Gilman argues that housework should be made easier so that women could save their

lives from ‘the greasy whirlpool of the tub and pan’(59). Motherhood should be made easy

so that mothers could bring up their children without sacrificing their lives. She proposed

‘baby gardens’ where working mothers could leave their children with childcare

professionals. Women should be trained in a particular area of housekeeping, which she

would be able to perform to perfection.

This division of labor of housekeeping would require the service of fewer

women for fewer hours a day. Where now twenty women in twenty

homes work all the time, and insufficiently accomplish their varied duties,

the same work in the hands of specialists could be done in less time by fewer

people; and the others would be left free to do other work for which they

were better fitted, thus increasing the productive power of the world (245).

Cleaning of houses should be done by an expert, who would clean one home

after another with the swift skill of training and experience (247).

Many modem feminist non-fiction works reflect the influence of Gilman’s ideas, and readers

are discovering much that is relevant to contemporary problems. Even in her own day the

relevance of the book to women’s problems could not be denied. In the words of one

contemporary critic:

However distant may appear the day when the principles of Women and

Economics shall be put to a practical test, we may congratulate ourselves

on the impulse to thought which has been given by the book... It remains

to be seen whether women, more than men, will resist this relentless
 78

attack on the time-honoured institution of marriage as a means of

livelihood ( Muzzey 263).

In the Preface she outlines her object of writing thus-

To reach in especial the thinking woman of today, and urge upon them a

new sense, not only of their social responsibility as individuals, but of

their measureless importance as makers of men (93).

So, according to Gilman, a socially responsible and collectively efficient motherhood may be

taken as the purpose of feminism.

The latest and highest form of Feminism has great promise for the world.

It postulates a womanhood free, strong, clean and conscious of its power

and duty. This means a selective motherhood, the careful choosing of fit men

for husbands, with full knowledge of the necessary qualifications and conditions.

It means a higher standard of chastity, both in marriage and out, for men

as well as women. It means a recognition of the responsibility of socially

mothers for the welfare of all children (Gilman, W&E 187).

In Concerning Children(T900). and The Home: Its Work and Influenced 903) she

continues the same ideas about motherhood and suggests children’s lives can be stunted

instead of enriched by a home in which the mother’s sole occupation is housekeeping. In

Concerning Children she gives advice to parents and urges parents to explain to their

children the reasons behind their commands or requests. They are counselled against corporal

punishment or condescension in the raising of children.

About her essay entitled Human Work (1904). she writes in The Living of Charlotte

Perkins Gilman -
 79

The social philosophy I was teaching included my organic theory of social

economics, later developed in Human Work: the theory of economic

independence and specialization of women as essential to the improvement

of marriage, motherhood, domestic industry, and racial improvement, with

much on advance in child culture (186).

Here was an enormous change of thought, altering the relationships of all

sociological knowledge. As in astronomy we had to change from the

geo-centric to the solar-centric theory of our planetary system, with

complete revision of earlier ideas, so here was a change from the ego-centric

to the socio-centric system of sociology, with wide resultant alterations in

prior concepts (285).

In The Man-Made World or. Our Androcentric Culture (1911) she emphasized for

the first time hereditary versus environmental factors as influences on character. It was

dedicated to Lester F. Ward, sociologist and humanitarian, whose Gynaecocentric Theory of

Life was a complete change of attitude regarding the relations of the sexes. He rejected

Social Darwinism and insisted it was possible for humans, who possess a mind, to shape the

social laws under which they operate. Gilman identified herself with the ideological camp of

Ward in believing that human beings were the key to determining their own destinies and

in using evolutionary theory as a weapon in the movement for social change. Her specific

contribution was her assertion that women, as a collective entity, could, if they so chose, be

the moving force in the reorganization of society( Lane xiv-xvi).

From her first struggles toward freedom and justice, to her present valiant

efforts toward full economic and political equality, each step has been
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termed “unfeminine”, and resented as an intrusion upon man’s pLace and

power (Gilman, Man Made World 24)

That our sex should have monopolized all human activities, called them

“man’s work” and managed them as such, is what is meant by the phrase

“Androcentric Culture”...

An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free

womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy (260).

Describing herself as a humanist, Gilman argued that ‘to be human women must share in the

totality of humanity’s common life’( MMW x-xi) Women are denied autonomy, and thus are

not provided the environment in which to develop. The Victorian woman, she pointed out,

was socially created, and as a type was neither universal nor eternal. In The Man Made

World she developed this theme at length, stating that girls were taught to act, think, look and

talk differently from boys though their interests and capabilities might be identical. Despite

her obvious and deep concern for equality of opportunity for women, Gilman argued for

neither the superiority of women nor their complete similarity to men. The two sexes she

envisioned as more human than either male or female. She challenged the limited sphere of

activity for women. The phillipic against men in feminist literature is not to be found in her

work (Degler xiv). The most obvious intellectual source from which she drew was

Darwinism, but her immediate source was the sociologist Lester Frank Ward, who said in

an article in the Forum magazine in 1888-“ Woman is the race, and the race can be raised up

only as she is raised up”(Degler vi-xxxv). Gilman was of the opinion that the Gynaecocentric

Theory set forth by Ward in his Forum article was ‘ the greatest single contribution to the

world’s thought since Evolution’ (Gilman, Living 187).

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The Man-Made World is an effort to separate the sexual attributes of male and female

from the cultural attributes of masculine and feminine. What is described as ‘human nature’

is in greater part ‘male nature’. When a woman struggles for freedom and justice and

attempts to gain political and economic equality, she is termed as being ‘unfeminine’ Man

has made the family an institution to serve his comfort, to be a vehicle of his power and

pride. The man holds the woman primarily for his satisfaction and service. Thus, necessarily,

he shuts her up at home. Confined thus, she has a slim chance of developing her own

personality. But Gilman sees a change coming. ‘We are slowly forming a nobler type of

family; the union of two, based on love and recognized by law, maintained because of its

happiness and use.’ Gilman feels, to have kept women confined within a small range of

duties is to have interfered with natural selection. She feels full autocracy for women is a

requirement for social progress.

Women are human beings, as much as men...To develop human life in its true powers

we need full equal citizenship for women. The great woman’s movement and labour

movement were parts of the same pressure, the same world progress. In her analysis of a

woman’s position in a man’s world she is anticipatory of modem writers on the subject.

Commenting on the changing position of women and its effects on fiction she writes -

The humanizing of woman of itself opens five distinctly fresh fields of fiction.

First, the position of the young woman who is called upon to give up her “career”

- her humanness— for marriage, and who objects to it. Second, the middle-aged

woman who at last discovers that her discontent is social starvation - that it is

not more love that she wants, but more business in life. Third, the inter-relation

of women with women - a thing we could never write about before because
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we never had it before, except in harems and convents. Fourth, the interaction

between mothers and children; this is not the eternal “mother and child”,

wherein the child is always a baby, but the long drama of personal relationship,

the love and hope, the patience and power, the lasting joy and triumph, the slow

eating disappointment which must never be owned to a living soul - here are

grounds for novels that a million mothers and many million children could

eagerly read. Fifth, the new attitude of the full-grown woman, who faces the

demands of love with the high standards of conscious motherhood (MMW105).

His Religion and Hers (19231 is a comparison of the male conception of the world ( a

postponement and preparation for the afterlife) with the female (trying to make heaven of

the present). If women controlled society, they would place greater emphasis on practical

issues. Commenting on the iconoclasm of her own ideas she writes in her autobiography:

This seemed to me a rather useful and timely work, treating of matters of

both lasting and immediate importance - sex and religion. Unfortunately my

views on the sex question do not appeal at all to the Freudian complex of to-day,

nor are people satisfied with a presentation of religion as a help in our

tremendous work of improving this world - what they want is hope of another

world, with no work in it ( Gilman^Living 327).

Her non-fiction work which is not related to social change is her autobiography The

Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). It is an excellent source for understanding

Gilman’s life, work and death. Her autobiography was written within the context of her

conflict with society, in which she was often labelled an outcast. The major conflict in her

life was with her female self, with her mother and with the very act of creation. She
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complains about her mother, Mary Fitch Perkins’ long-suffering passivity, and describes

herself positively as recreating herself -Athena-like- out of her own intellect and will

(Meyering 127). To Charlotte, mind power meant force of will and self-control - the ability

to renounce emotional needs, such as intimacy and dependency. Her independent spirit

suffered under the restrictions imposed by her mother, as the instance when her mother had

prohibited her from reading novels and having intimate friends (Gilman, Living 30). Her

confrontation with her mother at the age of fifteen is illustrative of this point. She was told to

apologize to a lady (Mrs. Stevens) for something she had not done.

To apologize for what I had not done was flatly dishonest, a lie, it was wrong...

“I am not going to do it - and I am not going to leave you - and what are you

going to do about it?”... I was realizing with an immense illumination that

neither she nor anyone, could make me do anything. One could suffer, one

could die if it came to that, but one could not be coerced. I was bom .. .(33-34)

Sometimes she had the feeling that she had never had anything that she had wanted. It had

all gone wrong like ‘a stopped sneeze’. She earned money by selling paintings of flowers.

On being told she could become an accomplished painter, she realized that her goals in life

were much higher-“...this seemed to me a poor ambition, not conducive to my object

[which was] - the improvement of the human race”(47).

Commenting on girls going in for higher education she wrote-

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Strong-minded girls were going to college under criticism and ridicule; the

usual curriculum in those days was held quite beyond “the feminine mind”.

Some thirty years later, an editor, really impressed by the majority of prize

takers being girls protested that these same curricula were “evidently too

feminine” (61).

Educated women were seeking occupation outside the home. Gilman chronicles the

situation by pointing out the resentment felt by men:

The “charmer” before marriage and the cook afterward were the prevailing

ideas at the time, as indeed they still are in some places. But things began

to change, women appeared in stores and offices - I once met a man from

Maine who told me how he was severely criticized for employing

saleswomen - so unwomanly! such a public occupation! (62).

Her coming of age was of particular significance to her, as from now on she was her own

mistress.

Twenty-one. My own mistress at last. No one on earth had a right to ask obedience

of me. I was self-supporting of course, a necessary base for freedom which the

young revolters of today often overlook ... One new indulgence was to go out

evenings alone. This I worked out carefully in my mind, as not only a right

but a duty. Why should a woman be deprived of her only free time, the time

alloted to recreation? Why must she be dependent on some man, and thus forced

to please him if she wished to go anywhere at night? (70,72).

This is the best example of feminine consciousness, the sense of awareness in a woman

that she is a person in her own right, and her unwillingness to continue a life of dependence.
 85

Gilman’s understanding of her purpose in life comes out very strongly in her

autobiography. This is a piece of writing that she used to keep stuck on the edge of her

looking-glass to see everyday and gather strength from:

For Loneliness and Grief

If I live, (as live I do) for others - if all my high desires for self-improvement

are solely with a view to the elevation of the race - if my mission is to lead a

self-sacrificing life and “give to him that asketh” as I go - to teach and guide,

to love, protect and care for - then it behooves me to crush all personal

sorrow and drop the whole ground of self-interest forever (80).

The conflict in her personal life was how to reconcile marriage and motherhood with her

vocation in life. After her child was bom she went through periods of mental agony.

On the one hand I knew it was normal and right in general, and held that a woman

should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world

also. On the other, I felt strongly that for me it was not right, that the nature of

the life before me forbade it, that I ought to forego the more intimate personal

happiness for complete devotion to my work (83).

Her bouts of melancholia became so acute that she was taken to Dr. S.W. Mitchell of

Philadelphia, the greatest nerve specialist in the country. He prescribed the rest cure, the

consequences of which were disastrous. His advice had' been to -

“ Live as domestic a life as possible. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have

but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil

as long as you live.” I went home, followed those directions rigidly for

months, and came perilously near to losing my mind. The mental agony
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grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving my head from side to side

... I made a rag baby, hung it on a doorknob and played with it. I would

crawl into remote closets and under beds - to hide from the grinding pressure

of that profound distress...( 96).

Ultimately her marriage broke up. Realizing that her husband was not at fault she wrote:

Our mistake was mutual... our suffering was mutual too, his unbroken

devotion, his manifold cares and labors in tending a sick wife, his

adoring pride in the best of babies, all coming to naught, ending in

utter failure (97).

When her husband remarried, she allowed her daughter Katharine to live with him and his

wife Grace Charming. For this she faced great public criticism. In justification of her act she

states :

Since the father longed for his child and had a right to her society and the

child had a right to know and love her father - I did not mean her to suffer

the losses of my youth - this seemed the right thing to do. No one suffered

from it but myself. This, however, was entirely overlooked in the furious

condemnation which followed. I had “given up my child” (163).

Thus we see how difficult it was for society to understand a woman of her forthrightness and

unselfishness of character. Her brand of motherhood was totally misunderstood. Not

only her views on motherhood, she felt that her views on the improvement of society were

also misunderstood.

Among the various unnecessary burdens of my life is that I have been discredited

by conservative persons as a Socialist, while to the orthodox Socialists themselves

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I was quite outside the ranks. Similarly the anti-suffrage masses had me blackly

marked “suffragist”, while the suffragists thought me a doubtful if not dangerous

ally on account of my theory of the need of economic independence of women .

(198).

She found that lecturing was a natural expression of her thinking, and she found writing

similarly easy and swift. On a visit to Chicago to lecture, on Miss Addons’ invitation, she

commented “Jane Addams was truly a great woman. Her mind had more ‘floor space’ in it

than any other I have known”(184). She was introduced by sonorous ministers as “one of

those consecrated women who have given their lives to the service of the poor and needy.”

‘Which was true enough’, she said, ‘except for the limited object; my interest was in all

humanity, not merely in the underside of it; in sociology, not in pathology’(184). She was

surprised and pleased when her work met with recognition and approbation. She felt that-

being so universal a heretic, it is much to the credit of our advance in

liberal thought that my work has been for the most part well received.

The slowness and indifference of the public mind was of course to

be expected, and its very general misunderstanding; the only thing I have

to complain of in the way of ill-treatment has been from newspapers, and

even among them there has been much, very much, of fair ard helpful

recognition (309-310).

In November, 1909, Gilman started a small monthly magazine called the Forerunner,

which she wrote entirely by herself. Each issue included one installment cf a novel, also of a

book published serially, a short story, articles of various length, poems, verses, humour, book

reviews and comments on current events. Her essays serialized in the Forerunner include The
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Man-Made World. Our Brains and What Ails Them. Social Ethics, The Dress of Women

(307).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a woman who had found her vocation in life, and

succeeded in following it against all odds. She exemplified in her.own life the indomitable

spirit that she believed women inherently possessed. ‘The one predominant duty is to find

one’s work and do it, and I have striven mightily at that”(335). She knew that the

improvement in women’s position would unleash the power jthat.was lying dormant in them.

This is the woman’s century, the first chance for the mother of the world to

rise to her full place, her transcendent power to remake humanity, to rebuild

the suffering world - and the world waits while she powders her nose.. .(331).

In 1932 it was discovered that she had cancer of the breast. On August 17, 1935 she

ended her life. The letter left by her was part of the text of the final chapter of her

autobiography-

Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune or “broken

heart” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains.

But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and

imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and

easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.. .1 have preferred chloroform

to cancer (333-334).

Thus in death, as in life, she was ahead of her times.

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III
Fiction

Gilman’s fiction is part of her ideological world view, and therein lies its interest and its

power. According to Ann. J. Lane in The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman -

We read her books today because the problems she addressed and the solutions

she sought are, unhappily, as relevant to the present as they were to her time...

Gilman evaded the issue of class by examining women’s issues alone and

resolving women’s problems without reference to class...She gave little attention

to her writing as literature.. .knew well the whole range of worries and joys women

shared. She wrote to engage an audience in her ideas, not in her literary accomplish­

ments (Lane xv -xvi).

The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1899, was written before her involvement in political

activities. This chilling narrative is an account of a woman’s entrapment, and gradual

progression into madness - caused by obtusely patriarchal men - the narrator’s husband and a

nineteenth century psychiatrist, S.Weir Mitchell, whose prescribed ‘rest cure’ treatment

caused her dementia.

For narrative technique Gilman chose the female Gothic form. As Showalter says:

For many nineteenth century American women readers and writers, the Gothic

suggested independence, adventure, narrative boldness, and self-reliance. It

allowed writers otherwise subject to the narrative restrictions of gentility

and patriotism to find covert outlets for their sexuality and to imagine exotic or

European settings for transgressive plots. A story that challenged :his narrative

of American Gothic was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper.

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(Showalter, SC 130-131)

The story is written as a first person narrative, arranged in brief paragraphs of one or

two sentences. In her story Gilman directly implicates her doctor and her husband for their

gender-encoded misconceptions. Her husband exercises the legal and emotional authority of

the husband, while Weir Mitchell uses the professional authority of a physician.

‘If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives

that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -

a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do?’ (Gilman, Yellow Wallpaper 57).

Both husband and doctor ostensibly attempt to cure her of her depression. John does not take

her anxiety about the wallpaper seriously because of his limited perspective. Gilman uses the

Gothic genre where ghostly presences live in decaying mansions, and madwomen abound.

As the protagonist says, there is something strange about the house -1 can feel it.” (58).

The Yellow Wallpaper is treated as a feminist document because it deals with sexual

politics at a time when few writers had the courage to do so. It directly confronts the sexual

politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship ( Hedges, Afterword 39).

The writing of the novella was for Gilman almost a cathartic exercise to give vent to her

feelings of anger, frustration and rebellion. It has the same theme as The Awakening - the

story of a woman who was questioning marriage and motherhood in the interest of her need

for greater fulfillment. The narrator’s hysteria, her infantilization are critiques of society’s

marital arrangements.

The protagonist has been prescribed the same treatment as the author, and kept confined

in a nursery with barred windows. The story is in the form of a journal which the writer

knows no one will read. She says she will not criticize her husband to ‘ a living soul, of
 91

course, but this is dead paper.’ Asserting herself only through her secrei act of writing, she

hides her journal when she senses John’s entry. Locked in the nursery, she starts following

the patterns in the wallpaper.

Looked at in one way, each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes

a kind of “debased romanesque” with delirium tremens - go waddling up and

down in isolated columns of fatuity... There is one end of the room where it is

almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly

upon it, I can almost fancy radiation, after all -

the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common center and rush off in

headlong plunges of equal distraction. It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a

nap I guess.

I don’t know why I should write this.

I don’t want to. I don’t feel able (20-21).

Her own suicidal tendencies are echoed in her description of the patterned wallpaper -

when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance, they

suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy

themselves in unheard of contradictions...(13).

Her writing exposes the unheard of contradictions in a man’s prescriptive logic. Since she

cannot voice her protests, she punctuates her writing by the ‘unsaid’. What remains muted

is what matters most. Her writing shifts from the symbolic to the imaginary when she

discovers a woman creeping about behind the wallpaper.

Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.

It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

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And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that

pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder - I begin to think -1 wish John

would take me away from here (65).

John does not take his wife’s apprehensions seriously. The narrator now sees the

wallpaper’s outside pattern as bars and the subpattem is a woman locked behind the bars.

She must free the shadow-woman from the pattern - from the bars that obstruct her self-

realization. In the shadow-woman she recognizes her double, the ether woman whose

passion for escape demands recognition. By identifying with this woman the narrator finds

recognition of her need for escape.

According to Kolodny ‘The Yellow Wallpaper was unreadable in its own time

because neither men nor women readers had access to a tradition or shared context

which would have made the “female meaning” of the text clear’(qtd.in Haney-Peritz 102).

Here we have a woman narrator whose problems are sociocultural rather than

idiosyncratic. Today the story is more readable because we do have a shared context to fall

back on, such as certain areas of deception that exist between a husband and wife. When

John makes the narrator lie down after each meal she feels -

It is a very bad habit, I am convinced, for, you see, I don’t sleep.

And that cultivates deceit, for I don’t teH them I am awake - oh, no!

The fact is, I am getting a little afraid of John (67).

The curt chopped sentences convey the taut, distraught mental state of the narrator. Soon

she begins creeping around inside the room. ‘I always lock the door when I creep by

daylight. I can’t do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once’(70). This

is an inadvertent admission that the woman behind the wallpaper is herself, trapped into a
 93

marriage and a situation which she cannot escape. She is kept in a room which was

formerly a nursery, with barred windows so that she cannot escape. The conflation of the

roles of child and wife occurs here. Gilman gives her protagonist a restricted language that

conveys her childlike frustration . By choosing to tell the protagonist’s story from her

perspective, complete with an insight into her changing psyche as she moves into

madness, Gilman reverses the traditional plot of having an observer act as the narrator of

the journey into insanity.

The story posits Gilman’s view that socialization of women in a patriarchal culture

makes them ill. In looking at the story as a woman’s quest for identity within an

oppressive patriarchal culture, we can read that a woman’s descent into madness implies a

woman can only imagine that she has found herself, for unless the social conditions were

changed radically there would be no real way out of mankind’s ancestral mansion.

No linguistic lapse or grammatical breakdown marks the narrator’s descent into dementia.

Her mental condition is made apparent by sentences such as ‘to jump out of the window

would be an admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try’. The most vividly

revelatory sentence is the concluding one - ‘ Now why should that man have fainted? But

he did and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!’

(74).

‘And what can one do?’ asks the narrator, knowing rebellion is not possible,

‘one’ signifying the code-governed person that she is. But soon the impersonal

‘one’ disappears and the subjective ‘I’ takes over. By maintaining the stylistic

composure, the narrator reveals that she is trying to maintain her ‘sanity’ in her

fictional world. The dominant text of her actions and the muted text of her writing
 94

no doubt initially concur — the narrator is not only oppressed by those who forbid

her to write but also by language itself ( Golden 194).

The narrator must maintain the proprieties of language to prove her sanity when the

doctors have already pronounced her ‘sick’. Learning to read the subtext of the yellow

wallpaper, the narrator loses herself in fancy. In the patterns of the wallpaper she

perceives a woman ‘stooping down and creeping about’. The dominant wallpaper pattern

becomes the prison bars and the woman ‘ just takes hold of the bars and shakes them

hard.’ The woman behind the bars becomes a symbol and soon she sees outside the

window ‘ so many of those creeping women’. These are the women trapped behind the

bars of patriarchy; trapped in incompatible marriages, helpless, unable to change the

society’s rigid norms. As a consequence the posture is one where the head is bent low, the

body stoops. Thus the creeping women in the narrative are not just the narrator’s fancy,

but the author’s way of symbolizing women trapped in the unmitigated claustrophobic

conditions imposed on them by insensitive patriarchal prescriptions. The narrator’s

defiance breaks out in the act of tearing off all the wallpaper when she triumphantly

announces: ‘I’ve got out at last ...in spite of you and Jane. I’ve pulled off most of the

wallpaper so you can’t put me back.’ Free of all shackles, she pan now speak of her

husband with detachment, referring to him as ‘that man’.

There is a controversy about the identity of Jane,in the line ‘in spite of you and Jane’.

It could be the maid Janey, who had supported John’s attempts to keep the narrator from

writing. It could be the first person narrator’s first name, which .is not mentioned

elsewhere in the text. The matter is complicated in a ‘Masterpieces Theater’ film version

of the story, where John breaks into the bedroom to find a completely different woman
 95

(played by a different actress) crawling around the room. So the question remains, ‘Who

is Jane? (Grossenbacher 1).

Elaine Hedges comments in the Afterword to The Yellow Wallpaper that the suicides

of Edna Pontellier (The Awakening), and Lily Bart (The House of Mirth-), as well as the

narrator’s madness in The Yellow Wallpaper are dramatic indictments by women writers

of the ‘crippling social pressures imposed on women in the nineteenth century’(Hedges

55). The writers need to revenge all those women whose talent was wasted because they

were not allowed artistic or literary expression. The protagonist’s final condition is a kind

of pyrrhic victory because it is a flight to another world where she can control, by way of

delusions, her own destiny.

The madwoman, or woman going through a mad phase, often has great

freedom to see and speak clearly. In some cases, the madwoman is

understood as a split-off projection from the immanent or foregone

wholeness of the protagonists’s Gestalt ( as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s

The Yellow Wallpaper') and in others, as an independent personality who

is also an avowed/disavowed element of the protagonist, like Bertha

Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre, the paradigmatic “madwoman in the attic”

(Kawin, 301).

It is possible to trace the influence of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane, who wonders whether

her red room is haunted. Here, too, Jane is warring against domineering males, though

Bronte’s John Reed is more tyrannical, than Gilman’s John. Jane Eyre, after a kind of

fit, awakens in a nursery. The protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper finds herself in her

nursery prison. In both stories enclosure and escape through madness are present.
 96

A physician in Kansas described Gilman’s work as the best description of

incipient insanity he had ever seen. In an article entitled “Why I wrote The Yellow

Wallpaper”as it appeared in the October issue of The Forerunner. 1913, Gilman

explained how - obeying the directions of the physician -

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came

so near the borderline of utter mental ruin ...

Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise

friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the wind and went to work

again - work, the normal life of every human being...ultimately recovering

some measure of power.

Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The

Yellow Wallpaper.. .It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save

people from being driven crazy, and it worked (Gilman, ‘ Why I Wrote ’ 1).

It wasn’t easy for Gilman to get her story published. She sent it first to William Dean

Howells, and he, responding to its power and authenticity, recommended it to Horace

Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, then the most prestigious magazine in the

United States. Scudder rejected the story, according to Gilman’s account in her

autobiography, with a curt note: “Dear Madam, Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I

could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself!"{Living

341). In the 1890’s editors, and especially Scudder, still officially adhered to a canon of

‘moral uplift’ in literature, and Gilman’s story with its heroine reduced at the end to the

level of a grovelling animal, scarcely fitted the prescribed formula. The hints of the

story’s attack on the ideal of the submissive wife unsettled the editors.
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The story was finally published in May 1892, in The New England Magazine. Gilman

was warned that such stories were ‘perilous stuff which should not be printed because

of the threat they posed to the relatives of such ‘deranged’ persons as the heroine (120).

Not all criticism was negative, however. She did receive positive response from some of

her readers. Doctor Brummel Jones of Kansas City, Missouri, wrote to Gilman in 1892-

When I read The Yellow Wallpaper I was very much pleased with it, when

I read it again I was delighted with it, and now that I have read it again I

am overwhelmed with the delicacy of your touch and the correctness of

portrayal. From a doctor’s standpoint, and I am a doctor, you have made

a success (341).

From 1909 to 1916 Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the editor and sole writer for the

feminist monthly The Forerunner . Her first utopian novel Moving the Mountain was

serialized in The Forerunner and appeared in book form in 1911. The central figure is an

American explorer lost in Tibet for thirty years who has to be introduced to the changes

that have occurred in his own society since his disappearance. Within two decades

America has gone beyond socialism to an ideal order based on human strength and skills

developed by women in their years of subordination. Two more feminist utopias -

Herland in 1915 and With Her in Ourland in 1916 completed the trilogy which

projected the socialist feminist vision onto the American society of the 20’s and 30’s.

Gilman’s social vision was utopian as well as socialistic. Her novel What Diantha Did,

serialized in The Forerunner from 1909 to 1910, was dedicated to The Housewife.
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Diantha Bell starts a profitable business in the scientific management of housework, with

the work being done by former servant girls whom she organizes into the self-managed

House Workers Union. Here Gilman ‘proposes the capitalization rather than the

socialization of housework’(Robinson, ‘Killing Patriarchy' 275). Her short stories and

one-act play Three Women also suggest solutions to the problems of housework and

child-rearing which were present during her time. In the 1970’s when women achieved a

measure of emancipation - the vote and more educational and job opportunities, the

changes were still rudimentary compared to the healthy liberation that Gilman had

dreamed of.

The majority of her female protagonists are strong and self-reliant, although

they must ultimately face a trial of courage to realize their potential;.

Significantly, most of them do not define themselves through their relationship

to men; rather, they tend to define themselves through what Gilman called their

“life’s work” - their careers. Invariably, the characters betray a conscious move

toward autonomy and economic independence and away from patriarchal

attitudes and institutions( Knight 31).

She then wrote a novel in a popular genre - a murder mystery entitled Unpunished, which

would portray her version of feminism for the new times. She knew the power of a

popular novel to shape historic events. In order to reach a wide audience with her ideas,

she was prepared to compromise on her material. Unpunished is,not so much a murder

mystery as an investigation into who the dead man is and why he was eliminated. The

murdered man, who was a tyrannical patriarch, represents male power at its most corrupt.

So the story of his death is the story of patriarchy overthrown.

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In Moving the Mountain (19111 the protagonist, John Robertson, loses his

memory after falling over a precipice in Tibet. He is found by his sis:er thirty years later.

During the long trip home he studies the changes that have taken place. He finds a world

that is, in its material and technological sense, very familiar. It is the people that he found

different. The new world is revealed through conversations between John Robertson and

his brother-in-law, who is perfectly content in a humanist-socialist society. It is not a

feminist community, we are reminded, it is a human one. The old world was ‘masculinist’.

The transition to socialism was achieved through the leadership of women, who had

acquired much organisational skill and political knowledge during their earlier periods of

struggles for their rights.

The uprising of half the adult world, which led to a new social consciousness,

occurred when women realized that civilization had been made by constructive industry,

not by warfare and aggression, and that it was women who had developed agriculture, the

domestication of animals and the nurturing of cultures associated with the rearing of the

young. Women reclaimed the leadership they had once had, and the world returned to its

natural balanced state.

Crucial to the creation of a new consciousness was the mothering and educating of the

children, carried out by trained specialists. Men created their own kind of women by

marrying only those who were fragile, dependent, passive and timid. Now that women select

from competing males, as in most other species, they are able to breed out the destructive

male qualities. Once evolution had been a long and slow process. Now v/e can aid nature by

understanding human need.

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In Herland (1915) women had learned to live without men at all. Gilman created an

imaginary country which the reader could visit in order to experience an alternative reality.

It was less of a prescriptive model than a critique of existing prejudices with guidelines for

future reconstruction. According to Griffin ‘women abused by the probable refuse it by

imagining the possible in a revolutionary rejection of patriarchal culture (qtd.in Gubar,

She\39). This world is unfolded in the story through male eyes and a male consciousness.

In Gilman’s narrative the boldest utopian idea is the parthenogenic reproduction of the

Herlanders. This theory suggests that women’s bodies can be free from phallocentric law.

Whereas women are marginalized in our androcentric culture, in Herland they are the

dominant sex. Gilman felt the ultimate centre of power should be women. She portrays

cultural conditioning as genetic determinism. The girl child survives because of the constant

infusion of male genes. She analyses the role of the sexes thus:

She was the deep, steady, main stream of life, and he the active variant, helping to

widen and change that life, but rather as an adjunct than as an essential. Races there

were and are which reproduce themselves without the masculine organism - by

hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis (Gilman, W&E 130).

Parthenogenesis is grounded in nature. Since men are variants of essential women, their

elimination is a possibility that Gilman explores in Herland. As Gubar opines, women’s

fantasies have often been feminist in nature, and concomitantly, feminism imagines an

alternative reality that is truly fantastic (Gubar, She 139).

A woman who is considered a nobody in patriarchy, may be a somebody in a utopian

world. Using the theory of intertextuality, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, may be

taken as a utopian feminist revision of Rider Haggard’s novel She, where the_Amahaggar
 101

trace descent through the line of the mother (Gubar She 141). The society in Herland is

matrilineal as in She . Three self-proclaimed misogynists explore the caves of Kor;

similarly a three-man team of explorers visit Herland. They are amazed to find in Herland

that the women are well-organized and do not bicker. Instead of submissiveness, they

found a ‘daring social inventiveness’, a social consciousness instead of pettiness and

sisterly affection instead of jealousy. Men had created their own kind of women - fragile,

dependent, passive - by not marrying those who deviated. Now women select from

competing males, and are able to breed out the destructive male qualities inherited from the

past. Gilman diagnoses the faults ascribed to women as symptoms of a disease known as

‘marginalisation’( 141). She questions the idea that there can be a single definition for what

constitutes a woman. Thus In Herland she creates women with no desire at all. Women

have no interest in the men sexually except as potential fathers. The women of Herland do

not understand why someone else’s name should be taken after marriage; why long hair is

considered womanly by men when only male lions have manes; why ideas from thousands

of years ago should be cherished and honoured.

Terry, the super-macho man, found even the young and beautiful Herlanders

unfeminine because they lacked the qualities of deference, girlish charm and fragility. To

Van, these women were without sexual appeal because he realized that femininity was a

creation of men to satisfy their wishes. These were women one had to love ‘up’, very high

up, instead of down. They were not pets. They were not servants. They were not timid,

inexperienced, weak (Gilman, Herland 141). Van develops an intimacy with Ellador, and

when their relationship is finally consummated, they find that sexual pleasure is only part of

a much larger feeling.

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The sequel to Herland. With Her in Ourland. finds Van and Ellador touring the world

just after the Great War. Ellador makes Van "see the world afresh. Ellador, being a

vehicle of Gilman’s opinions, could sometimes be blamed of didacticism. She observes

that Democracy is not possible in the United States so long as class inequities are

tolerated. She calls the women -poor, dragging, deadweights’ manufactured by the

men. Questioning the need for a woman to stay at home all day, she asks ‘ a man does not

have to stay in it all day long in order to love it; why should a woman?’ Ellador’s mission

was twofold: to spread news of Herland, and to educate Herlanders about the ‘bisexuality’

of the outside world. Based on her observations, she concluded that when both strains -

the male and the female - are balanced properly, then the world would become a

marvellous place. Ellador’s hope for America’s future lay in the women’s movement and

the labour movement which would ultimately lead the people to socialism. While Herland

ends with Van’s conversion, by the end of Ourland Ellador shows how her experiences

have changed her views on men - at first she thought of men just as males - as a

Herlander would; now she knew that men were people, too, just as much as women( Lane

xviii-xix).

Many utopias had been written in the nineteenth century, but few were by women.

Mary Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1836) describes the improved status of

women in Philadelphia, women having been responsible for the major social reforms.

However, at the end it turns out that the new world was all a dream. Mary E. Bradley

Lane’s Mizora (1890) is the only self-consciously feminist utopia written before Herland

(Lane xix). A group of blonde, physically powerful women were created after the

discovery of ‘ the Secret of Life’ and it made it possible for them to eliminate all men. But
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their world was not without class distinctions, as in Herland. as the women were found

bedecked and dining in style, dinner being prepared and served by servants.

The utopian novel in modem times has gone through a rebirth as a means of feminist
t

expression, with such books as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Ursula Le Guin’s

The Dispossessed (1974), Mary Staton’s From the Legend of Biel (1975). Many of the

ideas expressed in these books are reminiscent of those in Herland. such as - class

equality, communal child-rearing, elimination of sex-linked work, but these fictional

works are so much in the genre of science fiction that they are not comparable to the

classic utopian form as anew kind of feminist expression (Lane xx).

The problems Gilman addressed and solutions she found are as relevant to the present

as in her time. Her books are still read today because of her ideological world view. She

referred to women’s problems without pointing out their class - she knew that the worries

and joys of women were shared by all, irrespective of class. Her purpose in writing was

not to display her literary accomplishments, but to disseminate her ideas.

The tension between career and family in a woman’s life are brought out in the short

story “Making a Change”. Julia who is a musician and an exalted beauty, is depressed

when she has to give up her career and sit at home, taking care of the baby. Her attempt to

take her life brings her mother-in-law to her side, who starts a baby-garden in her house,

thus allowing Julia to return to her music. In the story “Ap Honest Woman” Mary

Cameron, who is branded a ‘fallen woman’, manages to put her life together. She is

Gilman’s answer to Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Hester carries her humiliation, but Mary

refuses to carry it. She feels grief, but no shame, as she is an honest woman. In “Turned”

Mrs. Marronee discovers that her husband has seduced and impregnated their servant girl.
 104 •

She turns her fury on her husband, who took advantage of the girl’s innocence without

loving her. The story ends with the two women uniting to confront him. “Benign

Machiavelli” creates a female Huck Finn, who ultimately agrees to grow up. There are

very few writers who have taken up the theme of girlhood- into-womanhood. In this short

novel Gilman offers ‘ a road to autonomy, a system to develop independence and courage,

a way to handle difficult parents with irreconcilable tensions (Lane, Fict. World xxxix).

As Peter Lewis points out, ‘she could have turned out to be a writer of considerable

significance if she had not channelled most of her creative energy into the women’s

movement from the mid-1890’s on’ (484). No one presented arguments as clearly as she

did. In her fiction she portrayed women adapting themselves to exciting new lives. She

suggested women should work outside her home to fully develop their potential. In the

words of Ann J. Lane

In Gilman’s work it is not the scientist, the warrior, the priest, or the

craftsman, but the mother who is the connecting point from the present

to the future. In her utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman transforms the private

world of mother-child, isolated in the individual home, into a community of

mothers and children in a socialized world. It is a world in which humane

social values have been achieved by women in the interest of us all (Lane,

Herland xxiii).

At the core of Gilman’s vision of social reform was the empowerment of women, on

whom depends the future of the world.