In 1890, a poem called ’Similar Cases’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman appeared inThe Nationalist. In it, Gilman propounded the overarching theme that was to concern her until she died in 1935: that humankind and the worldcanbe changed for the better. The poem earned her much praise in Nationalist circles and marked the beginning of a reformist career which was to last some forty-five years.¹ During that time, Gilman established a national reputation as a speaker on women’s issues and socialism: she publishedWomen and Economics(1898)—for which she was most well-known while she was alive—followed by...

I’ve been intrigued lately by the Bluebeard story, by the question of why and how Gilman managed to resist her Bluebeard, and also by the question of why and how, as a woman’s movement leader, she kept essential portions of her struggle secret. It is almost as though she sensed what academics often sense as well, that there are certain issues we should refrain from openly approaching, certain small keys that, if wise, we should not use. At conferences on poverty, for example, or even on homelessness (often scheduled, ironically, at Sheraton or Hilton Hotels) as academics we should approach...

WhenHerlandfirst appeared in the pages ofThe Forerunner, almost exactly four hundred years had elapsed since the publication of Thomas More‘sUtopiain 1516—a period during which utopian narrative was a genre overwhelmingly dominated by men. Not only were the vast majority of utopias written by men, but utopian narrative itself may be seen to embody a distinctively male fantasy: one which reinscribes or even reinforces the patriarchal values of the society to which utopia proposes otherwise radical alternatives. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the extent to which this reflects the ideological implications of the narrative...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer for whom boundaries had little sanctity. For her they were to be challenged, explored, and circumnavigated. The restrictive boundaries of patriarchal institutions and of enclosed spaces are continually interrogated within and through her writing, either directly, by overt and political confrontation, or through metaphors and other formal devices. Her interest in debating the limitations of personal freedom for women led her to explore a great diversity of domestic spaces and limits, as well as to question the ways in which women function outside or beyond them. She was fascinated by issues of interiority, by...

Marriage can make women sick. Married men live longer and are healthier than single men. We know these things now; they are statistically proven and have become acceptable truths and the basis for much of our theorizing as feminists.¹ More than a hundred years ago, Charlotte Perkins Gilman experienced in her own life and witnessed in the lives of others the dynamic association between gender relations and health and illness. The majority of her work is concerned with exegeticizing the body politic—that most ancient of metaphors—as a sick body, a body which will always be ailing in some...

The time during which Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote was one in which English and United States societies struggled between a belief system deeply ingrained in their people and the Siren-like call of a new way of thinking and living. InLove in the Machine Age(1930), Floyd Dell explains, referring to women in particular, ‘the fact...that we are in a transition period means that for multitudes of individuals there comes a change from the old order to the new at some time in their lives—that, having been trained to adjust to the old order, they are then called upon...

In Gilman’s utopiaHerland(1915) there is very little discussion of domestic labour. It is peopled entirely by women, who live separately in two-roomed apartments without kitchens; food can be eaten at dining rooms or taken away as desired. Collectivized child care takes place in specially designed surroundings, supervised by professionally trained staff. But we are not told how catering, laundry and cleaning are organized—and of course the question of the sexual division of labour does not arise in an all-female society. Domestic labour is invisible in this text because it has been abolished. More detailed representation of the...

Three-quarters of the way through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’sHerland(1915), the narrator, Vandyck (Van) Jennings, confesses, ‘I see I have said little about the economics of the place [Herland]; it should have come before’ (H p. 99). The intimation is that he will presently have a great deal to say about this subject. This, however, is not to be. While the author ofWomen and Economics(1898) devotes an entire chapter to the religion of her all-woman utopia, we are left to deduce what Herland’s industry and political economy are like by piecing together clues scattered throughout the novel. This...

‘Ecofeminism’ has been defined by Christine Cuomo as á radical environmentalism which incorporates both ecological and feminist concerns’, and which emerged from the global feminist movement of the 1970s’¹ Although the initial connotations of the term were political (it was formulated in 1974 by Franqoise d‘ Eaubonne, who was writing about the role of women in a proposed ecological revolution²), it has since incorporated a wide range of contexts, listed by Karen Warren as ’historical, empirical, conceptual, religious, literary, political, ethical, epistemological, methodological, and theoretical’, the common factor being that of connection between women and nature.³

Examining the question of...

Many recent theorists of utopian thinking have pointed out that the strength of a literary utopia lies not so much in the particular social structure it portrays, but rather inhowthe utopian vision is portrayed. Since narrative strategies and formal devices encode ideological messages, the form of the literary utopia is at least as significant as its content. As Tom Moylan says:

... the utopian process must be held open as a symbolic resolution of historical contradictions that finds its importance not in the particulars of those resolutions but in the very act of imagining them, in the form of...

ReadingThe Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman(1935) one encounters many assertions, convictions and rules, a number of which are self-imposed and several of which are clearly an integral part of pleasure. An instance of this is contained in the description of a favourite word game played with apparent zest by Gilman and Martha Luther, which contains the remarkable assertion that a story beginning ‘Once there was a pig’ would not interest. Typically for Gilman there is no explanation of, or defence for, this statement, yet it surely needs one. There are, after all, many stories at least ostensibly about pigs...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman remains one of the foremost Western feminist theorists and writers. She offered, and still offers, readers new ways of thinking about their society which deconstruct conservative views about femininity and masculinity, and about the nature of the work practices which defined Western socioeconomics in the early twentieth century. She also theorized the relationship between sex-role stereotyping and work, in the process reconstructing some of the fundamental concepts by which we think about our world. As a writer Gilman was acutely aware of the role played by texts in the constitution of the individual subject, and of society....