Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) lived a turbulent life during turbulent times for women and men of color, white women, and other oppressed groups in the United States. Her family ties as well as her proliferation of social theory, journalism, and fiction give her a profound prominence among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectuals in the English-speaking world. Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, was related to Henry Ward Beecher, Catherine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Among feminist theorists and readers, Gilman's novella The Yellow Wallpaper, [a first-person narrative about confinement for mental instability] is likely as familiar as Harriet Beecher Stowe's work. Broadly based on her own lived experiences, The Yellow Wallpaper helped to legitimize women's breaking silence about emotional and other forms of abuse endured not only at the hands of male partners but also within the strictures of androcentric institutions such as medicine and religion.

One of Gilman's book-length studies focuses on androcentric culture. In The Man-Made World Or, Our Androcentric Culture (1914), she analyzes how one sex has “monopolized all human activities, called them ‘man's work,’ and managed them as such” (p. 25). Insistent that the women's and the labor movements reflect the “same worldprogress,” Gilman sought similar progress in the institutions of marriage and family. Crediting men with shifting [Page 330]the family “from an institution for the best service of the child to one modified to his own service,” Gilman spoke cultural heresy when she insisted that neither friendship nor love needs “a head” so, “Why should a family?” (pp. 27, 43). Elsewhere Gilman (1903) had argued that marriage and family have “not developed in proportion to our other institutions” (p. 10), thus implying the centrality of these institutions in women's subordination.

Gilman's theoretical prowess also took aim at the institution of religion. In His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers ([1923]1976), her heresy is less metaphorical. Here she offers not only a critique of androcentric religion but also a pathbreaking analysis of what we today call “normalization” and “masculinization,” twin cultural and political processes that socially construct girls and women as deviations from or inferior versions of what is meritorious and desirable. Gilman talks about “men assuming themselves to be the normal human beings, deprecating the influence of women as ‘feminine,’” and about “masculinization” as a social fact that “we do not yet recognize.” (p. 83).

While married to her first husband, Charles Walter Stetson, and writing as Charlotte Perkins Stetson, Gilman published Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898). Again her analysis was pathbreaking. Above all, she recognized the economic value of women's unpaid labor in the home. Near the beginning of this work she announces that “[f]or a certain percentage of persons to serve other persons, in order that the ones so served may produce more, is a contribution not to be overlooked” (p. 13). Gilman also recognized the “wide, deep sympathy” women are capable of feeling for one another and how that feeling can fuel women's movements (p. 139).

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