Jan Smith
21 June 2015

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Mother’s Advocate

While reading the 1915 novel Herland, I realized how powerful utopian fiction is for advocating social reform. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopia brings to light many feminist issues plaguing women at turn of the century. On one hand the novel identifies with traditional male utopias: isolation from the mainland, divisions of labor, and a self-sustaining food source. But the novel takes radical shifts away from the patriarchal form and creates a place where women design, determine, and control all aspects of society. A world in which the “peaceful, unified, matriarchal society makes “the worse, patriarchal American” deeply unsettling (Lant 292). What I want to understand is how Gilman uses her stories to raise awareness for women’s issues specific to America at the turn of the century.  

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Reassessing Her Significance for Feminism and Social Economics focuses on the home as the center of economy. It uses Women and Economics to support and defend a society where motherhood and economics are fully integrated. Gilman appeals for women when she says, “The lowest classes of course fe[el] it the worst, that among the poorest of all, the women, [are] driven into the labor market by necessity” (Herland 608).  Mothers weren’t viable in the marketplace, and if they did enter, the wages were minimal.  Gilman pictured a society where women would turn the home into a place for consumers. One in which motherhood is seen as a job. This article supports the Herlandic theory that society “ha[s] the potential to evolve institutionally into a healthier, freer, more socially interdependent state” (Sheth and Prasch, 324). Gilman feels there must be a shift in the way society regards women in the home. Only with social restructuring could domestic labor be regarded as a service. There is current support for these theories as employers provide daycares in the workplace and moms work from home as they raise children, but we have yet to see a complete restructuring.     

In her book Women and Economics, Gilman places a tremendous amount of emphasis on the “compatibility of women’s economic independence [and] motherhood” (Gilman, 245). She theorizes that this relationship could only be realized though a more closely knit social structure. In Herland, she demonstrates a society where motherhood and production are seamlessly interwoven. Vandyke sums this up when he says, “They were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere 'instinct,' a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion" (Gilman 667).   Opposed to the idea of individualism, Gilman was not a proponent of economic freedom for personal gratification. She sees freeing woman from the familial responsibilities to enter the workplace for labor and wages as a type of superficial liberation, one in which burdens increase rather than decrease. As a single mother of two sons with a full time job, I can only affirm how overwhelming it is to juggle all of the work  responsibilities and raise children. The article envisions a complete reorganization of structure calling for specialized social arrangement to where motherhood and production completely integrate. The article explains how “the interdependence of parts” would result in a decrease in the individual need for success creating a society that is advantageous to both the individual as well as the “social body” (Sheth and Prasch, 329).  This article reflects Gilman’s regard for domestic labor and how personal fulfillment and individual economic freedom for women could only be attained through a more closely knit social structure.   

While searching the class webpage, a post titled Every Womb is Sacred: Herland in Historical Context presented relative information. In the article Wells points out how women’s health issues were neglected during the Progressive Era, specifically pregnancy and child bearing.  She conveys Gilman’s outrage at how “the American system had failed in terms of allowing women full humanity” (Salinas,129). Gilman understood the need for protecting women’s reproductive rights in American society. Typically, women were defined by pregnancy, child birth, infant mortality, and motherhood: “This was the norm for women in the Progressive Era” (Wells, 2013).  In her post, Wells discusses one woman’s struggle through no less than 18 pregnancies in her lifetime (eleven children and seven miscarriages). The prospects of work and education must have seemed like far-off aspirations to a mother tied to a never-ending cycle of children. With the lack of opportunity for advancement, it appears that many women in the Progressive Era led lives of servitude within the confines of the home.

 Another topic of   interest from Wells’s posts was the reference to Gilman’s story, The Yellow Wallpaper.  This story depicts a woman driven insane by the perverse medical treatment she receives post-partum.  “Gilman, herself a sufferer of 'hysteria' and product of terrible rest cures, surely was presenting a way to stop this awful, female illness by controlling and regulating the pressures of childbirth and motherhood” (Wells, 2013). The treatment of women seems absent-minded and barbaric. When I envision the damage to a woman’s body after bearing multiple children and imagine the unhinging despair associated with post-partum depression endured over and over again, the concept of limited births and birth control are arguably more favorable choices for woman than the oppressive aspects of perpetual motherhood.  Gilman presents another Herlandic solution to society’s dilemma. “When the colony becomes overcrowded, with each woman producing five female children, the women simply limit themselves to only one female offspring (Salinas, 131). Through literature Gilman is not only making a huge statement about population control, but she is advocating women’s autonomy over the entire reproduction process. Others, like Gilman, were passionate about this idea. Pioneers like Margaret Sanger spent most of her life educating women of the New York area about birth control and health care. Sanger was famous for founding the organization that would eventually become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. After reading Ms. Wells’s post, I am convinced that Gilman’s use of pathogenesis as a means of population control in Herland could be seen as the author’s way of giving women, at least in a fictional sense, the “full humanity” that society had denied them during that time.   

After surveying the research on Gilman, I can come to the conclusion that she was keenly aware of how childbirth and motherhood affected a woman’s ability to be a functioning part of society. Advancements in women’s healthcare was also a major concern. Using personal experience as well as scientific knowledge, she writes literature to account and envision a better life for women in the 1900s. A progressive thinker, Gilman is convinced that restructuring society to where the home is part of the economy and domestic labor is regarded as viable would benefit society as a whole. On the cutting edge for her time, she applies scientific principles to societal issues in an attempt to illicit social change for women.  I hope to continue my research on these types of historical text, delving deeper into utopian literature as vehicles for social change.    

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. 1915. 

---. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relations between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, New York: Harper & Row, 1966/1898. Print

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of the Text: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Violation of Herland.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9.2 (1990). 291-308. Web.

Prasch, Robert E. and Sheth, Fulguni A. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Reassessing Her Significance for Feminism and Social Economics.” Review of Social Economics Fall 1996: 323-335. Web.

Salinas, Haley. “A Sociological Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and With Her in Ourland.” The Discourse of Sociological Practice 6.2 (2004). 127-135. Web.

 Wells, Hannah.   ‘Every Womb is Sacred: Herland in Historical Context.”  UHCL, June 2013. Web. 12 June 2013