Mary Ritter Beard on Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“The theory that women had been members of a subject sex throughout long history, but coupled with a plan for their emancipation by socialism or communism, found expression with increasing force in the United States as the twentieth century advanced. Among the women who expounded this theory of woman none was more influential than Charlotte Perkins Stetson who long before her death in 1935 attained national and international fame as an exponent of a new feminism...In her writings she ranged from light, humorous verse and witty narrative poetry, through articles gravely gay and wholly serious books, to novels. Captivated by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888, Mrs. Stetson discovered in idealistic socialism what she deemed the clue to the emancipation of women and joined the disciples of Bellamy. Henceforward, with growing stress, she dwelt on the economic aspects of the "woman question"...Her belief in woman's long subjection to man was embodied in the following lines, quoted from a poem in her collection entitled In This Our World: "Close, close he bound her, that she should leave him never/Weak still he kept her, lest she be strong to flee;/And the fainting flame of passion he kept alive forever/With all the arts and forces of earth and sky and sea." But the future could be different, she believed. It had been and was woman's economic dependence on man that kept her in thrall. This was Mrs. Gilman's contention, especially, in Woman and Economics. Hence, she concluded, woman - especially the mother as guardian of the social spirit in social evolution - when freed from economic bondage to her mate would achieve liberty and make her "culture" and her "religion" prevail over his culture and his religion. And this economic freedom was to be won through various economic institutions of a collectivist nature, especially a form of cooperative living that would ease, if not abolish, the home drudgery of woman. To the old doctrine, so often advanced by parsons and lay men, that "woman's place is in the home," Mrs. Gilman opposed the doctrine that woman's place is in community and public life. In a poem on the assumption of male prerogatives, she stated the case in boasting words by the male: "I sing to the wide world/And she to the nest." But Mrs. Gilman did not deride singing to the nest. She approved it and gave it social significance. She proposed, however, that henceforward there should be a common singing to the wide world, her idea being that such singing had been done by man alone.”

“So impressed by her writings was W. D. Howells as early as 1902 that he declared: "She has enriched the literary center of New York by the addition of a talent in sociological satire which would be extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivaled among us."”