Introduction
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is not ordinarily thought of as a humorist, but her feminist utopia, Herland, is a very funny book. Prominent at the turn of the century as a social critic and lecturer, Gilman was best known as the author of Women and Economics, a serious and sweeping analysis of the history, sociology, and political economy of the female sex; and The Yellow Wallpaper, a chilling and largely autobiographical study of insanity. But much of her fiction, the least known of her work, relies on humor for its social commentary. Ideologues—and Gilman was one of the best—rarely can establish sufficient distance between themselves and their cause to laugh and make others laugh with them. The women’s movement is only now coming to recognize the power of humor as a device for social criticism, a power which, as with Gilman, is located essentially in imaginative work.1 Gilman appealed to an assortment of our comic sensibilities—the satiric, the whimsical, the sardonic, the rousing belly laugh—all in the interest of exposing the absurdities of accepted pieties, particularly as they applied to woman’s “eternal place” or “eternal nature.” She used the marginality forced upon her as a woman in Victorian America to shape a distinctly woman’s humor. Herland is an example of Gilman’s playful best.
What makes Gilman’s skill even more special is the facility with which she moved back and forth from humor to serious social and historical analysis, and the setting in which Herland appeared well illustrates her virtuosity. Written in 1915, Herland was serialized in Gilman’s monthly magazine, The Forerunner; and until now it was never published separately. The Forerunner appeared each month from November 1909 through December 1916, beginning with “no capital except a mental one,” and ending when Gilman decided that she had said what she had wanted to. She wrote every line of the thirty-two-page magazine, including the few advertisements she tolerated for a short while. Moore’s Fountain Pen and Fels-Naphtha Soap were personally endorsed, the first because it did not leak when one bent over to wash floors or change diapers, the second because it was “artistically and antiseptically clean” and a “solid comfort” in her kitchen. Each year two books were serialized; the full seven-year run of The Forerunner equaled in pages twenty-eight full-length books.
Every issue contained editorials, critical articles, comments and observations, book reviews, essays, poetry, and fiction that dealt with a whole range of subjects from venereal disease to noise pollution, but the overriding commitments were to the rights of women and to socialism. Writing in the years when the women’s movement and the socialist movement were each trying to win mass support, Gilman sought to unite them by demonstrating their essential and necessary interdependence. Her impudent and heretical pieces, unacceptable to professional journals or popular magazines, flourished in The Forerunner. Herland cannot be described as a typical selection, for no one selection can be; but it characterizes the spirit and style of Gilman during this period.
Charlotte Anna Perkins2 was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860. Her father, Frederic Beecher Perkins, a man of letters and one-time head of the Boston Public Library, was the grandson of the distinguished theologian Lyman Beecher, and nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Perkins left his wife, Mary A. Fitch, soon after Charlotte’s birth, and thereafter provided his family with little support, emotional or financial. Charlotte and her brother grew up in an unhappy, cheerless home. Mother and children lived on the edge of poverty, moving nineteen times in eighteeen years to fourteen different cities.
As a young woman still living at home, Charlotte Perkins supported herself as a designer of greeting cards, an art teacher, and a governess. In 1884, after much vacillation, she reluctantly married Charles Walter Stetson, a local artist. Katharine Beecher, their only child, was born a year later. Soon after, Charlotte Stetson became so deeply depressed and despondent that she consulted S. Weir Mitchell, the well-known Philadelphia neurologist who specialized in women’s nervous disorders. Mitchell’s famous “rest cure” forbade Charlotte Stetson ever to write and sharply limited her reading time. The treatment almost drove her mad. She ultimately rejected his regimen, as she was all her life to reject “expert” advice, and fled to California, away from husband and child. There the depression lifted. When efforts to reconcile with her husband failed, she moved permanently to California with her daughter. She and Stetson later divorced. He immediately married Grace Ellery Channing, Charlotte Stetson’s closest friend, and the three remained good friends throughout their lives.
For a time Charlotte Stetson barely managed to support herself, Katharine, and later her mother, by running a boarding-house. During these difficult years she launched her writing and lecturing career. In 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper appeared, a bitter story of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who, with the purest motives, imposed Mitchell’s rest cure. It was Charlotte Stetson’s retaliation for the damage done to her and others by the powerful psychiatric profession and might be placed in the tradition of black comedy, although its comic quality has not previously been acknowledged. The Yellow Wallpaper reflects a woman in torment, Herland a woman at play. The caged creature in the first achieves her freedom, and thereby her sanity, in the second.
In 1893 she published a book of verse, In This Our World. In 1894 she edited, with Helen Campbell, The Impress, a journal of the Pacific Coast Woman’s Association. She was contributing editor to The American Fabian, along with Henry Demarest Lloyd, Edward Bellamy, and William Dean Howells, who did much to sustain her career. Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward pictured the world in the year 2000 under a form of Utopian socialism—which he called Nationalism—and inspired the formation of Nationalist clubs to implement the ideas espoused in the book. Charlotte Stetson found herself drawn to the ideas of Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist movement, as well as caught up in the women’s movement.
She earned her living by lecturing to women’s clubs and men’s clubs, to labor unions and suffrage groups, to church congregations and to these Nationalist clubs. Like the Beechers from whom she came, she was a preacher, but the message was uniquely hers.
Soon after Walter Stetson remarried, both parents agreed that their child should live with her father and his new wife, whom the child knew and loved. Charlotte Stetson, by this time moderately well known, was attacked in the press, particularly in California, for “abandoning” her child and for being an “unnatural mother.” Unnerved, she fled her home. From 1895 until 1900, she led a nomadic existence, ceaselessly lecturing and writing, forging for herself a role as ideologue and propagandist, a humanist-at-large. Here is a woman in late-Victorian America, denying the social definition of herself as wife and mother, first with a scandalous divorce (scandalous because it was amicable and seemingly without cause), then by “abandoning” her child to its father, and finally by denying the very reality of home. She created a kind of self-imposed exile, reproducing, but this time by choice, the marginality of her early life.
Out of this environment came her most famous book, Women and Economics, which appeared in 1898, was soon translated into seven languages, and won her international recognition. In 1900 she published Concerning Children; in 1903, The Home: Its Work and Influence; in 1904, Human Work; in 1911, Man Made World: Or Our Androcentric Culture; and in 1923, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. Three novels serialized in The Forerunner were later published separately: What Diantha Did, 1910; The Crux, 1911; and Moving the Mountain, 1912.
In 1900, after a long and agonizing courtship, she married George Houghton Gilman, her first cousin, also a descendant of Lyman Beecher’s. They lived, very happily it seems, in New York, until 1922, when they moved to Norwich, Connecticut. Houghton Gilman died suddenly in 1934, two years after Charlotte
Gilman had learned that she suffered from inoperable cancer. After her husband’s death, she moved back to Pasadena, near her daughter, who lives there still. Grace Channing Stetson, also a widow, joined her there, thus reuniting the women of the family. In 1935, Gilman completed her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, made certain that the royalties, which were never to be substantial, would be a legacy to her daughter, and selected the cover for the book. She said good-bye to her family, and with the chloroform she had long been accumulating, ended her life. The note she left appears in the last pages of her autobiography:
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 …. I have preferred chloroform to cancer.
Gilman had an enormous reputation in her lifetime, but she is almost unknown to ours. A serious critic of history and society whose intriguing ideas have never been adequately examined, she tried to create a cohesive, integrated body of thought that combined feminism and socialism. She struggled to define a humane social order built upon the values she identified most closely as female values, life-giving and nurturing. She constructed a theoretical world view to explain human behavior, past and present, and to project the outlines of her vision for the future. It was a theoretical structure that encompassed anthropology, history, philosophy, sociology, and ethics. Her cosmic efforts were not always successful, but she did create a social analysis that is largely coherent internally and awesome in its proportions.
She came of age during a time of struggle over the ideas of Charles Darwin and their application to society. Darwin’s theory of evolution did not directly apply to social theory, but intellectuals translated his ideas of natural selection into social language, and argued about their interpretation. One view, formulated by English theorist Herbert Spenser, and defended in the United States by William Graham Sumner, was that society’s laws are irrevocably rooted in the evolutionary process, and that there is no way to interfere with the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Lester Frank Ward, an American sociologist, rejected this interpretation of Social Darwinism, as it was called. He insisted that it was possible for humans, who, unlike other animals, possess a Mind and therefore a Culture, to shape the social laws under which they operate. Gilman early 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. Convinced of the plasticity of human nature, she vehemently sought to destroy the molds into which people, especially but not only, female people, were forced. Her specific contribution to this wing of Social Darwinist thought was her assertion that women, as a collective entity, could, if they so chose, be the moving force in the reorganization of society.
Gilman’s ideas matured at the turn of the century. Like most other intellectuals of her time, particularly those in the new social sciences, she struggled to create a theory and to envision a world that relied neither on class violence nor on uncontrolled individualism. Unlike other social scientists, most of whom were university-affiliated, she did not seek explanations for social problems or solutions to them from experts in these newly created disciplines. The new social sciences that emerged in this period, for all the differences that separated sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science, had a common set of assumptions about society that distinguish them as a group. They affirmed the primacy of culture over biology. They believed in a social intelligence, dominated by trained, disinterested specialists who ostensibly would transcend politics, but who, in reality, shared a tacit commitment to the prevailing ideology. They relied primarily on descriptions of the interdependence of institutions and relations in society, which inevitably raised questions of how society functions but left untouched questions of why and for whom it operates the way it does or how it had evolved to that point; that is, the role of power was unexamined. By stressing the relationships among all social phenomena, implying that all are of significance, the social scientists obscured the reality of class rule in the United States and therefore made irrelevant any program to alter that rule.
Gilman self-consciously dissociated herself from this intellectual environment. Her work, on the contrary, was an effort to devise and to carry out a strategy for change. Opposed as she was, temperamentally and ideologically, to violence or force, she also separated herself from Marx’s revolutionary ideology. In her vision, the peaceful collective action of women replaced Marx’s class struggle.
Describing herself as a humanist, Gilman argued that since “it is only in social relations that we are human … to be human, women must share in the totality of humanity’s common life.” Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of the organism, she said, the individual, or the social body requires the use of all of our powers in four areas; physical, intellectual, spiritual, and social. In each, women are denied their share of human activities.
Women’s historic subordination she dated from the expropriation by men of the surplus that women produced in agriculture. It was, she said, the first form of subordination, and it became the model for subsequent exploitation. That subordination stunted the growth of women and thus dehumanized the whole female sex. What we call masculine traits are simply human traits, which have been denied to women and are thereby assumed to belong to men: traits such as courage, strength, creativity, generosity, and integrity. To be “virtuous” a woman needs but one “virtue”—chastity. “Women are not undeveloped men,” said Gilman, “but the feminine half of humanity is undeveloped humans.”
The most important fact about the sexes, men and women, is the common humanity we share, not the differences that distinguish us, Gilman said repeatedly. But women are denied autonomy and thus are not provided the environment in which to develop. Men, too, suffer from personalities distorted by their habits of dominance and power. A healthy social organism for both men and women, therefore, requires the autonomy of women. That autonomy can be achieved only by women’s collective political action. Just as most women have been socialized to accede to their own subordination, implied Gilman, so can they be moved to lead the struggle for a humanized-socialized world. She saw the first step toward resolving the world’s predicament in the ideological sphere, and she saw herself engaged in a fierce struggle for the minds of women.
Gilman was determined to package her social vision in terms attractive to the mass of the population and at the same time to make socialism a legitimate, appealing, and reasonable idea. The literary genre she selected was the Utopian novel, and she wrote three of them: Moving the Mountain, 1911; Herland, 1915; and its sequel, With Her in Ourland, 1916, all of them appearing in The Forerunner. Although Moving the Mountain and With Her in Ourland are more earth-bound, a look at them can nonetheless provide the reader with a deeper sense of the texture and meaning of the world of Herland.
Moving the Mountain is set in the United States in 1940. John Robertson, traveling in Tibet in 1910, falls over a precipice and loses all memory until he is found by his sister thirty years later. During the long trip home and afterward, he studies the enormous changes that have taken place in his country. He finds, in Gilman’s words, “a short-distance Utopia, a baby Utopia,” a society brought about by “no other change than a change of mind, the mere awakening of people, especially the women, to existing possibilities.” Just as one man can change his life in thirty years, “so can the world.” Acknowledging that most of us cannot imagine what we have not seen, Gilman creates a world for her audience to experience, a world that is, in its material and technological sense, very familiar. It is the people who are different, a reversal of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, for example, where the world looks different but the people in it are traditional
Victorians.
Instead of Warren Harding, the American people chose socialism in 1920; and in the subsequent twenty years they went beyond socialism to a New Religion, described as “Living and Life.” The new world is revealed through conversations between skeptical John Robertson and his brother-in-law, Owen Montrose, who feels perfect contentment, as a man, 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, Robertson is told, through the leadership of women, who used the organizational skills and political knowledge accumulated during the earlier decades of struggle for their rights. The powerful rulers of the old society gave up because they had no choice: the soldiers would not fight, and the workers would not work. All had been persuaded of the superiority of a humanist-socialist world.
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 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.
“We make a new kind of people now,” John Robertson is told over and over. The mothering and educating of the children, carried out by trained specialists who are not necessarily mothers but who always are women, is crucial to the creation of a new people with a new consciousness. Gilman seems to assume that the desire for motherhood, though not the ability to be a good mother, is inherent in the female condition.
Men long had the power to create their own kind of women—fragile, dependent, passive, timid—by not marrying those who deviated. Now women select from competing males, as is common in most other species, and are able to breed out the destructive male qualities inherited from a historic past when combat and aggression were necessary for progress. Once evolution had been a long and slow process, but now change can be made rapidly because we understand how to aid nature in the interests of human need.