Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gillian Niebrugge-Brantley, Patricia Lengermann, Patricia Lengermann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351952576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is one of the most important women contributors to classical sociology, primarily because of the originality and significance of her theoretical work. Although well known to her contemporaries in both the United States and Europe, Gilman's legacy was not fully acknowledged by sociologists until her work was recently rediscovered under the impetus of second wave feminist scholarship. Gilman's overarching accomplishment as a sociologist was to formulate a still unparalleled conception of gender. She was both the first theorist to separate gender, as socially constructed behavior, from biological sex and to treat it as a significant variable in social analysis, and the first to create a general theory of society in which gender stratification serves as the foundational principle. She also offered important ideas for the sociological subfields of economy, work, culture and family, presenting her arguments in a variety of forms: formal theory, verse, essays, public lectures, novels and short stories. The essays selected for this volume feature essays of interest to sociologists from across a spectrum of disciplines: economics, literature, women's studies, philosophy and history as well as sociology. The essays are arranged thematically with sections on: gender and society; economy and society; methodology; the public role of the sociologist; towards a sociology of women; and race, class and gender.

Part I
Gilman and the Sociological Imagination

[1]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Feminist’s Struggle with Womanhood

Mary A. Hill

In a letter written from Belmont, New Hampshire, September 2, 1897, Charlotte Perldns Stetson exclaimed, “Thirty-five hundred words I wrote this morning, in three hours!” A book’s chapter in one sitting; a successive six-week dizzy pace of morning writing; elaborate consultations with her closest critic, Houghton Gilman, soon to be her second husband; and thus was Women and Economics dashed into print. Jane Addams, already emerging as one of America’s foremost social reformers, expressed her gratitude to Charlotte, her “pleasure and satisfaction,” her “greatest admiration55 for the “Masterpiece.” Florence Kelly, another pioneer of social settlement reform viewed it as “the first real, substantial contribution made by a woman to the science of economics.” According to The Nation, “Since John Stuart Mill’s essays on The Subjection of Women, there has been no book dealing with the whole position of women to approach it in originality of conception and brilliancy of exposition.¹

Charlotte Gilman quite naturally felt increasingly elated as positive reviews rolled in, despite the societal distortions her book both reflected and described. A flamboyant speaker, a writer with a penetrating wit, she was rapidly emerging as a major theorist and popularizer for the woman’s movement in turn-of-the-century America. Publicly she attempted to analyze and expose the ubiquitous effects of sex-based inequalities and the sources of female strength; and privately she acknowledged that many of her perceptions emerged as well from agonizing conflicts of her life. “We ourselves,” she publicly and sweepingly asserted, “have preserved in our own character the confusion and contradiction which is our greatest difficulty in life.”² And privately she acknowledged the war between contending factions in herself. To Houghton Gilman she described a major challenge of her life: “To prove that a woman can love and work too. To resist this dragging weight of the old swollen woman-heart, and force it into place—the world’s Life first—my own life next. Work first—love next. Perhaps this is simply the burden of our common womanhood which is weighing on me so.”³

The seeds of charlotte’s radical feminism were rooted in an early struggle for independence, self-assertion, and self-respect. Raised primarily within a female kinship network necessitated by her father’s absence, and deprived from early infancy of the motherly affection for which she yearned, Charlotte nonetheless disclosed in her diaries and notebooks a growing strength of character, a playful, lively, independent personality. Rebellious against the model of repressive discipline her unhappy mother, Mary Perkins, attempted to impose, she was active in physical fitness programs, lecture clubs, and language classes. Armed with books and reading lists provided by her librarian father, Frederick Perkins, Charlotte was well-read in contemporary philosophical, historical, and anthropological thought. She delighted in her physical as well as in her mental agility; her effort to control her body was maintained within her larger program to control her life. By the age of 21 she was self-supporting, busy from 6 am to 10 pm, and thriving in the process.

Despite the limitations imposed by her mother’s prudish discipline, Charlotte constantly had calls, visitors, and stimulating friendships with males as well as females. She enjoyed hiking, sleighing, rowing, playing whist, and was exhilarated in her triumphs at the chess board. She enjoyed inspiring evening talks with Ada Blake and Augusta Gladding, and many long walks with Grace Channing, who became her lifelong friend. Also, she developed an intimate relationship with Martha Luther, a relationship of mutual trust and shared interests. They delighted in each other’s company. “With Martha I knew perfect happiness,” she later wrote. “Four years of satisfying happiness with Martha, then she married and moved away.”⁴

Charlotte’s friendship with Martha provided the kind of support, encouragement, and mutual affection historians currently believe was central to the experience of most nineteenth-century women. The reality of Charlotte’s love was quite apparent, her grief at the impending separation was intense and disruptive. In 1881, Charlotte noted that “some swain” was threatening her relationship with Martha, that because of marriage she might lose her “most intimate friend.” On November 5th she wrote: “Pleasant, to ring at the door where you’ve always been greeted with gladness; to be met by the smile that you value all others above—to see that smile flicker and vanish and change into sadness because she was met by your presence instead of her love.” On November 16th she noted, “Walk in the dark streets for an hour or so in dumb misery.” In December, she summarized: “A year of steady work. A quiet year, and a hard one. . . . A year in which I knew the sweetness of perfect friendship, and have lost it forever.”⁵ After a typical self-scourging, she became more stoic, striving to submerge her grief by helping others. But the vacuum left by Martha’s absence heightened Charlotte’s longings for affection, and may have paved the way for her acceptance of the comforting protection of a man.

On January 12, 1882, Charlotte met an aspiring artist, Walter Stetson. Within seventeen days of their first meeting he proposed. Her diary entry reads: “I have this day been asked the one great question in a womans [sic] life and have refused.” Two days later she wrote:

Now that my head is cool and clear, now before 1 give myself in any sense to another; let me write down my Reasons for living single.

In the first place, I am fonder of freedom than anything else— . . .

I like to be able and free to help any and everyone, as I never could be if my time and thoughts were taken up by that extended self—a family. . . .

I am cool, fearless, and strong . . . .

For reasons many and good, reasons of slow growth and careful consideration, more reasons that I now can remember; I decide to Live—Alone.

God help me!⁶

For a time at least, Charlotte remained committed to her rationale for spinsterhood: “if I were to try the path you open to me I could never try my own,” she wrote. “I knew of course that the time would come when I must choose between two lives, but never did I dream that it would come so soon, and that the struggle would be so terrible.” It was, as she put it directly to Walter, “a trial which in very truth does try me like fire.”⁷

Despite her misgivings, Charlotte began to express increasing affection for Walter—“I am beginning to wonder how I ever lived through this winter, before you—; . . . You want to give me something! You are giving me back myself.” By 1883, she was engaged to Walter and began to accept his sympathy, his comforting, his advice, even when it was constricting. For example, when a close friend gave her a new copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass she noted, “I am obliged to decline, as I had promised Walter I would not read it.” She now resolved, first and foremost, to be “Absolutely unselfish . . . To find my happiness in the pleasurable sensations of others rather than in my own. To consider others, think of others, think first ‘will he or she like it?’ rather than shall I.”⁸

As Charlotte’s expressions of affection and self-sacrifice intensified, so also did her gloom. She experienced a loss of strength, discipline, and courage which she had worked so consciously to acquire. In December, 1883 she wrote: “Let me not forget to be grateful for what I have. Some strength, some purpose, some design, some progress, some esteem, respect—and affection. And some Love. Which I can neither feel, see, nor believe in when the darkness comes.” She continued: “I mean this year to try hard for somewhat of my former poise and courage. As I remember it was got by practice.” Nonetheless, a severe depression began to take its toll:

I would more gladly die than ever yet; saving for the bitter agony I should leave in the heart of him who loves me. And mother’s pain.

But O! God knows I am tired, tired, tired of life!

If I could only know that I was doing right.⁹

Charlotte’s expressed attitudes toward marriage and motherhood were fiercely ambivalent. Rationally aware of possible conflicts between selfdevelopment and love, she was largely unprepared to meet the complex unconscious as well as deliberate patterns of socialization which forced most women to accept self-sacrificing love as natural, inevitable, and right. Drawing from conflicting signals of her mother, Mary Perkins, Charlotte knew that women could achieve a modicum of independence, but always at a price. Mary Perkins was a divorced and eventually self-supporting woman, nourished and sustained by a female network of friends and relatives; her nonconformity strengthened Charlotte’s capacity for independence. But suffering from the stigma of divorce, from economic hardship, from the guilt and emotional insecurity her single life-style caused her, Mary quickened Charlotte’s fear of spinster-hood. Both parents had also unwittingly encouraged Charlotte’s independence by withholding their affection. Mary Perkins had denied caresses to her daughter: “I used to put away your little hand from my cheek when you were a nursing baby,” Mary told Charlotte in her later years. “I did not want you to suffer as I had suffered.” Likewise her librarian father, Frederick Perkins, kept his distance: “the word Father, in the sense of love, care, one to go to in trouble, means nothing to me,” Charlotte wrote, “save indeed in advice about books and the care of them—which seems more the librarian than the father.”¹⁰

A contemporary psychologist, Alexandra Symonds, discusses symptoms in her recent patients quite similar to those that Charlotte was beginning to exhibit. The women Symonds treated were active, vital, and self-assured before their marriages. Yet they were also often women who had to “grow up in a hurry.” Denied experiences of warmth in childhood, they were encouraged to control their feelings and give the impression of strength and self-sufficiency. Symonds suggests a frequent pattern: “They repressed their healthy needs to be taken care of and repressed the child in them as well.” Perhaps Charlotte’s difficulties were rooted in the discipline and loneliness of youth, the loss of her friend Martha Luther serving only to exacerbate her thirst for love. Perhaps, as Symonds puts it, she desired “to put down a tremendous burden which she had been carrying all her life, and be the dependent little girl she had never been before.”¹¹

On May 2, 1884 Charles Walter Stetson and Charlotte Anna Perkins were married in Providence, Rhode Island. “O my God! I thank thee for this heavenly happiness!” she wrote in her diary the evening of the wedding.¹²

There were commonly expected roles of men and women in marriage that both Charlotte and Walter accepted. As a man, Walter was expected to provide for his family. He did not have to choose between marriage and his work. In fact, marriage lent further purpose to his artistic growth and creative efforts. Charlotte, by contrast, felt a momentous change occurring in her life. Formerly self-supporting, independent, and career-oriented, she found herself involved with time-consuming domestic chores which conflicted with the work she loved—painting and writing. Within a week, some spontaneous rebellion seemed to be occurring. She wrote in her diary, “I suggest he [Walter] pay me for my services; and he much dislikes the idea. I am grieved at offending him; mutual misery. Bed and cry.” She was beginning to experience firsthand what later she would depict so trenchantly: “the home which is so far from beautiful, so wearing to the nerves and dulling to the heart, the home life that means care and labour and disappointment, the quiet, unnoticed whirlpool that sucks down youth and beauty and enthusiasm, man’s long labour and woman’s longer love.”¹³

Although the personal dynamics of Charlotte’s relationship with Walter must remain elusive, sexual experiences may have contributed to her growing discontent. At times Charlotte viewed sexuality with traditional Victorian prudery: “Purity,” she wrote in 1883, “is that state in which no evil impulse, no base thought can come in; or if forced in dies of shame in the white light. Purity may be gained by persistent and long continued refusal to entertain low ideas.” Yet it is also clear that she was by no means always cold or unapproachable in early marriage. On June 15, 1884 she noted: “Am sad: last night and this morning. Because I find myself too—affectionately expressive. I must keep more to myself and be asked—not borne with.” And on June 25 the same year she wrote, “Get miserable over my old woe—conviction of being too outwardly expressive of affection.”¹⁴

Soon Charlotte was pregnant, a condition which lessened her physical and emotional stamina. Even after the birth of Katharine Stetson in 1885, Charlotte wrote in her diary, “Every morning the same hopeless waking . . . same weary drag.” She appreciated her home, her healthy baby, the services of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• PART I GILMAN AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
• PART II GILMAN AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL CANON
• PART III A MULTI-PARADIGM THEORIST
• PART IV THE GENERAL THEORY
• PART V WOMEN AND WORK
• PART VI ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE
• PART VII PROBLEMS AND UTOPIAS
• Name Index