Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I found Gilman a mixed bag. Her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is admirably trim. She uses the unreliable narrator to full effect, and the tracing of progressive insanity through the descriptions of the wallpaper pattern works wonderfully. Moreover, the so-called cure that the narrator's subjected to -- the so-called rest cure, what a horror! -- stands marvelously as metonym for the mistreatment and misappraisal of women in western society in general, and in the bourgeois classes from the victorian eras into the 1970's in particular. And also, actually, much of the mistreatment of other outwardly pampered and domesticated groups of society -- all the recipients of the mushroom treatment. In this story, Gilman leads the reader through the ideas non-didactically, one at a time, almost one clipped paragraph per idea. It's a masterwork.

Herland, sadly, does not approach the same level. The plot feels like a cross between kinky femdom and The Planet of the Apes. But to discuss Herland on its own terms is to ignore its flaws as fiction and discuss Gilman's ideas of women and men in society. This can better done in conjunction with her Women and Economics.

Gilman, like many reformers inflamed by new problems and opportunities afforded by industry, wanted to socialize the family unit. She confused the effects of democracy witht hose of industry and abjured any idea that women should naturally raise their own children. (The idea that men should raise their own children doesn't come up, but this is not likely Gilman's fault.) Her explanations are very broadly based on a Darwinist positivistic determinism that plays fast and loose with distinctions between "instinct" and "desire" and socially influenced traits.

She finds thus:

Women are dependent on men whereas men are not dependent on women. In this she confines herself to economic dependency, but traces its many effects, mostly the loss to society of healthy, hardy and productive women. Her analysis also deals primarily with proletarian and bourgeois gender economy, leaving other possibilities to analogy.

Women have no particular ability to raise their own children. She regards formal education as key, individual love as unreliable and inadequate. Sex is something that males are over-occupied with, to the detriment of all concerned. Women waste considerable time and suffering in seduction and barter that would be better avoided were they economically equipped to just ignore male desire. Proper understanding of the love of society or mankind or something like that is or will be better. Accordingly, childcare should be hired out to a few pros.

Her suicide note may be as personally revealing as anything she wrote. Obviously retaining her intellectual capacities and her faith in science and objectivity as a basis.

"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."