Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America

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by Jill Bergman


  are ruled by Queen Calafia; these women reproduce through “carnal unions” but otherwise expel or kill all men. See Dora Beale Polk, The Island of California: A History of the Myth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 125. We thank Andrea Dominquez for reminding us of this myth. Although there are obviously

  telling differences between Montalvo’s California and Gilman’s Herland, it is very likely that she was familiar with Montalvo, because it was her own uncle, Edward Everett Hale, who was the first to suggest Montalvo as the source for California’s name. Asserting that Hernán Cortés (credited by some for naming the region)

  would surely have known Montalvo’s work, Hale affirms that “from the romance, the peninsula, the gulf, and afterwards the State, got their name.” Edward Hale, Everett, “The Queen of California,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1864.

  41. See, e.g., Charlotte J. Rich, “From Near- Dystopia to Utopia: A Source

  for Herland in Inez Haynes Gillmore’s Angel Island,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, ed. Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2004), 166. Rich has written that “Herland’s vague location in a ‘semitropical’ region . . . , in the

  ‘enormous hinterland of a great river’ . . . , suggests it to be somewhere in South America, a continent where Ameri can capitalists were heavily investing in agri-cultural and natural resource industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” See also Kristin Carter- Sanborn, “Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti- Violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 2

  (2000): 14.

  42. Gilman, Herland, 34, 106, 107 120; Judith A. Allen, The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 232.

  43. Gilman, Herland, 42, 44, 48, 49, 104, 154.

  44. Ibid., 76, 81, 84, 86.

  45. Ibid., 49. In Herland’s sequel, With Her in Ourland, serialized the next

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 39

  year in the Forerunner, Van and his Herlander wife, Ellador, even attend the PPIE, along with other world’s fairs. It is not surprising that the reality of Ourland does not measure up to the fair or to Herland.

  46. Burton Benedict, ed., “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” in The An-

  thropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berke ley, CA: Scolar Press, 1983), 60; Gray A. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berke ley: University of California Press, 1999), 246; Bill Brown, “Science Fiction, the World’s Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1900–1915,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 149.

  47. Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America, rev. ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), 132, 493; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 246. This eugenic maternalism was expressed even more famously at the fair in Charles Grafly’s pro-natalist Pioneer Mother statue. See Brenda D. Frink, “San Francisco’s Pioneer Mother Monument: Maternalism, Racial Order, and the Politics of Memorialization, 1907–1915,” Ameri can Quarterly 64, no. 1 (March 2012): 85–113; and Abigail M. Markwyn, “Encountering ‘Woman’ on the Fairgrounds of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition,” in Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, ed. T. J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 180–83.

  48. Sarah J. Moore, “Manliness and the New Ameri can Empire at the 1915

  Panama- Pacific Exposition,” Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, ed. T. J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 87; Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D.

  Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Wash ing ton, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 65; Markwyn, “Encountering ‘Woman,’ ” 172. A telling example of such commodification, notes Markwyn, were the “orange girls,”

  the “young, attractive, white women” who “showcased local produce” and “represented California’s fecundity” to “potential [white] settlers” concerned about the state’s ethnic diversity.

  49. Elizabeth E. Armstrong, “Hercules and the Muses: Public Art at the Fair,”

  in The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, ed. Burton Benedict (Berke ley, CA: Scolar Press, 1983), 125; Brown, Science Fiction, 141. It is not insignificant that another of the fair’s aims was to observe the four hundredth anniversary of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s “discovery” of the Pacific Ocean.

  50. Brown, Science Fiction, 139, 142, 145; Moore, “Manliness,” 76.

  51. Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition: Being the Official History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 1:20; Brown, Science Fiction, 138, 146, 148. Like

  40 / Chapter 1

  the older model of manliness epitomized by the West Cure, which depended on

  the invisible labor of packers, guides, and servants, according to Brown, this new representation of Ameri can technological power, through an idealized corporeal form, “aestheticizes . . . into [an] abstraction” the actual labor performed by the close to forty thousand men, mostly West Indians, who worked with Ameri can-made machines to create the canal. For an excellent discussion of Roosevelt’s significance to the fair, see Moore, “Manliness,” 75–76.

  52. Moore, “Manliness,” 84. Indeed, Turner himself envisioned such a transi-

  tion to overseas expansion in his 1896 essay, “The Problem of the West.”

  53. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Standardizing Towns,” Forerunner, February 1915, 53.

  54. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Gorgeous Exposition,” Forerunner, May 1915, 121, 122.

  55. Todd, Story of the Exposition, 3:1.

  56. Elisabeth Nicole Arruda, “The Mother of Tomorrow: Ameri can Eugenics

  and the Panama- Pacific International Exposition, 1915,” master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 2004, 26; Alexander Missal, Seaway to the Future: American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 123, 199.

  57. Bridget Bennett, “Pockets of Resistance: Some Notes towards an Explo-

  ration of Gender and Genre Boundaries in Herland,” in A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (Liverpool, UK: University of Liverpool Press, 1998), 42, 43, 47.

  58. Carter- Sanborn, “Restraining Order,” 2, 28.

  59. Brigitte Giorgi- Findlay, The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 11; Moore, “Manliness,” 89, 90–91. Moore notes that the canal exhibit’s

  “pedagogical motivation . . . was formally recognized by its receipt of a grand prize under the Liberal Arts Section” of the fair. Susan Gubar, “She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, ed.

  Sheryl L. Meyering (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 198.

  60. Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 143; Allen, Feminism, 214; Carl N. Degler, ed., “Introduction,” in Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898; repr., New York: Harper, 1966), xiii.

  61. Nora Stanton [Blatch] Barney to Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin,

  August 21, 1935, Katharine Beecher Stetson Papers, 1827–1956, 2011- M45, carton 3, folder 8, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Bederman, “Manliness,”
122, 167; Rebecca J.

  Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the West ern United States, 1868–

  Tuttle and Scharnhorst / 41

  1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 76. Gilman was a vocal participant in the California suffrage campaign, which similarly entwined feminism with white supremacy. “Her arguments,” writes Mead, “challenged many assumptions about gender but relied heavily upon prevailing racialist paradigms. Gilman did not challenge contemporary discourses about ‘civilization’ and ‘race suicide.’

  Instead, she modified and reinforced these ideas for feminist purposes, helping to reinscribe nativist and racist prejudices in the pub lic mind.” See also Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 31. For Herland’s affinity with the broader purposes of the California suffrage movement, in clud ing its deployment of white supremacist rhetoric, see Darcie Rives- East, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and the California Suffragist Movement, 1896–1911,”

  paper presented at the Ameri can Literature Association Conference, San Fran-

  cisco, May 24, 2012.

  62. Krista Comer, “Exceptionalism, Other Wests, Critical Regionalism,” American Literary History 23, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 159–73; Lois Rudnick, “Re- Naming the Land: Anglo Expatriate Women in the Southwest,” in The Desert Is No Lady: Southwest ern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), 11; see also Tuttle, “New England Innocent,” 307n21.

  63. Melody Graulich, “Creating Great Women: Mary Austin and Charlotte

  Perkins Gilman,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, ed. Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2004); Comer, “Exceptionalism,” 171; Krista Cromer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 42; Susan Kollin, ed.,

  “Introduction: Postwest ern Studies, Dead or Alive,” in Postwest ern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), xi.

  64. Gilman wrote in a letter from Las Casitas, “I feel very much at home and

  welcome [at Las Casitas]. . . . I still think I should like to live in this part of the country, but not too near town!” Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin, April 21, 1915, Katharine Beecher Stetson Papers, 2011- M45, carton 1, folder 6 .

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  ———. “Reconfiguring Vice: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Prostitution, and Fron-

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  42 / Chapter 1

  Armstrong, Elizabeth E. “Hercules and the Muses: Public Art at the Fair.” In The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, edited by Burton Benedict, 114–33. Berke ley, CA: Scolar Press, 1983.

  Arruda, Elisabeth Nicole. “The Mother of Tomorrow: Ameri can Eugenics and

  the Panama- Pacific International Exposition, 1915,” master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 2004.

  Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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  Bennett, Bridget. “Pockets of Resistance: Some Notes towards an Exploration of Gender and Genre Boundaries in Herland.” In A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Val Gough and Jill Rudd, 38–53. Liverpool, UK: University of Liverpool Press, 1998.

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