by Jill Bergman
been solved. Despite the great strides global women’s movements have made
to secure the equality of the sexes, some of those problems remain unsolved to this day. At the very foundation of Gilman’s social philosophy was the simple notion that women are people—that their femaleness is sec ondary to their
basic humanity. “So utterly has the status of woman been accepted as a sexual one,” she wrote in Women and Economics, “that it has remained for the women’s movement of the nineteenth century to devote much contention to the
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claim that women are persons! That women are persons as well as females,—
an unheard of proposition!”4
Eighty years after Gilman’s death, the fact that women are above all human
beings who deserve to be taken seriously is not yet universally recognized—an appalling circumstance indeed. Certainly, were she alive today, Gilman would
have championed the Italian parliamentarian Rosy Bindi, who in 2009 was
disparaged on national television by then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
with the intentionally ironic comment that she was “more beautiful than . . .
intelligent.” Bindi was the only woman “on a stage full of men,” and she fa-
mously retorted, “I am not a woman at your disposal.”5 Bindi’s rejection of
Berlusconi’s dehumanization is emblematic of Italian feminists’ increasingly
vocal resistance to a social and po liti cal climate of unapologetic sexism; Italian translations of Gilman’s work are part of this resistance. Yet this flam-
boyant example of silencing and objectification is not so different from that which women endure elsewhere, in clud ing in the United States. Attending
to such social and po liti cal contexts and historicizing recovery work in Gilman studies illuminates the forces that shape scholars’ choices and method-
ologies. More important, it demonstrates how and why this recovery matters
and helps to explain why Gilman, even with her myriad flaws exposed, re-
mains such a compelling fig ure for feminists of today.
GILMAN REDISCOVERED:
RECOVERING THE PUBLISHED WRITING
During her long life, Gilman published an impressive quantity of material,
in clud ing eight novels, close to two hundred short stories, nearly five hundred poems, eleven book- length nonfiction works, a vast number of articles,
and an autobiography, along with a variety of other pieces. Some of this writing appeared in her journal, the Forerunner, which she edited and for which she wrote all of the content between 1909 and 1916. Although the recovery
of this prolific output is still underway, scholars in a range of disciplines have brought a considerable number of these works back into print.6
Three publications stand out as Gilman’s best- known and were the first to
capture scholars’ attention in the sec ond half of the twentieth century. Women and Economics, a nonfiction treatise that traced the source of the inequality of the sexes to women’s economic dependence on men, was origi nally published
in 1898 and recovered in 1966. “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” an 1892 short story
of a woman objectified by both marriage and medical science who is denied
full bodily autonomy and (some argue) driven mad as a result, was recovered
for a wide audience in 1973.7 And the 1915 utopian novel Herland, featuring
190 / Chapter 9
a society without men or gender roles where women are free to develop their
human strengths and aptitudes, was recovered in 1979. These texts offer ac-
cessible treatments of some of sec ond- wave feminism’s central concerns, in-
clud ing “the politics of gender relations, of housework, and of childcare.” It is thus not surprising that they were attractive to critics and historians working in that era. Gilman “was rediscovered during” this period, argues Cynthia Davis, “largely for her insights into gender politics and issues that remain unresolved decades after her death.”8
The first of these works to be recovered in the modern era, Women and Economics, was reissued by Carl Degler in 1966. Sensing “the emergent tenor of the times in the years immediately following the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963,” Degler recognized, according to Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, that the “increasingly politicized feminist intellectu-
als” leading the women’s movement sought “foremothers, mentors who had
been there before, wrestled with the same issues.” Although parts of Gilman’s treatise had long since gone out of date, its central argument linking the inequality of the sexes to women’s economic dependence on men unfortunately
remained valid and was a topic of great concern to sec ond- wave feminists.9
Preceding Degler’s edition of Women and Economics by a mere three years, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) had published
a report calling for equal pay for equal work and work of comparable value
(Gilman herself had given a lecture, “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” in Lon-
don in 1899).10 The resulting Equal Pay Act did not sufficiently address the
problem, leading some members of the commission to found the National Or-
ganization for Women in 1966. To this day, US women earn less than men for
comparable work, and the disparity is wider still for women of color.11 When
Degler recovered Women and Economics, he confirmed that Gilman’s aim was
“to achieve full equality for women in an industrial society.” The book had
much to say, Degler insisted, “about and to women today.”12 Degler’s reissue
coincided with an upsurge of feminist literary criticism that represented part of the sec ond wave’s intellectual arm; studies such as Mary Ellman’s pioneer ing Thinking about Women (1965) and Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969), echoing Gilman, challenged the sexist paradigms and assumptions that shaped gendered power relations, in clud ing the economic inequality that Gilman sought to eradicate through her work.
A reissue of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” appeared seven years later, in 1973; this story was one of the early titles published by the Feminist Press, which had
been founded a mere three years before “by a women’s collective intent on re-
storing to print women writers of high literary quality.”13 In her afterword to this edition, Elaine Hedges highlighted the contextual forces that shaped recovery work in Gilman studies: “with the new growth of the feminist move-
Tuttle / 191
ment, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is being rediscovered.” Recognizing Gilman as
“one of America’s foremost feminists,” Hedges highlighted the ways that Gil-
man’s short story “directly confronted the sexual politics of the male- female, husband- wife relationship” that was such a flash point for second- wave activists. Gilman’s indictment of the twin male- dominated institutions of mar-
riage and medicine spoke with great urgency to feminists of the early 1970s.
Hedges elsewhere remarks on the telling fact of the story’s reappearance in
the same year that the Supreme Court issued its verdict in Roe v. Wade, legal-izing abortion in the United States.14
The issues of women’s health and bodily and reproductive self- determination
were clearly at the forefront of many minds that year, which also saw the first professionally published edition of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves. Scholars’ commitment to understanding these issues in his tori cal perspective was confirmed in such publications as Carroll Smith- Rosenberg’s foundational essay “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and
Role Conflict in Nineteenth- Century America” (1972), Barbara Ehrenreich and
Deirdre English’s book Complaints and Disorders:
The Sexual Politics of Sickness (1973), and Ann Douglas Wood’s article “ ‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth- Century America” (1973).
During the ensuing six years, as the women’s movement developed apace,
readers were primed for Ann Lane’s recovery of Herland in 1979. The best-known of Gilman’s utopian works, it had never before been published in a
freestanding edition, having appeared serially in the Forerunner in 1915. Pantheon’s book jacket proclaimed the novel’s enduring relevance as “A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel” that was “as on target today as when it was written sixtyfive years ago.” Like Degler and Hedges before her, Lane reinforced this in her introduction, where she highlighted Gilman’s argument for women’s “common
humanity” with men. “A healthy social organism . . . requires the autonomy
of women. That autonomy can be achieved only by women’s collective ac-
tion.” Lane noted the inextricability for Gilman of writing and activism, ef-
fectively rendering Herland a call for “collective action” on the part of women and feminists in her own era. Such activism was still urgently needed; it was in 1979, for example, that the Equal Rights Amendment—written in Gilman’s
lifetime by Alice Paul and first introduced in Congress in 1923—failed to be-
come part of the US Constitution because of an insufficient number of state
ratifications (and remaining so to this day). “The crisis of gender inequality loomed large: . . . Gilman’s utopia—in which self- sufficient women, free of
patriarchal oppression, governed themselves—offered a liberating yet tanta-
lizing fantasy, still far beyond the reach of readers.”15
Just as Lane (through Gilman) issued this challenge to the staying power
of patriarchy, so other feminist literary critics continued their activism in aca-
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demia: in 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in
the Attic, a study of female writers in the nineteenth century. Among this volume’s many contributions was an early analy sis of Gilman’s work. “The Yel-
low Wall- Paper,” the authors argued, serves as a meditation on female writers’
“parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies.” Introducing the 2000 reissue of their volume, Gilbert and Gubar aptly supply a frame-
work for understanding both the imbrication of recovery with its sociopo litical context and the trajectory of sec ond- wave recoveries in Gilman studies in particular. For feminists of the 1970s, they explain, “the personal was the politi cal,” and “the sexual was the textual.”16
GILMAN UNCOVERED:
RECOVERING THE UNPUBLISHED WRITING
Although feminist activists and academics have followed varying and more
nuanced paths since the sec ond- wave era—Golden has astutely surveyed such
developments in Gilman studies, so I will not rehash them here—critics’ in-
creasing attention to women’s private and otherwise unpublished cultural pro-
duction has certainly been fueled, at least in part, by the enduring idea that the personal is po liti cal. Of course, this scholarship has also established that such binary categories themselves force into a false dichotomy the shifting,
complex nature of texts and self- representation, particularly for women, who have had limited and uneven access to conventional publication.
Focusing specifically on recovery work in early Ameri can studies, Theresa
Strouth Gaul elucidates the forces driving scholars’ ever- expanding recovery efforts. “Scholars working on women’s writing have long understood that attending primarily to published artifacts like books excludes from view the majority of women writers, who did not have access to publication, produced
their work in manuscript form, and wrote in genres traditionally considered
to be private or appropriate for females.” Although Gilman lived and worked
in an era when women of her background could achieve publication with
relative ease, Gaul’s remarks are instructive for our understanding of both the constraints that remained on Gilman’s voice and the ethos that surely contributed to the recovery of Gilman’s so- called private writing.17
The majority of this private writing has now been published; predictably,
this recovery seems to have been fueled by scholars’ increasing interest in Gilman after her appearance on the scene as outlined above as well as by critics’
commitment to historicizing their analyses and their recognition that private writing is worthy of analy sis in its own right. The deep recovery of Gilman’s unpublished work also indicates that the trajectory of her own life still resonates with feminists decades after her death. In 1988 Denise Knight began the
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process of recovering Gilman’s diaries, which she published in a two- volume
set in 1994; a single- volume abridged edition followed in 1998. Interest in recovering Gilman’s correspondence began even earlier. In 1985, Juliet Langley
published some letters by Gilman to her first love, Martha Luther, in Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, an important radical feminist journal founded in 1982. It is significant that Langley sought to document Gilman’s relationship with Luther at that his tori cal moment, when women were increasingly and publicly shaking off the compulsory heterosexuality of both mainstream culture and some segments of the early women’s movement, as Adrienne Rich so eloquently argued
in 1980. “Throughout her life,” Langley writes, “Gilman struggled relentlessly to create a world in which women could live, love, and express themselves as
fully as possible. Perhaps through these letters we will find the courage to realize, express, and live our own ‘audacious fancies’ ”18
Like Langley, Mary Hill recognized the myriad ways Gilman’s correspon-
dence spoke to contemporary women. In 1995 she published A Journey from
Within, a volume of Gilman’s letters to her sec ond husband, Houghton Gilman. This project had been in the works for many years, during which Hill
admits her views of the letters evolved, a process that occurred alongside successive waves of feminist activism in Ameri can culture. The letters are com-
plex, contradictory, and subtly crafted texts that illustrate Gilman’s attempts to negotiate “almost every women’s issue she publicly discussed.”19
Among the most prominent of these issues is “work- family reconciliation,”
long a concern of women’s and workers’ rights advocates and one that was at
the forefront of feminist discourse during the years in which Hill was work-
ing with Gilman’s correspondence (as it still is today). Gilman’s letters, like much of her other writing, document the anguish caused by her inability to
balance personal and po liti cal, private and public, body and mind—her de-
sires as lover, wife, and mother with those as intellectual, writer, and world worker. Although much of Gilman’s work aimed to challenge the idea that
such categories had to be separate or oppositional, her strategy, as Davis argues through out her biography of Gilman, seems to have been to continu-
ally suppress the in di vidual in favor of the pub lic self, at great personal cost.
This struggle, which so captivated Hill in her recovery of Gilman’s letters, remains as relevant as ever: a half century after the advent of feminism’s sec-
ond wave, Stephanie Coontz has shown, “When family and work obligations
collide, mothers remain much more likely than fathers to cut back or drop
out of work. But unlike the situation in the 1960s, this is not because most
people believe this is the preferable order of things. Rather, it is of ten a reasonable response to the fact that our po liti cal and economic institu
tions lag way behind our personal ideals.” Coontz notes, “This is where the po liti cal gets really personal.”20
194 / Chapter 9
Certainly, Gilman’s attempts to make her personal ideals compatible with
what she perceived as her pub lic duties (and with the extremely limiting po-
liti cal and economic institutions of her day) are starkly evident in the more comprehensive volume The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which Denise Knight and I published in 2009. Recent developments in epistolary
studies provided us with a framework for appreciating the “performative, fic-
tive, and textual dimensions” of Gilman’s letters, in which Gilman negotiated the tensions between aspiration and limitation.21 Although our study of the letters (initiated in 1990) benefited from recent insights in the scholarship on recovery and epistolarity, however, it generally took shape in response to an early third- wave moment in which we sought to explore Gilman’s “mixed legacy”—
complicating the stories that scholars tell about her, we pointed out—as well as to address a range of issues that remain unresolved in our present moment.22
A case that exemplifies both of these impulses concerns the letter that Gil-
man wrote to her physician, the neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, in 1887, before she departed for Philadelphia to take his rest cure. This letter, long sought by Gilman scholars but recovered only in 2004, provides a trove of information
about the uses to which Gilman put the epistolary form and reveals substantial biographical details. It also enriches our framework for interpreting Gilman’s best- known work of published fiction, “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” and speaks
directly to some of the most nettlesome problems facing women’s rights ad-
vocates in the twenty- first century.
Written in 1890 and published in 1892, “The Yellow Wall- Paper” is a haunt-
ing account of a woman apparently driven mad by Victorian gender norms
and their enforcement in medical treatment for so- called hysterical women;
in particular, the story, though not reproducing the full regimen of the rest cure, critiques its disregard for the patient’s perspective and its silencing of women. Although it is a work of fiction, the story is informed by Gilman’s