by Jill Bergman
“crossed the Atlantic several times” and “Nearly everywhere she traveled in
Europe, she exulted in her international reputation and in the admiration of
her fans.” When Gilman served as an invited “speaker- at- large” at the International Council of Women Quinquennial in Berlin, the “turnout for her one
talk at the conference was so large that she had to repeat it in a sec ond hall for the overflow crowd.”42
Ameri can suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt confirmed the transatlantic reach
of Gilman’s influence, crediting her work “with utterly revolutionizing the attitude of mind of the entire country, indeed of other countries, as to woman’s place.” Davis takes pains to point out, of course, that, while “Gilman devoted much of her life to theorizing about ‘the world’ and the service necessary on its behalf,” a good portion of her international travel after the first decade of the twentieth century was undertaken “to offset her flagging national reputation.” Similarly, although benefit to the world was a crucial aim of Gilman’s philosophy of activism, as her tolerance for difference narrowed she became
disenchanted with the world she had formerly idealized. During her final de-
cades, “she swapped her always vaguely defined project of uplifting humanity
via ‘world service’ for an investment in specifying the kinds of humans she
considered worthy, or unworthy, of uplift.” Her shrinking enthusiasm for the
world beyond the United States certainly was evident in her account of a ten-
day visit to Italy in 1904, for which, she archly reports, her daughter “had arranged an itinerary of appalling completeness.”43
Italians of Gilman’s time would have had access to one of her works in
translation: Women and Economics appeared there in 1902, a mere “few years after its publication in the United States,” Anna Scacchi points out. She notes that today, however, “Gilman is little known” in Italy.44 Although there is no modern edition of Women and Economics, “The Yellow Wall- Paper” and Herland were important to Italian feminists in the sec ond- wave era. It is illuminating to consider the social context of such recoveries. The first Italian translation of “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” appearing in 1973, packaged the story as a horror tale; the sec ond, however, came out in 1976 as one of the first titles published by the feminist press La Tartaruga, founded in 1975 by Laura Lepetit.45
As in the United States, in Italy this was a period of tumult over issues of
women’s bodily autonomy and their rights in marriage. To provide merely one
example: La Tartaruga’s edition was in production at the same time that Ital-
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ians were in the process of overturning the Roman law of patria potestas (literally, “paternal power”); it had left Italian women “virtually without rights in their own homes, having no say in the upbringing of their children or where
they live, and lacking rights to share family property.” It also had required a woman to take her husband’s surname and permitted a girl to marry as young
as age fourteen—twelve, if she was pregnant. Laura Moschini points out that
the “father’s power” over the family remained the law of the land until 1975, when “sex equality in the family [was] sanctioned” by new legislation; of course, as Moschini also takes pains to confirm, the new laws assured “formal but not actual equality between sexes.”46
It was in such a context that the first Italian translation of Herland was published in 1980, just a year after Ann Lane’s Ameri can edition. It is not
surprising that an all- women’s utopia such as Gilman’s would appear at that
time, when women’s reproductive and sexual rights were at the forefront of
much pub lic discourse. A 1976 protest march in Rome with fifty thousand
participants called for abortion on demand; even though abortion was le-
galized shortly thereafter, it remains a source of conflict in Italy, particularly considering the influence wielded by the Vatican. In the same year, the case
of Claudia Caputi provided a harsh reminder that women still lacked legal
protection from sexual assault and other forms of violence: Caputi was gang-
raped twice, the sec ond time in retaliation for reporting the first; she was also slashed with razors in an attempt to silence her. Within hours of the sec ond attack, fifteen thousand women mobilized to protest the law enforcement and
legal corruption that both sanctioned this violence and further victimized Caputi. A commentator years later noted, “This was the first incarnation of Take Back the Night” in Italy.47
Moschini has noted that this sec ond- wave period in Italy was character-
ized by “a great reflection on the emancipation of women” urged by feminist
activists and academics; the difficulty lay then, as it lies now, in applying that theory and in enforcing the legislative advances that have been made. Although a few Gilman translations appeared during the 1970s and 1980s, in her review
of this literature Scacchi points out that Gilman subsequently “was forgot-
ten for more than two decades.”48 Aside from one appearance of “The Yellow
Wall- Paper” in a 1989 anthology of horror stories, no new Italian translations of Gilman’s work appeared until 2007, and most appeared later than that.
Michela Marzano confirms that after the significant gains and consciousness-
raising of the sec ond- wave decades, there have been “more and more system-
atic attacks on the victories won by feminism. . . . Women are rescaled to remind them that their ‘natural’ place is next to a man. . . . Speech is reserved for men. Women should be content to be beautiful and silent.”49
The recent resurgence of feminism in Italy is characterized by increasingly
Tuttle / 203
pointed critiques such as Marzano’s, and the recovery of Gilman seems to be
riding the crest of this wave. In the last five years a new rediscovery of Gilman has begun, and there is, as Michael Hill has observed, “a small but grow-
ing collection of translations” of her work into Italian.50 Most notable are the three separate anthologies of Gilman’s short fiction: one edited in 2008 by
Marcella Romeo, another in 2010 by Ilaria Police, and finally, Scacchi’s long-awaited 2011 collection, which includes both a detailed scholarly introduction and a translation of Herland.
One glaring absence is that there is no modern Italian edition of Women
and Economics. Moschini has argued that such a translation is sorely needed: the allocation of financial resources “is not,” she reminds us, “a neutral instrument . . . ; on the contrary, it reflects the distribution of power existing in society.” She notes that “some Italian pub lic administration offices are now beginning to implement gender budgeting”—financial reforms intended to
allocate resources more equitably between men and women—“and that is the
reason it is important that these administrators be supported by a gender analy-sis of the context in which they operate” and by Gilman’s “innovative . . . economic theory.”51
In other words, translating Gilman’s work is valuable in part because it can
raise pub lic consciousness about enacting social change. In the absence of a translation that would bring Italians to Gilman’s economic theory, Moschini
has taken Gilman’s economic theory to Italians—“stress[ing] the importance
and topicality of . . . Gilman’s ideas,” for example, at the National Meeting on Gender Budgeting held in Rome in 2006. The administrations and munici-palities that are enacting financial reforms “are well aware,” Moschini notes,
“of the work to be done[,] . . . of the difficulties to be faced before pub lic politics can overcome gender inequalities: for this reason it is important that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s belief, and her proposals, be a
ccessed, investigated, and implemented—even with a 100- year delay.”52
Moschini’s activism is one sign among many that the recovery and transla-
tion of Gilman’s work is not merely an intellectual exercise. Although critics strive to be appropriately mindful of Gilman’s many ideological liabilities, the building urgency among Italian feminist scholars to produce translations of her work suggests, Chloé Avril notes, that Gilman “still has the power to shake us out of complacency and certainty” about having achieved meaningful sexual
equality and about the blind spots that remain within contemporary West-
ern feminism. In her recent Gilman anthology, Scacchi explains that Gilman’s
aim was “to write with a purpose,” and Gilman’s work provides women with
“models for change”; in making Gilman’s writing accessible, the translators
give readers new “narrative structures through which to imagine their lives.”53
The recent Italian upsurge of interest in recovering Gilman is a hopeful
204 / Chapter 9
sign; it accompanies the recent revival of feminism in general. In taking stock of the work that lies ahead for feminist activists and academics, Moschini considers “the Italian resistance to reconsidering the traditional idea of women and family,” which she traces “back, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman asserted after having analysed the female condition and society in the West ern world, to the fact that family, home, and mother are still considered sacred and inalterable institutions. This mentality constitutes the obstacle to the active participation of [Italian] women in productive and social po liti cal actions.” Some other aspects of this problem are women’s sexual objectification—Rubygate, the re-
cent controversy concerning former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s deal-
ings with an underage prostitute, is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg—and violence against women, which remains deeply intractable in Italian culture.54
But while the Italians have Berlusconi, they also have the formidable prose-
cutor Ilda Boccassini, who presided over Berlusconi’s sex charges. The Sciarpa Bianca (White Scarf) marches in 2011 protested the objectification of women,
and the participants described themselves (possibly in reference to the then-
popu lar Ameri can- imported TV show Desperate Housewives) as “neither desperate, nor housewives.” One of the protesters affirmed, in fact, the frequently repeated fact that Berlusconi “reinvigorated the women’s movement.”55 It is
particularly telling that Scacchi’s publisher chose a senator, Vittoria Franco, to write the preface to Scacchi’s new Italian edition of Herland and Gilman’s short fiction. Franco, like Gilman, is a feminist philosopher and longtime activist for social justice. Reviewer Bruna Bianchi confirms of Scacchi’s volume,
“The importance of these writings . . . lies not so much in their content, . . .
but in the very act of imagining, in the ability to look beyond the present.”
Rediscovering Gilman’s work during these troubled times, she predicts, will
lead readers “to rediscover the creative impulse of feminism.”56
Although an appropriately theorized analy sis of the Gilman translations
themselves is beyond the scope of this project, this work will be necessary if we are to understand how, when, and where these translations have appeared
and how they function as translations within the larger field of Gilman studies. Sujit Mukherjee’s book Translation as Discovery “demonstrate[s] how the act of making a translation or even the process of reading one [can] become
a moment of revelatory literary discovery.” Feminist translation theory sug-
gests that such acts of translation are neither objective nor neutral, shaped, as Michael Cronin puts it, more by “ideology” than by “linguistics or aesthetics.”
And Olga Castro points out that translators have a “double (con)textual re-
sponsibility,” with duties toward both the origi nal source and the “(con)texts”
in which the translation will be read.57 In making Gilman’s works available
to a global audience, translators, engaging with and shaped by such contexts,
Tuttle / 205
facilitate recovery not only by bringing more people into the conversation
but also by decentering North Ameri can perspectives in Gilman scholarship.
Translations of Gilman’s work are therefore an important part of the re-
covery that has fueled the field since the sec ond- wave era of feminism. Al-
though a good deal remains to be done to bring the great variety of her output to the awareness of contemporary readers, there now exists a significant body of recovered work, representing her published and unpublished writing, appearing in a variety of languages, and appealing to a diverse readership. The more scholars learn about Gilman, and the more they discover about just how mixed
her legacy is, the more complex their relationship with her becomes. Histori-
cizing recovery in Gilman studies— placing recovery in its myriad contexts—
helps to illuminate that relationship as well as to shed light on why the de-
mand for such recovery remains as strong as ever.
After all, when Hillary Clinton proclaimed in her 1995 address to the Fourth
World Conference on Women that “women’s rights are human rights,” what so
electrified audiences around the world was the very fact that it was still necessary to assert such a thing. More than a decade later, in 2009, Italian po liti cal scientist Sofia Ventura used what was by then familiar language to counter the proposed candidacy of television showgirls in European parliamentary elec-tions, asserting (in words quite reminiscent of Gilman’s), “Women are not
playthings to be used as decoys, nor are they fragile creatures in need of protection and nurturing by generous, paternal overlords; women are, quite simply,
people.”58 Gilman’s writings spoke to such issues in her day, just as they continue to do in ours; her work reveals a great deal about her biography and the time in which she lived, but what we do with it also tells us about ourselves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Jennifer Lunden, Laura Moschini, and Anna Scacchi for their
generous comments on earlier versions of this essay. For producing the illus-
trations I thank the Wisconsin His tori cal Society and Hollis Haywood at the University of New England. I also thank the Wisconsin His tori cal Society and Donzelli Press for granting me permission to use the images.
NOTES
1. Portions of this essay originated in that keynote address: Jennifer S. Tuttle,
“ ‘Scrappy, Imperfect, Desperately Earnest’: Recovering the Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” paper presented at the “Women and Polis: Charlotte Perkins
Gilman Today” conference, Rome, Oc to ber 22, 2010. I thank Cristina Giorcelli,
206 / Chapter 9
Laura Moschini, and Anna Scacchi for inviting me and inspiring my thinking on the project.
2. Elaine Showalter, ed., “Introduction: The Feminist Critical Revolution,”
in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 3; Catherine J. Golden, “Looking Backward: Rereading Gilman
in the Early Twenty- First Century,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts, ed. Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 46, 50.
3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009), 293.
4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898; repr., New York: Prometheus Books, 1994), 49.
5. Sylvia Poggoli, “Italian Women Assail Berl
usconi for Sexist Remarks,” NPR, Oc to ber 28, 2009, http://m.npr.org/story/114242303; Chiara Saraceno, “Affront to Rosy Bindi Exposes the ‘Philosophy of the Exploiter,’ ” trans. Wendell Ricketts, Una Vita Vagabonda, February 3, 2010, http://unavitavagabonda.wordpress
.com/?s=bindi.
6. For a more detailed discussion of this recovery work, see Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler, eds., “Introduction,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 2–4. Much of the material in this section of the chapter appeared previously in this source, and I thank the Ohio State University Press for allowing me to build upon it here.
7. This is in no way meant to diminish the importance of the story’s inclu-
sion the previous year in Gail Thain Parker’s his tori cal anthology The Oven Birds: Ameri can Women on Womanhood, 1820–1920, which traced a genealogy of American feminism. The Feminist Press edition of the story, however, packaged as a single- text reprint with Elaine Hedges’s afterword and marketed to the scholarly and pedagogical arm of the women’s movement, obtained a higher profile. The
story had, in fact, remained in print through out the twentieth century, but many of the anthologies in which it appeared framed it as a horror story. Ann Lane has argued that the sec ond wave of the women’s movement provided an audience that was prepared to appreciate what the Feminist Press edition offered. Ann Lane, ed., The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), x.
8. Cynthia J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), xii, 345.
9. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, “Introduction,” in Women and Eco-
nomics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898; repr., Berke ley: University of
Tuttle / 207
California Press, 1998), vii, viii. This introduction discusses the dynamic relationship between the reissues of Women and Economics and the his tori cal moments in which they have appeared. See also Jennifer S. Tuttle, “Women and Economics,” in Ameri can History through Literature, 1870–1920, ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Detroit, MI: Scribner’s, 2006): 3:1203–7.