by Jill Bergman
10. Davis, Biography, 228.
11. In 2010 the National Organization for Women reported, “For full- time,
year- round workers, women are paid on average only 78 percent of what men are paid. . . . These wage gaps stubbornly remain despite the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and a variety of legislation prohibiting employment discrimination.” National Organization for Women, “Women Deserve Equal Pay,” http://
www.now.org/issues/economic/factsheet.html.
12. 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), vii–viii.
13. The Feminist Press confirms the explicit link between recovery and ac-
tivism, reminding us that publishers have always partnered with scholars in such efforts: “we began,” the staff of the press explain, “as a crucial publishing component of sec ond wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much- needed texts
for the developing field of women’s studies.” Feminist Press, “About FP,” http://
www.feministpress.org/about- fp.
14. Elaine R. Hedges, “Afterword,” in The Yellow Wall- Paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892 (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), 37, 39; Elaine R. Hedges,
“ ‘Out at Last’?: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ after Two Decades of Feminist Criticism,”
in The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper, ed. Catherine J.
Golden (New York: Feminist Press, 1992), 327–28.
15. Ann J. Lane, “Introduction,” in Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915; repr., New York: Pantheon, 1979), xi; Tuttle and Kessler, “Introduction,”
15–16. According to Davis, Biography, 474n67, Gilman in fact opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
16. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), xlii, 89.
17. Theresa Strouth Gaul, “Recovering Recovery: Early Ameri can Women and
Legacy’s Future,” Legacy: A Journal of Ameri can Women Writers 26, no. 2 (2009): 265. Gilman also produced a large quantity of public, unpublished work, her lectures most prominent among them; these have yet to find their way into print. In addition, it is important to mention her detective novel, Unpunished, composed in 1929, which she tried and failed to publish during her lifetime. The 1997 recovered edition of this work notes the continued relevance of the novel’s indictment
208 / Chapter 9
of intimate partner violence. Catherine J. Golden and Denise D. Knight, “Afterword,” in Unpunished: A Novel, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Feminist Press, 1997), 222–23. Six years earlier the novel was recognized as still compelling: as in the post–Nineteenth Amendment era in which it was composed,
in the early 1990s, “we are being told that women’s struggle is over” and “existing gains are being threatened.” Lillian S. Robinson, “Killing Patriarchy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Murder Mystery, and Post- Feminist Propaganda,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10, no. 2 (1991): 283.
18. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631–60; Juliette A. Langley, “Audacious Fancies: A Collection of Letters from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Martha Luther,” Trivia: A Journal of Ideas 6 (Winter 1985): 68–69.
19. Mary A. Hill, ed., “Introduction,” in A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 17, 28. In her 1980 Gilman biography, Hill remarked on her plans to publish further on Gilman’s correspondence. Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980), ix.
20. Ariane Hegewisch and Janet Gornick, Statutory Routes to Workplace Flexi-bility in Cross- National Perspective (Wash ing ton, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2008), viii; Stephanie Coontz, “Why Gender Equality Stalled,” New York Times, February 16, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/
why- gender- equality- stalled.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp&.
21. William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 4.
22. Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, eds., “Introduc-
tion,” in The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 12; Denise Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle, eds., “Introduction,” In The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Tuscaloosa: University of Ala bama Press, 2009), xxii.
23. The scholarship on Gilman’s engagement with medical discourse in “The
Yellow Wall- Paper” is vast. In addition to the work of Elaine Hedges cited above, some foundational studies are Catherine J. Golden, “ ‘Overwriting’ the Rest Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Literary Escape from S. Weir Mitchell’s Fictionalization of Women,” in Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Joanne B. Karpinski (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 144–58; Suzanne Poirier, “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctor and Patients,” Women’s Studies 10, no. 1 (1983): 15–40; Paula Treichler,
“Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yel ow Wal paper,’ ” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 3, no. 1–2 (1984): 61–77; and Ann Douglas Wood, “ ‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and Their Treatment in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 1 (1973): 25–52. No-
Tuttle / 209
table recent work on the topic includes Cynthia J. Davis, Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on Ameri can Literature, 1845–1915 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 122–53; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of “The Yellow Wall- Paper” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Denise D. Knight, “ ‘All the Facts of the Case’: Gilman’s Lost Letter to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell,” Ameri can Literary Realism 37, no. 3 (2005): 259–77; Denise Knight, “ ‘I Am Getting Angry Enough to Do
Something Desperate’: The Question of Female ‘Madness,’ ” in “The Yellow WallPaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Dual- Text Critical Edition, ed. Shawn St.
Jean (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 73–87; and Jane F. Thrailkill, “Doctoring ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ ” English Literary History 69, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 525–66. All these works inform my own thinking here.
24. Although the story seems most overtly to criticize Mitchell, it might have actually been an attack on Gilman’s first husband, Charles Walter Stetson. Denise D. Knight, “ ‘Only a Husband’s Opinion’: Walter Stetson’s View of Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall- Paper’; An Inscription,” Ameri can Literary Realism 36, no. 1 (2003): 86–87.
25. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed Denise D. Knight (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 1:385; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935; repr., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 95; S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1888), 48.
26. Gilman, Selected Letters, 45, 47, 49–50.
27. Ibid., 45, 49, 50.
28. Knight asserts that Gilman “proposes to aid S. Weir Mitchell in making
a diagnosis.” Knight’s rhetorical analy sis of the letter indicates that in it Gilman was “attempting to reclaim her identity, to advance an agenda, and to illustrate her self- worth.” Knight, “All the Facts of the Case,” 264, 268.
29. Ibid., 271.
30. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall- Paper, ed. Elaine R. Hedges (1892; repr., New York: Feminist Press, 1996), 11. There is still a clear need for further feminist scholars
hip on such sexuo- textual power dynamics when even the most welcome and legitimate of calls for greater his tori cal precision in accounts of Mitchell’s rest cure can effectively reinscribe Mitchell as the sole authority in the encounter. Gilman used the language (and the license) of fiction to comment on her experience of illness, but this “literary representation” of the treatment remains suspect because it is an inaccurate portrayal of the “highly orchestrated regimen established by Mitchell.” Michael Blackie, “Reading the Rest Cure,” Arizona Quarterly 60, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 79.
31. For an excellent discussion of Gilman’s engagement with medical discourse beyond “The Yellow Wall- Paper,” see Martha J. Cutter, “The Writer as Doctor:
210 / Chapter 9
New Models of Medical Discourse in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Later Fiction,”
Literature and Medicine 20, no. 2 (2001): 151–82.
32. Ameri can Medical Women’s Association, “AMWA’s History of Success,”
http://www.amwa- doc.org/about- amwa/history; Molly Carnes, Claudia Morrissey, and Stacie E. Geller, “Women’s Health and Women’s Leadership in Academic
Medicine: Hitting the Same Glass Ceiling?” Journal of Women’s Health 17, no. 9
(2008): 1454, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586600/; Susan
Scherman, with Voices from the Network, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy, ed. Susan Scherman and the Feminist Health Care Ethics Research Network (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 13; Susan Scherman, “A Relational Approach to Autonomy in Health Care,” in The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy, ed. Susan Scherman and the Feminist Health Care Ethics Research Network (Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press, 1998), 44.
33. Karen L. Baird, Beyond Reproduction: Women’s Health, Activism, and Public Policy (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2009), 26.
34. United Nations, “Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action,” Fourth
World Conference on Women, Beijing, Sep tem ber 4–15, 1995, http://www.un.org/
womenwatch/daw/beijing/pdf/BDPfA%20E.pdf; United Nations, “Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women,” http://www
.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/text/econvention.htm#intro.
35. Lisa Baldez, “U.S. Drops the Ball on Women’s Rights,” CNN Opinion,
March 8, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/08/opinion/baldez- womens- equality
- treaty; Ellen Chesler, “Introduction,” in Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality, and Women in the New Millennium, ed. Wendy Chavkin and Ellen Chesler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 14, 15.
36. Sunlen Miller, “Birth- Control Hearing Was ‘Like Stepping into a Time
Machine,’ ” ABC News, February 17, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/
2012/02/birth- control- hearing- was- like- stepping- into- a- time- machine/.
37. Sandra Fluke, “Sandra Fluke’s Speech: Full Text from the Democratic Na-
tional Convention,” National Journal, Sep tem ber 5, 2012, http://www.nationaljournal
.com/conventions- speeches/sandra- fluke- s- speech- full- text- from- the- democratic
- national- convention- 20120905.
38. Katha Pollitt, “Wendy Davis, Superhero,” Nation, June 26, 2013, http://
www.thenation.com/blogs/katha- pollitt#; Leticia Van de Putte, “Leticia Van de Putte Asks What Women Need to Do to Be Heard in the Texas Legislature,” YouTube, June 25, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPntuZ7jmGY. Although
Davis’s filibuster succeeded in blocking the passage of Senate Bill 5, the nearly identical House Bill 2 was signed into law soon afterward. A Supreme Court challenge to some provisions of this law, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, is cur-
Tuttle / 211
rently underway. There, at least, women have a place at the table, and there, too, they refuse to be silenced. The March 2, 2016, discussion of the case was notable in this respect: “ There was something wonderful and symbolic,” writes Dahlia Lithwick, “about [Chief Justice John] Roberts losing almost complete control over the court’s indignant women, who are just not inclined to play nice anymore.”
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, March 2016.
39. Gaul, “Recovering Recovery,” 265.
40. Cristina Giorcelli, Laura Moschini, and Anna Scacchi, “Donne e polis:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman oggi,” prospectus of the “Women and Polis: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Today” conference, Rome, Oc to ber 22–23, 2010.
41. Olga Castro and Emek Ergun. “CFP: Feminist Translation Studies.” WMST- L, July 18, 2013.
42. Gilman, Living, 305; Cynthia J. Davis, “Abroad Yet Narrow: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Transatlantic World,” paper presented at the Transatlantic Women II Conference, Florence, Italy, June 6–9, 2013; Davis, Biography, 276.
43. Davis, Biography, 368–69; Davis, “Abroad Yet Narrow”; Gilman, Living, 299.
44. Anna Scacchi, ed., “Una donna vittoriana a Utopia,” in La terra delle donne: Herland e altri racconti (Rome: Donzelli, 2011), xxvii. The quotations in the original Italian are a pochi anni dalla pubblicazione negli Stati Uniti and Gilman e poco nota in Italia.
45. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, La carta gialla, ed. and trans. Bibi Tomasi and Laura McMurphy (Milan: La Tartaruga, 1976). The first edition was Le signore dell’orrore [Ladies of Horror], ed. Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis, trans. Lisa Mor-purgo (Milan: Loganesi, 1973).
46. Correspondent in Rome, “New Family Law Gives Italian Wives Equality,”
Sydney Morning Herald, May 1, 1975, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301
&dat=19750501&id=NvpjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=YeYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3024,78125; Laura Moschini, “The Economic Proposals of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Gender Budgeting in Italy,” International Review of Sociology 19, no. 3 (2009): 434.
47. “Take Back the Night, Brooklyn, 2010,” Rad- Sauce, De cem ber 29, 2012,
http://ninjabikeslut.tumblr.com/post/39187523125/in- 1976- claudia- caputi- a- 17- year
- old- woman- was.
48. Moschini, “Economic Proposals,” 434; Scacchi, “Una donna,” xviii. The
origi nal Italian is ma poi Gilman e stata dimenticata per piu di due decenni.
49. Michela Marzano, “The Humiliation of Women: The Situation in Italy,”
TransEuropa 9 (May 10, 2010): 18. According to studies cited in 2013 by Rashida Manjoo, the United Nations reporter on violence against women, “53 percent of women appearing on television in Italy didn’t speak, while 46 percent of them
‘were associated with issues such as sex, fashion, and beauty, and only 2 percent
212 / Chapter 9
issues of social commitment and professionalism.’ ” Nicole Winfield, “Italy Tries to Reduce Violence against Women,” Yahoo News, May 2, 2013, http://news.yahoo
.com/italy- tries- reduce- violence- against- women- 113833126.html.
50. Michael R. Hill, ed., “Introduction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on the So-
ciology of Families, Marriages, and Children,” in Families, Marriages, and Children (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011), xi.
51. Moschini, “Economic Proposals,” 437, 443.
52. Ibid., 435, 443.
53. Chloé Avril, The Feminist Utopian Novels of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Themes of Sexuality, Marriage, and Motherhood (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2008), 34; Scacchi, “Una donna,” xxxi. The origi nal Italian phrases are scrivere con uno scopo, modelli per cambiare, and che offra alle lettrici strutture narrative diverse sulle quali immaginare le proprie vite.
54. Moschini, “Economic Proposals,” 436. In May 2013, “Italy’s lower chamber
of parliament ratified a European anti- domestic violence convention on the same day that the latest victim was buried: a 15- year- old girl beaten, stabbed 20 times, and burned alive, allegedly by her boyfriend.” Winfield, �
��Italy Tries to Reduce.”
However, “politicians were criticized for not taking the issue more seriously after only a handful turned up to debate about the treaty”—the chamber was “nearly
empty.” Naomi O’Leary, “Brutal Murder of Teenager Overshadows Italy[‘s] Wom-
en’s Rights Vote,” Reuters, May 28, 2013, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/
uk- italy- women- idUKBRE94R0TW20130528.
55. Ben Marshall, “The Rise of Women in Italy,” Stylist, http://www.stylist
.co.uk/life/the- rise- of- women- in- italy#image- rotator- 1.
56. Franco is the author of Care Ragazze: Un Promemoria [Dear Girls: A Reminder] (Rome: Donzelli, 2010), in which she reminds younger generations of
women about what progress has been made but also what remains to be done.
Bruna Bianchi, Review of La terra del e donne: Herland e altri racconti, (1891–
1916), ed. and trans. Anna Scacchi Deportate, essuli, profughe 20 (July 2012), 222.
The origi nal Italian is L’importanza di queste scritture . . . non risiede tanto nel loro contenuto, . . . ma nell’atto stesso dell’immaginare, nella capacità di guardare oltre il presente and a riscoprire l’impulso progettuale del femminismo.
57. Harish Trivedi, “Introduction,” in Translation as Recovery, by Sujit Mukherjee (Delhi: Pencraft, 2009), 11; Olga Castro, “(Re- )Examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave?,” trans. Mark Andrews, MonTI 1
(2009): trans; Michael Cronin, “Ideology and Translation,” in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, ed. Olive Classe (Lon don: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 695; Olga Castro, “Talking at Cross- Purposes?: The Missing Link between Feminist Linguistics and Translation Studies,” Gender and Language 7, no. 1 (2013): 35.
58. Patrick E. Tyler, “Hillary Clinton, in China, Details Abuse of Women,”
Tuttle / 213
New York Times, Sep tem ber 6, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/06/world/
hillary- clinton- in- china- details- abuse- of- women.html; Marzano, “Humiliation of Women,” 18.