Examining the Limitations of Theory: Counterbalancing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Economic Treatment of the Woman Question

“Some of the worst evils under which we suffer, evils long supposed to be inherent and ineradicable in our natures, are but the result of certain arbitrary conditions of our own adoption”

-Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Women and Economics (1898)

In her feminist treatise, Women and Economics (1898), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, presents a solution to the Woman Question based partially (if not completely) on economics. Gilman’s main argument claims that the human species as a whole has suffered from the patriarchal system that keeps women in the home. The only mutually beneficial way for both sexes to move forward is for women to move away from the domestic sphere to find emotional and intellectual fulfillment and independence in the work place (while still balancing a home life). Since the resurgence in Gilman studies in the 1960’s, modern critical scholars (Chang, Davis, Gill, et al.) have recapitulated Gilman’s economic notions. These recent studies shed new light on Gilman’s economic vision as to whether her solution to the Woman Question can be applied realistically, which previous studies had not addressed. This essay will interpret Gilman’s economic vision together with Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and E.D.E.N. Southworths’s The Hidden Hand (1859) and analyze how these two novels are in conversation with Gilman’s vision and ultimate solution to the Woman Question. Do these two novels anticipate Gilman’s rhetoric? Or are these two novels in completely different theoretical frameworks?

Women and Economics and Modern Critical Response

            Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860-1935), the great-niece of Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffered a nervous breakdown after the birth of her daughter Katherine and was administered the “rest cure” which “put her to bed, where she was fed, bathed, massaged and advised to have her child with her at all times”[1] by the famous physician Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Not long after, she divorced her first husband and granted him custody of her daughter. She then moved to California where her creativity flourished. Although “this early nervous collapse marked the rest of her life,”[2] it also provided her with much-needed inspiration to write her most famous work, The Yellow Wall-paper (1892).

            After moving to California she married her second husband, George Houghton Gilman, and wrote prodigiously including the feminist treatise Women and Economics (1898). Influenced by Edward Bellamy and Frank Ward, Gilman “emphasizes [in Women and Economics] that women must have ‘world work’ beyond their traditional roles as wife and mother” [3] with the ultimate goal of gaining and maintaining their emotional and intellectual independence away from the domestic sphere. Gilbert and Gubar, in their introduction to Gilman, go much further in praising Women and Economics. They herald it as the ultimate feminist “Bible”:

Hailed as the Bible of the women’s movement and translated into seven languages, the latter work established the argument Gilman would extend in many other publications, namely, the claim that women’s economic dependency on men had arrested not only their intellectual and emotional growth but also the healthy development of the human species.[4]

During her lifetime Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote nearly two-hundred short stories, fifteen books, and numerous lectures. Sadly, she was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer late in life, and passed away by consuming chloroform “not because of the pain she suffered, she explained, but because her career of service was over”[5]. Resurgence in Gilman studies during the 1960’s established her reputation as the foremost mother of first wave feminism.   

Cynthia J. Davis in her critical essay "Love and Economics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman On ‘The Woman Question’" (2005)[6] argues that while Gilman idealized her solution to the Woman Question (as put forward in Women and Economics), her own personal life (and papers) reveal that combining life and work was no easy task. Davis concludes that Gilman’s personal life (her disastrous first marriage, and comfortable second) and her papers reveal that “combining living and loving–without equating them–could prove the most troublesome task of all”[7], an issue that her treatise does not address or even take into account. If Gilman boldly proclaims that the Woman Question is not one of sex, but of economics, then how should we (as 21st century scholars) treat the incongruence between her private life (which seems to problematize her ideas) and her idealization (and public commitment) of her economic theories? While Davis addresses this paradox she ultimately concludes that by Gilman promoting her ideas and aspirations public, she revealed her “fundamental idealism” in the belief of her theories, and brought them that much closer to “done deeds”[8].

While it is true that Gilman never satisfied the paradox between her ideas and her actions, it does not necessarily follow that her theories/ideas on the relation between women and a patriarchal 19^th century American economy are faulty or do not deserve examination. Mary Ann Dimand in her study titled “The Economics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman”[9] pronounces that while Gilman has been discussed as an economic theorists before (specifically by Michael Barratt Brown in 1984), these readings “are so fragmentary as to amount to misrepresentation”[10], hence they provide partial interpretations of her economic theories. Dimand, on the other hand, sets out to faithfully interpret Gilman’s economic themes in Women and Economics in conjunction with other of her works (Our Androcentric Culture, and her writings for The Forerunner). Gilman’s main theme in Women and Economics, according to Dimand, was to “attempt to define the conventionally housebound and unpaid woman’s role in the economy”[11] in order to situate the problems areas and possible solutions that would improve her role. Gilman’s ultimate concern was to define women’s share in the wealth of the world: “although it must be admitted that men make and distribute the wealth of the world, yet women earn their share of it as wives. This assumes [an employer/employee relationship] . . ., or that marriage is a ‘partnership’, and the wife an equal factor with the husband in producing wealth”[12], yet Dilmand exclaims, “women are not employees of their husbands or fathers”[13] nor do they equally share the wealth of the husband in this ‘partnership”, hence it follows that women are not economically independent members of society and completely dependent upon their fathers or husbands.

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Anticipating Gilman: Ideology in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Eden Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1859)

The theme of race has been fairly absent in modern Gilman scholarship[14], but its relation to the domestic sphere in 19^th century America cannot be ignored. Both in the South and North the presence of African-American women/girls in the home both enslaved and indentured revealed the social constructions of race and the hierarchal position of whiteness over blackness. If the Woman Question is not one of sex but of economics, then the racial factor behind that economic system must be addressed.  Since the subjugation of women in 19^th century America ignored racial boundaries, African-American women (who were subjugated only because of sex, but also because of color) who were traditionally at the bottom of the economic scale were particularly sensitive to this gender disparity.

            Frado, the main character of Our Nig who gets abandoned by her white mother and black father at the footsteps of the Bellmonts experiences the double jeopardy of both race and gender. While all the women in the Bellmont home seem subject to the patriarchy of 19^th century America, Frado experiences cruelty from other women who are themselves victims of patriarchy.  African-Americans in 19^th century America experienced oppression from those already heavily oppressed. It seems patriarchy surpassed racism in its ideological maneuverings of 19^th American society.

Although the patriarchal economic system of 19^th century America permeated society completely, the home in the novel becomes a space that supports patriarchy and its sister oppression, racism. In her critical essay “Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig”[15] Lois Leveen delineates how the “racial dynamics of slavery are replicated in interracial encounters outside of slavery”[16] in this case the home, and how the home creates or supports “hierarchies of power”[17]. More importantly, Frado’s status as a legally bonded indentured servant to the Bellmont’s places her at the bottom of the home’s hierarchal maneuverings. Central to this hierarchy is Frado’s relation to whites: “she thought she should, by remaining [in the house], be in some relation to white people she was never favored with before”[18]  Together with Gilman, Wilson presents a bleak picture of women’s economic status, namely that no matter the race a woman’s labor in the home (or domestic sphere) was not economically recognized. Gilman’s theory “that the economic status of women generally depends upon that of men generally, and that the economic status of women individually depends upon that of men individually”[19] holds even more ground in Wilson’s Our Nig where a racial dynamic extends the severity of the dependence of women on men and which seems to anticipate Gilman’s Women and Economics. Because her labor, as an African-American woman, was not economically acknowledged, “[t]he story of her physical subjugation is what she can sell in lieu of her physical labor”,[20] we find this same story all throughout the 19^th century (the image of the “scribbling woman” who writes in order to support herself because her labor, or the kind of work available to her, cannot support her).

            Serialized first in 1859 and published in book form in 1888, E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand anticipates the central argument of Women and Economics by presenting an anti-sentimentalist protagonist, Capitola Black, who cross-dresses as a boy in order to survive as an orphan in 19^th century New York City. Not only is Capitola a young woman with no work available, but she is also “black” by way of her last name “Le Noir” or Capitola Black. This blackness, we find, is socially constructed, and cleverly inserted into the novel by Southworth in order to add another dimension to her multi-dimensional protagonist. 

Katherine Nicholson Ings in her essay “Blackness and the Literary Imagination: Uncovering The Hidden Hand” reflects that this “integration of blackness into the narrative”[21] metaphorically points to the racial complications of our historical and literary past, complications that the literary royalty of our day still have not come to grips with:

This miscegenated foundation of American Literature, however, has been largely unacknowledged by white scholars who may misinterpret cultural signs or disregard those elements that appear trivial . . . to them. Such a reading practice contributes to the idea of textual “passing”: by not recognizing or by misreading the racial influence of canonical texts, scholars can actually help a text pass as “white” literature. Textual passing thus encourages cultural blinders, allowing literary historians to perpetuate the myth of a homogenous literary tradition.[22]

In my view, Ings theory clearly connects to Waimbaum’s claim mentioned earlier that explicates how in the recovery of Gilman scholars “centrality of racialized reproductive thinking to her feminism, or her express concern with women’s role in creating a ‘pure’ national genealogy”^[23]. In other words, in canonizing texts such as The Hidden Hand and Women and Economics we must not only situate them in their proper historical/racial and ideological space, but also recognize the ideological moves we are making in placing these texts on the pedestal in or modern time.

            Writing in 2001, Wainbaum recognizes a resurgence in Gilman scholarship (specifically the 1998 edition of Women and Economics edited by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson), but seems disturbed that this recent scholarship “either continue[s] to omit discussion of Gilman’s racism and nativism, or merely pay[s] lip service to endemic problems”^[24]. She recognizes a dangerous problem with recovery projects, specifically with Kimmel and Aronson’s edition, that exhibit a “strong resistance to the conceptual transformations that might ideally result from a reassessment of the underpinnings of Gilman’s writings”^[25]. In other words, in the process of recovering texts and formulating literary traditions scholars run the risk of continuing the conceptual trajectory under which the original text was written.

In chapter VI of The Hidden Hand entitled “A Short, Sad Story” Capitola relates the ordeals of homelessness that she experienced and how she ultimately found sustaining work. Capitola describes the usual answers given to her when asking for work: “[s]ome of the good-natured landlords said, if I was a boy now, they could keep me opening oysters, but as I was a girl, they had no work for me”[26], the landlords reluctance to offer her work is based solely on her sex and nothing else. Here Capitola found herself in a peculiar situation. One of the consequences of being a woman in a deeply patriarchal society (in 19^th century America) is subjugation and/or discrimination by those in the superior role, i.e. men. She was looked down because of her sex and the work she could do was limited, in man’s eyes, because she was a woman.

            Capitola faces a dilemma: “I was a girl, they had no work for me”[27]. This is discrimination and subjugation in its simplest form. According to patriarchal ideology, which the landlords in the novel represent, Capitola as a woman cannot ask for work in the first place because her place is in the domestic sphere (even as a young child) who was not adequate for the kind of work she was asking to do (delivering papers). What is more interesting is how Capitola herself starts to internalize the ideologies of her patriarchal society: “And then I felt bitter against fate for not making me a boy!”[28].  Instead of resisting the oppressions of patriarchal ideology she decides to play within the ideology in order to simply survive. What this means, is that Southworth is recognizing women’s economic dependence on men even before Gilman’s economic treatise on women. 

Conclusion???

How do I turn this into a list?

Bildungsroman? Capitola’s and Frado’s stories as bildungs??

           

           

             

Bibliography

Davis, Cynthia J. ""Love and Economics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman On 'The Woman Question'" ATQ 19, no. 4 (2005): 243-58.

Dimand, Mary Ann. "The Economics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." In Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics, edited by Mary Ann Dimand, Robert W. Dimand, and Evelyn L. Forget, by Mary Ann Diamnd, 124-49. Aldershot, Hants, UK: E. Elgar, 1995.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman." In The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 1130-131. Second ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 1996.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1998, 12.  http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft896nb5rd/

 Ings, Katherine Nicholson. “Blackness and the Literary Imagination: Uncovering The Hidden Hand”. In Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durnham: Duke University Press, 1996, 132.

Leveen, Lois. "Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig." African American Review 35, no. 4 (2001): 561-80.

Southworth, E.D.E.N. The Hidden Hand, Or, Capitola the Madcap. New Brunswick [N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Wagner-Martin, Linda and Cathy N. Davidson. "Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman." In The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson, 41. Oxford [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Weinbaum, Alys E. "Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Materialist Feminism." Feminist Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 271-302.

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[1] Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman." In The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 1130-131. Second ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 1996.

[2] Gilbert and Gubar, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman", 1130.

[3]Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson. "Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman." In The Oxford Book of Women's Writing in the United States, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin and Cathy N. Davidson, 41.New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

[4] Gilbert and Gubar,"Charlotte Perkins Gilman", 1131.

[5] Gilbert and Gubar,"Charlotte Perkins Gilman”, 1131.

[6] Cynthia J. Davis, "Love and Economics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman On 'The Woman Question'" ATQ 19, no. 4 (2005): 243-58.

[7] Davis, “Love and Economics”, 256.

[8] Davis, “Love and Economics”, 257.

[9] Mary Ann Dimand, "The Economics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." In Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics, edited by Mary Ann Dimand, Robert W. Dimand, and Evelyn L. Forget, by Mary Ann Diamnd, 124-49. Aldershot, Hants, UK: E. Elgar, 1995.

[10] Dimand. “The Economics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman", 125.

[11] Dimand,"The Economics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.", 128.

[12]  Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1998, 12.  http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft896nb5rd/

[13] Dimand,"The Economics of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.", 129.

[14] In her recent work, the scholar Alys Eve Wainbaum in "Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Materialist Feminism." has offered a harsh critique of modern Gilman scholars for continuing to ignore the “centrality of racialized reproductive thinking to her [Gilman’s] feminism, or her express concern with women’s role in creating a ‘pure’ national genealogy”. Now, while an assessment of Gilman’s work in light of Wainbaum’s study might offer some intriguing ideas, it is not the concern of this paper to revolutionize the field of Gilman studies, but rather to recapitulate Gilman’s economic treatise as a response to Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig.

[15] Lois Leeven. "Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig." African American Review 35, no. 4 (2001): 561-80.

[16] Leeven, Lois. . "Dwelling in the House of Oppression”, 561.

[17] Leeven, Lois. . "Dwelling in the House of Oppression”, 561.

[18] Harriet E. Wilson. Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. (New York: Penguin, 2009), 17.

[19] Gilman, Women and Economics, 10.

[20] Leeven, “Dwelling in the House of Opression”, 578.

[21] Katherine Nicholson Ings. “Blackness and the Literary Imagination: Uncovering The Hidden Hand”. In Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durnham: Duke University Press, 1996, 132.

[22] Ings, “Blackness and Literary Imagination”, 132.

[23] Weinbaum, Alys E. "Writing Feminist Genealogy”, 271.

[24] Weinbaum, Alys E. "Writing Feminist Genealogy”, 292.

[25] Weinbaum, Alys E. "Writing Feminist Genealogy”, 292-293.

[26] Southworth, E.D.E.N. The Hidden Hand, Or, Capitola the Madcap. New Brunswick [N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988, 43.

[27] E.D.E.N Southworth. The Hidden Hand, Or, Capitola the Madcap. New Brunswick [N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988, 43.

[28] Southworth, E.D.E.N. The Hidden Hand, Or, Capitola the Madcap. New Brunswick [N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988, 46.