| Review: Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| Who will John Kerry choose as his vice-presidential
running mate? I was wondering about that last week. I would like to
see him choose a woman—Carol Mosely Braun would be a good choice.
At the same time though, I doubt it will happen. As a society, we’re
not ready. We weren’t ready for Geraldine Ferraro as VP in 1984,
so we punished her for her temerity with a stinging scrutiny that
went beyond reason. We weren’t ready for Hillary Clinton as
a transparent force in the White House in 1992, so we belittled her
triumphs and chortled over her failures. Still, there were and are women in powerful places—Madeleine Albright, Hanan Ashrawi, Donna Shalala, Janet Reno, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, Alexis Herman, Carol Browner, Diane Feinstein, Barbra Boxer, Ann Veneman, Gale Norton, Elaine Chao, Condoleezza Rice. But really, when you think about it, only a handful. Where are the women, I wondered, and how do we feel about them running the world? And then, for some reason, the name Charlotte Perkins Gilman came to mind. I hadn’t read her in years, not since the ‘70s, when women’s studies was still unknown and forgotten names such as Charlotte Gilman, Kate Chopin, Djuna Barnes, Olive Schreiner, Sarah Orne Jewett, names we’d never heard raised before in any literature class, were just being rediscovered. I pulled Gilman’s short novel Herland off the shelf and reread that, along with her short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman was an unusual woman for her time (1860-1935). During her life, she published poetry, short stories, books (both fiction and non-fiction), divorced her first husband, supported herself, and allowed her first husband custody of their daughter. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, she committed suicide. Clearly, a woman who commanded her own destiny. In Herland, Gilman creates a utopian civilization inhabited and built only by women. There is no war, no famine, no competition, no hierarchy. Women there have one fulfillment—motherhood. And since this is fiction, that goal is achieved without men, dependent on nothing more than an overwhelming desire to procreate. Children are the center of this particular universe, and all energy goes toward providing them an ideal environment where love, patience, learning, and striving to create perfection is all. The introduction of three American males seeking adventure and discovery turns out to have barely any effect at all on Herland or its inhabitants, although it heavily underscores the shortcomings for women and children in America in the early twentieth century. Here’s how the men describe what they find: “Their little country was quite safe. Their farms and gardens were all in full production. Such industries as they had were in careful order. The records of their past were all preserved, and for years the older women had spent their time in the best teaching they were capable of, that they might leave to the little group of sisters and mothers all they possessed of skill and knowledge.” For these three men, a female utopia is hard to believe, and the one with the heaviest saturation of testosterone scoffs. “It’s unlikely women—just a pack of women—would have hung together like that! We all know women can’t organize—that they scrap like anything—are frightfully jealous!” While a more gentle one acknowledges: “These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call ‘femininity.’ This led me very promptly to the conviction that those ‘feminine charms’ we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.” What do the men expect to find? Feminine vanity, a dull submissive monotony, pettiness, jealousy, and hysteria. What do they actually find? Usefulness and dignity and good taste, inventiveness, a social conscience, sisterly affection, fair-mindedness, and a calmness of temper. Used to the idea that a man goes on with his business while a women adapts to him and to it, they’re confused by the resolute self-confidence of women who entirely lack self-doubt and any hint of submissive behavior. “We talk fine things about women,” one man admits, “but in our hearts we know that they are very limited beings—most of them. We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our own decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we value them, all right, ‘in their place’….” How did reading this effect women in 1915? Were they scandalized, the way they were scandalized by Kate Chopin’s The Awakening? Or did it nudge some sense of dissatisfaction? Clearly, there was a chord to strike, because women went to war and, very gradually, things changed. Women won the vote. Women went to work. Women ran for congress. And when, I wonder, will a woman succeed as vice-president, or…dare I say it…president? We shouldn’t forget Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We should read her every once in a while, even if the writing seems antique, the premise hopelessly idealistic or no longer valid. We should read The Yellow Wallpaper to remind ourselves that post-partum depression was once considered a weakness of the feminine mind and body, something that rated a lecture, a good talking-to. That adult wives were often treated as precious, ignorant, little girls. That girl children were raised to show docility, good manners, minor intelligence, and to defer to men in every situation. And that women believed all this, too, right to their core. We shouldn’t forget Charlotte Perkins Gilman because she dared to believe this was wrong. She dared to believe that she mattered. So read her. And read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening--when it came out in 1899, it was banned. Read Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Read them again, or for the first time. It's the least you can do...too many of them died in obscurity, thinking their writing had been in vain. Then, after you've read them, think about how far women have come. Think about how painful it must have been before and during. And, most importantly, think about how far we still have to go.
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