Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is well known to lovers of Gothic horror for her acclaimed story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). This story, considered one of the first written documents on postpartum depression, reveals the gender bias of the psychologists of her time. But Gilman was more than just a writer of Gothic horror fiction: she was also a prolific poet, lecturer, illustrator, and essayist. After her divorce from Charles Stetson, she was the subject of a scandal, becoming the indirect target of editorials in ultra-conservative magazines that questioned the ability of literate women to fulfil their duties as wives and mothers. Like many women of the Progressive Era, such as Jane Addams and Anna Julia Cooper, her biography would make a fascinating basis for a TV series or film. (If you are reading this and you are a producer with the means: I have the ideas for the script; please get in touch!)
Perhaps most intriguing of all is how a woman who never had the opportunity to attend university and had to educate herself came to conceive ideas that are still relevant today. Gilman can be considered a pioneer of feminist political economy. Her essay Women and Economics, written in 1898, combined her feminist and socialist ideas with evolutionary theory. The main aim of the essay was to prove that the seclusion of women to the domestic sphere is unjust and unprogressive and brings no natural nor social advantage for the human species. Gilman starts from a classic tripartite model that was relatively common in the social sciences of the time, according to which human life depends on three factors: the environment (like any other living thing), the material universe (like any other physical object), and the social conditions (including economic conditions). An interesting argumentative move, which may seem a minor point, is that she defines “economy” in a much broader sense than did classical political economists: Adam Smith, for instance, was more interested in the wealth of nations or in the circulation of money, while Gilman labels as “economic” any condition that must be given to maintain life. From this perspective, animals that collect food also engage in “economic activity.” The difference with respect to human animals, however, appears with astonishing clarity: only among humans do females depend on the males of the species to survive.
According to Gilman, this phenomenon is unparalleled in the organic world, and she draws two important conclusions: first, that human females are in a sexuo-economic relation (Gilman seems to have coined this term herself), that is, that a woman’s economic status is relative to the sex relation. Second, if this sexuo-economic relation is not found in any other species, its origins are likely to be social rather than natural. Given the advances in industry and agriculture, is there any reason why human females cannot obtain food for themselves? Would it not be preferable to “liberate” women’s talents so that they can contribute to social progress, rather than staying at home, withering away and becoming depressed? Gilman’s answer is an emphatic yes: it is counterproductive to expect women who are responsible for educating future generations to remain ignorant of social progress. Not only that, but the fact that women are financially dependent reduces them to being servants, mere possessions of their husbands, stripped of their humanity.
Gilman’s arguments resonate with many first-wave feminist texts, such as The Subjection of Women (1869) by Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill. Her specific theoretical innovation, however, is its broadening of the economy to what we now call “social reproduction,” that is, attributing economic value to domestic work. It is easy to demonstrate that this is the case: when we outsource these tasks, we pay for them, and so what women do at home has genuine economic value. Decades later, women around the world would come to the same conclusion: domestic work must be paid if there are no other sources of income. In the 1970s, the social movement Wages for Housework, led by Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, among others, campaigned for women to receive what is rightfully theirs.
Another area in which Gilman may well have been a forerunner of later feminist debates was the question of sexual difference. As a keen observer of nature, she cannot deny that there are anatomical differences between males and females and that motherhood places a heavy burden on women. However, in her essays, Gilman seeks to limit the function of sexual difference to the mere fact of reproduction. We find paragraphs where she identifies masculine and feminine with the sexual characteristics of bodies: it is a natural and unchanging fact. On the other hand, there is the concept of the human, which is malleable, changeable, and progressive. How are the concepts of humanity, femininity, and masculinity related to each other?
For Gilman, both the feminine and the masculine equally represent the human. Masculine and feminine would be, so to speak, the natural; whereas the human would also include a cultural and historical element, not reducible to the natural; this is the context for Gilman’s claim that “women have to be humanized.” In her terminology, this means that, while men have had access to the truly human sphere, the realm of the spirit, women have been confined to the home, whose form and function have remained unprogressive.
By introducing the difference between the sexual-natural and the cultural-human, is Gilman advancing the sex and gender distinction? It is difficult to affirm this categorically, but she does seem to be trying to conceptualize this distinction, as many second-wave feminists did much later after the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1949. Gilman often remained ambivalent with regard to gender essentialism and gender constructivism, using her essays and fiction to experiment with different possibilities (some examples are discussed here).
Stereotypes and myths about femininity have been a tool for oppressing women. Without any justification, human culture has long been a man-made world. Taking this term from Lester F. Ward, Gilman wrote a furious essay entitled The Man-Made World; or Our Androcentric Culture (1911), being the first person to use the term critically and denouncing the gender bias in the family, in health, beauty, education, sports, law, government, politics, economics, and so on. In all dimensions of human culture, men have been conceived as the norm and women as the deviation. Many years had passed since her youthful writings, and she remained steadfast in her belief: lack of independence is the worst evil for women, and their home is often nothing more than a well-decorated prison. From this, she draws one of her most revolutionary conclusions: the home, as a human institution, must adapt to social change. In order for as many people as possible, especially women, to be able to enjoy independence and a fulfilling life, homes should be built without kitchens, and domestic tasks should be socialized. There is no household task that would not benefit from a more efficient investment of resources: socializing care, for example, would free up resources for the common good and allow families to expand their social circles, thus releasing women from the isolation of modern motherhood.
Once again, Gilman seems to have contributed to the debate ongoing today about the abolition of the family and the home, which has resurfaced since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the home as a self-sufficient unit is clearly in crisis, highlighting the extent to which the privatization of care has jeopardized the survival of families. On the other hand, new models of family and emotional relationships question whether the bourgeois nuclear family model can be the place of protection and emotional support that children need in order to develop. In her utopia Herland, written in 1915, Gilman fantasized about a matriarchal society structured around cooperative motherhood.
It is striking how the recent anti-feminist wave uses the family and traditional motherhood as weapons. Their appeal to tradition and the pleasures of motherhood as something “naturally given” in the history of the world would find a powerful counterargument in Gilman. And there were many, like her, who fought so that women could leave the confines of the home; only now, women are being forced to retreat there again.
Núria Sara Miras Boronat
Núria Sara Miras Boronat is an associate professor in moral and political philosophy at the University of Barcelona. She focuses on contemporary theories of oppression from a feminist pragmatist perspective. Together with Chiara Ambrosio, she founded the Women in Pragmatism Network. Her latest book isFamília/Family(2025).
