Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, and writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is best known for her influential work "The Yellow Wallpaper," which critiques the patriarchal medical establishment's treatment of women. Gilman's writings and activism played a significant role in advancing women's rights and challenging traditional gender roles.
3 Key excerpts on "Charlotte Perkins Gilman"
eBook - ePubWomen and Peace
Theoretical, Historical and Practical Perspectives
- Ruth Roach Pierson(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...And if feminist pacifists today are more wary of arguments steeped in biological determinism, 4 we are nonetheless still influenced by these early attempts to mobilize women and explain their unique potential as advocates of peace. This essay explores the development of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s understanding of the relation of sex and gender to war and peace, and goes on to consider her response to the grim reality of World War I. Gilman is usually remembered not as a pacifist, but as one of America’s most influential and witty feminist and socialist thinkers. Unlike her friend Jane Addams and many other female reformers, she was never a key activist in the various peace ‘movements’ of her day. Nor did any of her books focus exclusively, or even primarily, on war and peace. Nevertheless, Gilman’s writings reflect a serious attempt to come to terms with the nature and origins of militarism and the meaning of peace. As a writer and lecturer of immense popularity from the late 1890s to the end of the war, her ideas helped mold the thought of a great many early social activitists. Gilman’s views on war and peace found a natural home in her assessment of male/female differences and her critique of patriarchy. More so than most reform-minded Americans, she characteristically emphasized the interconnectedness of issues. Indeed, her broad, weblike approach partly explains her reluctance to become too closely involved with any of the organizations whose cause she endorsed—the notable exception being her commitment, from 1890–1892, to the Bellamy-inspired nationalist socialist clubs in California. Despite this active work for Nationalism, Gilman was always more of a theorist than a political activist...
eBook - ePubProtest Nation
Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism
- Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- The New Press(Publisher)
...3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland (1915) Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a social critic, utopian novelist, and feminist-socialist whose trenchant analysis of the economic basis for women’s subordination has had an enormous impact on modern feminism. After a tough childhood of abandonment, poverty, and inconsistent schooling, Gilman married Charles Stetson in 1884, gave birth to her only daughter, suffered a nervous breakdown (which she chronicled in her chilling 1892 short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper”), and finally divorced her husband in 1894 while she was living in Pasadena, California. A popular lecturer and prolific writer, Gilman earned widespread fame with the publication of Woman and Economics (1898), a pioneering work of sociology that examined sexual inequality as a function of women’s economic dependence on men. Her most creative writing appeared between 1909 and 1916, when she served as editor of The Forerunner, a feminist magazine in which her witty and popular utopian novel, Herland, was serialized in 1915. Herland is a fictional tour through a futuristic utopian island community populated entirely by women and children, and governed by the principle of “New Motherhood,” a cooperative feminist alternative to the male-dominated social-sexual order of late-nineteenth-century America. In the following chapter, “Comparisons Are Odious,” the narrator and his male companions are humbled by the women they encounter in Herland. Gilman, however, never witnessed the feminist utopia she envisioned. She was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, and took her own life in 1935. SOURCE: Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. SELECTED READINGS: Joanne B. Karpinski, Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1992). Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896 (1980). Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1980). There you have it...
eBook - ePub- Michael W Doyle(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...(Of course, one can hope that this will happen as a matter of equity.) Rather, they are pondering what difference it might make to the study of international relations if questions of gender were centrally and routinely included rather than being peripheral, to the extent they appear at all. By gender questions or gender representations, I do not have in mind the much-debated notion that, were women to gain control over states, wars would be resorted to less frequently and less relentlessly. Those of us who have done work in this area recognize that women as leaders and women as mothers and women as workers have sustained and supported the wars of their states in far greater numbers than women in any capacity have acted in opposition to wars, militarism, and nationalistic excess. If these are not the most salient issues, what emerges as exigent if one claims that concerns with gender are important to theorizing about the study of politics, including international relations? My working assumption is that tending to the inclusion of feminist themes—and none that I will take up is narrowly or exclusively feminist—makes a contribution to more robust thinking across the board about the complex world of women, men, the state, and war. There are four general areas of theoretical demarcation and conceptual contestation in international relations that feminist inquiry necessarily touches on. I will take up each in turn. The Reading and Use of Classic Texts We have heard much in recent years about the discursive terrain that helps to constitute the study of international politics as the complex practice that it is. It is not surprising that a number of feminist scholars have been drawn to a rereading and rethinking of foundational texts, including Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz, and others...
