Review of “Catharine Beecher and Charlotte Perking Gilman: Architects of Female Power”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American lecturer, writer, feminist and publisher who was a leading theorist in women’s rights. Gilman’s childhood was surrounded by poverty due to the fact that her father had left the family and it left the mother to fend for her and her children. Most of the education that she was lucky to receive was limited and irregular, Perkins would go to her town library to study books and novels considering her family couldn’t afford a formal education for her as a child. But, she did attend Rhode Island School of Design so she did receive some form of formal education. As Gilman aged, her writings and essays became more concise and sophisticated compared to when she was a younger woman.

For the longest time, women’s role in society was very narrow and set in stone. Women weren’t given the chance to decide life for their own, and there was a very sharp distinction of gender roles. Women were viewed as inferior, weak, and dependant. They were expected to be responsible for the family and maintainance of the house. But as the 19th century began, so did a drastic change in society. Women started voicing their opinions and seeking change. Trying to break away from this ideology called “cult of domesticity” was a lengthy, burdensome, and demanding struggle.

The text ‘The Daughters of England’, is a book written to provide guidance for young women, pertaining to their character and behaviour; the book creates the framework for the role of women in the household. It instructs that women must offer a virtuous influence on men - as wives, mothers, and daughters - as part of their role within society. Estimated to have been written in 1842, in London, ‘Daughters of England’ was penned by Sarah Stickney Ellis; a popular author of Victorian conduct literature. Ellis’ popularity implies that the source was widely circulated at the time, thus represents an important view of contemporary society. This document reveals to us the ideals expected of middle class women of the time, and the principles that were envisioned for them, relating in particular to the ‘separate spheres’ ideology.

“The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood.” This quote from Margaret Sanger highlights many first wave feminists views about the restrictions of motherhood, marriage, and household responsibilities. Many women saw being a mother as a chore or as something out of their control. Sanger fought these restrictions through bringing birth control to the general public who suffered from poverty due to large families. Others, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, wrote social critiques in her texts “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland to bring attention to how society treats women and ideally how motherhood should be. Both of these women believed motherhood was a responsibility of women and they should take it more seriously to create better future generations. This goes beyond the suffrage and equality movement because it dictated that women’s sexual emancipation was equally important as women’s legal emancipation. Being a mother was considered a woman’s most crucial task at this time, therefore the power behind female sexual education and birth control challenged society to feminist.

In 1854 Fanny Fern published what was to become not only her most successful works, but one of the most popular and enduring works of English literature during the Antebellum period: Ruth Hall; A Domestic Tale of the Present Time. Though the title – especially to a modern reader – does little to convey the level of thoughtful and heady critique that Fern expounds through this book, it is actually is a strong indictment of the feminine position as the subordinate housewife, mother, and societal agent. However, despite this criticism, it does not seem that Fanny Fern is critical of the institutions of marriage or motherhood as a whole. Her critique is based on the limiting effects of the conventional roles into which wives and mothers fall, and the deleterious consequences these roles have on the personal development and self-actualization of the women who enter into them. Therefore, it is not the institution of marriage or motherhood that Fern is critical of, but rather the expectations and limitations that society assigns to the women who assume these roles.

The Progressive Era of the 1890’s was a period of immense political debate and economic struggle with the movement of various women seeking reform. The excerpt from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s essay,“women must free themselves from the home to achieve genuine freedom,” presented the argument that an essential piece to the improvement of marriage, motherhood, and individual freedom was independence. Further, the argument Gilman presents supports the transformation of marriage, family, and home by exercising economic interdependence.

The diction Gilman employs relates directly to the lasting role of women in the home to expose the historical adversities endured within the domestic sphere. The intricacy with which Gilman composes the text highlights the inherent

For centuries, women have had the role of being the perfect and typical house wife; needs to stay home and watch the children, cook for husbands, tend to the laundry and chores around the house. In her short story “Girl”, Jamaica Kincaid provides a long one sentence short story about a mother giving specific instructions to her daughter but with one question towards the end, with the daughter’s mother telling her daughter if she had done all the instructions to become a so called “perfect” woman, every man would want her. Kincaid’s structuring in “Girl,” captures a demanding and commanding tone. This short story relates to feminist perspectives. The mother expects a great deal from her daughter to have a certain potential and she does not hesitate to let her daughter understand that. As a matter of fact, the story is about two pages long, made into one long sentence - almost the whole time the mother is giving her daughter directions to follow - conveys a message to the reader that the mother demands and expects great potential in her daughter. The daughter is forced to listen and learn from what her mother is telling her to do to become the perfect housewife. Throughout the story, Kincaid uses the symbols of the house and clothing, benna and food to represent the meanings of becoming a young girl to a woman and being treated like one in society. Women are portrayed to appeal to a man to become the ideal woman in society, while men can do anything they please.

During the Victorian Era in 1837 the period that was ruled by Queen Victoria I, women endured many social disadvantages by living in a world entirely dominated by men. Around that time most women had to be innocent, virtuous, dutiful and be ignorant of intellectual opinion. It was also a time associated with prudishness and repression. Their sole window on the world would, of course, be her husband. During this important era, the idea of the “Angel in the House” was developed by Coventry Patmore and used to describe the ideal women who men longed. Throughout this period, women were treated inferior to men and were destined to be the husbands “Angel in the House”.

Comprehension Exercise Gilman, known for her most famous work, “Women And Economics” was a novelist, activist, academic and journalist who fought against patriarchy of her time. During Gilman’s life she, “sought to eradicate marriage” Charlotte Perkins Gilman A Biography. Davis. C.J. Stanford University Press. (2003).

When looking through Newsweek, the article "The Failures of Feminism" grabbed my attention, and I reacted to it strongly. My immediate response was one of defensive disgust, but the more I realized that I might actually understand and argue with the author on some points. This essay is an exploration of my own beliefs and reflection of my growth as both a writer and a person.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a famous social worker and a leading author of women’s issues. Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's relating to views of women 's rights and her demands for economic and social reform of gender inequities are very famous for the foundations of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In critics Gilman ignored by people of color in the United States and attitudes towards non-northern European immigrants (Ceplair, non-fiction, 7). “Gilman developed controversial conception of womanhood”, by Deborah M. De Simone in “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the feminization of education”. Gilman’s relation to reading deserves more attention than it has received (“The reading habit and The yellow wallpaper”). Her work about Women and Economics was considered her highest achievement by critics.

Throughout the 19th century, literature, especially the one written by women, romanticized domesticity. For example, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe politicized the home when she made it central to social action. In her novel, many of the pivotal or key scenes took place in the home and in most cases, women were seen as a central part when it came to making moral Christian-based choices. Another example is in An American Woman’s Home written in 1869 by Catherine Beecher. In this book, Beecher tries to raise the positions of women in the home to the same level as that of professional men since according to her, the work of women in the home is necessary and essential for the preservation of culture and morality. Many missionaries

For the advantage to working in the household to operate, it must be that women choose (or men choose for them) to live in a society of gendered work roles. This perspective is strongly held by both Woolf and Gilman though with slightly different consequences. Gilman’s proposed society is predicated on the elimination of gendered work roles. More specifically, she argued that the inefficiency inherent in gendered work roles demands their abolition. However, implicit in her model is the demands made by society as existed for her that women remain in the household and men work in the market. Woolf and Gilman both choose to deny the inevitability of gendered divisions in labor, however none of the authors deny that without significant change to social structures, women are more able to work in the household than men. Or phrased more to Woolf’s and Gilman’s tastes, that women are unable to work in the market due to restrictions placed on them by the patriarchy.

I have never heard of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I am unimpressed with because it shows the large ratio of the celebration of women writers in sociology to male sociologists. In the section “The Dependence of Women” from Women and Economics (1898), Gilman explains that the partnership of a husband and wife is a not a business partnership. Women seem to “earn all they get, and more, by house service” (Gilman, 1898, p. 151). Women’s labor in the home allows men to produce their wealth outside the home. However, a woman’s labour in the home is a functional duty, not