A Rose By Any Other Name: Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman) and the Case for American Reform Socialism

While best known as a feminist author (and under the surname she adopted after her second marriage, in 1900), Charlotte Perkins Stetson held stronger commitments to movements advocating gradualist, or reform, socialism: Nationalism, Populism, and Fabianism. This article reconsiders the socialist underpinnings of Stetson/Gilman's career and, also, uses her work to illuminate the tradition of American reform socialism. Stetson's work in the 1890s reveals the radicalism of this tradition as well as its progressive stance on women's rights. Indeed, while acknowledging that "reform" and "revolutionary" socialist movements had separate identities in the United States, they were much closer in rhetoric, philosophy, and praxis than is usually assumed. This is clear not only in Stetson's explicitly socialist writing but in her ground-breaking Women and Economics (1898), a close reading of which reveals both the ongoing influence of Edward Bellamy Nationalism and startling parallels to August Bebel and Frederick Engels.