In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

sandra m. gilbert & susan gubar ‘‘Fecundate! Discriminate!’’ Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity ‘‘Not all the long, loud struggle for ‘women’s rights,’ not the varied voices of the ‘feminist movement,’ and, most particularly, not the behavior of ‘emancipated women,’ have given us any clear idea of the power and purpose of the mother sex.’’ So, somewhat surprisingly , mused Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the theological treatise His Religion and Hers (1923) that she produced late in her career as one of her generation’s foremost speakers for just the feminist movement from which she appeared to be distancing herself here. Why would an emancipated woman who had spent a lifetime struggling for women’s rights and sex equality abjure her own goals in favor of a quasi-Victorian celebration of maternity? In particular, how could such a statement come from a woman who had dramatically (and notoriously) relinquished her own maternal role to the friend who became her former husband’s second wife? We argue here that although, with its uncharacteristic theological focus, His Religion and Hers looks like a rather eccentric text in the context of Gilman’s overall career as lecturer on social issues, polemicist, and fiction writer, its ambiguities reflect a curious rift that runs through much of this writer’s work and thought. On the one hand, His Religion and Hers draws on the ‘‘gynecocentric ’’ theories of Lester Ward, the ‘‘father of American sociology ,’’ to offer an ecstatic celebration of maternity as the primary human model for loving kindness while also subversively glorifying woman’s evolutionary primacy in her role as mother. As Gilman sees the world in this work, woman was biologically as well as morally the First, not the Second, Sex. On the other hand, the theologizing rhetoric of His Religion and Hers frequently involves a notable misreading of Ward’s ideas which itself camouflages beneath a sentimentalized vision of maternity a hostility to motherhood along with a view of mothering as a form of hostility. Indeed , the way in which Gilman conceives woman as the First Sex attributes a unique eugenic centrality to mothers that not only undermines the feminist movement’s ideal of sex equality but even degenerates into precisely the racism that marks much Social Darwinist thinking about racial betterment. For all these reasons, a consideration of this book’s ambivalent politics illuminates the contradictory strains of revolution and regression in the uses to which the concept of the maternal has been put by contemporary feminists as well as their precursors in Gilman’s era. ‘‘It was a man, so human as to be above sex-pride,’’ enthused Gilman, ‘‘so great as to see the advantage of the world above the privileges of sex,’’ who produced what was next ‘‘to the theory of evolution itself . . . the most important single precept in the history of thought’’ (57). She was commending Lester F. Ward, who himself recalled with considerable pleasure the occasion on which he first formulated his ‘‘Gynecocentric Theory’’ of the ‘‘Phylogenetic Forces’’ that shape all creatures. At the ‘‘Fourteenth Dinner’’ of Washington D.C.’s ‘‘Six O’Clock Club’’ on 26 April 1888, remembered Ward, he was asked to speak on sex equality to a group of feminist luminaries, including ‘‘Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton . . . and a number of others equally well known’’ (297). Outlining his ‘‘view that the female sex is primary and the male secondary in the organic scheme, that originally and normally all things center, as it were, about the female,’’ Ward claimed that ‘‘the theory, so far as I have ever heard, is wholly my own, no one else having proposed or even defended it, scarcely anyone accepting it, and no one certainly coveting it’’ (Pure Sociology, 296–297). But of course the notion of female primacy was hardly original with Ward. Rooted in the Romantic movement’s valorization of the organic and of nature’s ‘‘wise passiveness,’’ sanctifyings of the maternal had appeared in the writings of European thinkers from the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who hymned the praises of ‘‘the Mothers’’) to the Swiss jurist J. J. Bachofen (who hypothesized the originatory power of a Matriarchate). Much closer to home, however, Ward would very likely have encountered the protofeminist eugenics asserted by Walt Whitman The Theologizing of Maternity 201 in what was entitled ‘‘Poem of Women’’ when it was first published in 1856 and later called ‘‘Unfolded Out of the Folds’’: Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes...

Share