Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (review)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. 328 pp. $37.95/$17.95 paper.

A spinoff from the first international Charlotte Perkins Gilman conference in Liverpool in June 1995, this collection of fourteen essays attests to Gilman's intellectual versatility, the growing interest in her work among scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, and her continuing appeal a generation after her initial revival. The best of these essays plumb the seldom-explored recesses of Gilman's writings. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, in " 'Fecundate! Discriminate!' Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity," trace the implications of Gilman's misreadings of Lester Frank Ward's feminist theories. Similarly, Catherine J. Golden, in " 'Written to Drive Nails With': Recalling the Early Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," reads the un-apologetically didactic verse in In This Our World against the background of Gilman's treatise Women and Economics, "a reform tract written at times as a pseudo-scientific study" (246). To her credit, Golden confronts Gilman's racism and ethnocentrism as well as her surprising (for a self-described socialist) classism: "[W]hen I speak of Gilman liberating women, it is a small, privileged class of women" (262). And, in " 'But O My Heart': The Private Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," Denise D. Knight, the most prolific and insightful scholar working on Gilman today, focuses on a rich body of neglected verse addressed to her closest friends and family. In this verse Gilman's "most authentic poetic voice emerges" and offers a glimpse of the private self Gilman "sought valiantly to shield from public scrutiny" (268, 283).

In contrast, Ann J. Lane's lead essay in the collection, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Rights of Women: Her Legacy for the 1990s," seems insufficiently revised from its origins as a conference paper. It also contains a factual error: the assertion that Women and Economics (1898) was Gilman's "first book" (13), when in fact In This Our World: Poems and Sonnets was published three years earlier. A few contributions simply appropriate one or two of Gilman's ideas and reiterate them in essays that have little to do with Gilman's legacy. For example, Karen Stevenson's "Hair Today, Shorn Tomorrow? Hair Symbolism, Gender, and the Agency of Self" only mentions Gilman briefly and in passing. And Yvonne Gaudelius's "Kitchenless Houses and Homes: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Reform of Architectural Space" covers a topic previously and more thoroughly discussed by Dolores Hayden in The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) and Polly Wynn Allen in Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural Feminism (1988).

Other essays in the volume, while interesting, reach unsurprising conclusions. In "The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Evolutionary Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Class," Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams illustrates the extent to which Gilman rationalized her ethnocentrism or dressed her racism in the guise of "evolutionary sociology." Though Ganobcsik-Williams claims that Gilman "embraced and extended to the realm of human society the evolutionary biological theories that Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace had made public in the 1850s" (18), such a statement is problematic. The essay is marred by its failure to distinguish between "conservative" Darwinism and the brand of "reform" Darwinism promulgated by Lester Ward, whom Gilman regarded as "quite the greatest man I have ever known" (Gilman, The Living Charlotte Perkins Gilman 187). In fact, Ganobcsik-Williams does not even mention Ward. Frederick Wegener's essay, " 'What a Comfort a Woman Doctor Is!': Medical Women in the Life and Writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," usefully surveys the recurring trope of the woman physician in Gilman's œuvre and predictably demonizes S. Weir Mitchell and his "infamous rest cure" (58). Yet the binary the essay constructs between woman doctors as saviors and male doctors as villains is misleading: around the turn of the century, the eminent physician Mary Putnam Jacobi treated Gilman for fatigue and depression with electrical stimuli generated by batteries...