Maternal Economies in the Estranged Sisterhood of Edith Summers Kelley and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds resists recovery as stubbornly as its protagonist, Judith Pippinger Blackford, unsuccessfully resists her plight as a poverty-stricken housewife and mother. In 1972, Matthew Bruccoli initiated a reprint of the nearly-lost novel. The new edition failed to find a sustained body of readers or critics and once again fell out of print. In her afterword to the 1996 reprint of the novel, Charlotte Margolis Goodman writes, “It is my hope that this new printing . . . will both secure an enduring place in literary history for Weeds and guarantee that it reaches a wider audience,”¹ Despite Goodman’s hopes, during the last seventeen years only a handful of articles or book chapters have appeared about Edith Summers Kelley’s 1923 novel and its tenant-farming protagonist, Judith Pippinger. Of these few articles, Weeds is a central text in only two of them, and Goodman herself contributed one of these. Most recently, Linda Komasky compares Kelley’s Judith to Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier of The Awakening.² Allison Berg reads Weeds primarily through the framework of Margaret Sanger, the birth control movement, and eugenics discourse. In a later article, Goodman rereads Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), through the thematic and biographical connections she makes between the writing and lives of Gilman and Kelley. She sees similarities between Weeds and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” noting that the intersection of the authors’ lives through Upton Sinclair influenced their shared interests in gender roles, motherhood, compensation for work, and the status of would-be artists.

Following Goodman’s lead, I suggest that reading Kelley alongside Gilman highlights a powerful correlation between the economic and “natural” conditions that determine Judith’s life as a young wife and mother in rural Kentucky during the World War I era. As others have discussed, in Weeds Kelley fictionalizes her own experiences as a tenant farmer in rural Kentucky. If, as Goodman suggests, Kelley and Gilman are literary sisters, then their divergent perspectives on motherhood and writing estrange them. In Women and Economics, Gilman romanticizes the working-class woman, arguing that the middle-class mother is the only woman who needs emancipation from her animal-like status as a domestic beast of burden in order to pursue her own life and living. While I do not claim that Kelley intentionally addresses Gilman’s arguments, this essay argues that Weeds exposes the absurdity of Gilman’s romanticized poor by depicting women whose very maternal and material circumstances animalize them. Communal housework, cooking, daycare and other shared “woman’s work” may play out nicely in Gilman’s middle-class fiction and in urban utopian communities like Helicon Hall, but, as Kelley compellingly illustrates with Judith Pippinger Blackford, such fantasies cannot alleviate the working-class pressures of eking a harsh existence out of resistant Kentucky soil. Moreover, this essay shows how Kelley’s novel challenges the utopian-feminist rhetoric circulated by Gilman and other theorists from privileged backgrounds, reading Weeds through Gilman’s Women and Economics to underscore the glaring inadequacies of a feminism that serves urban middle-class women but fails rural, poor women. Drawing on Margaret Fuller’s and Fanny Fern’s advocacy of feminine solidarity, I contend that a spirit of competition and a lack of cooperation among and between middle-class and lower-class women in Weeds prevent all the women from achieving social equality and economic autonomy.

As Goodman points out, no “direct evidence” shows that Kelley read any of Gilman’s writings.³ Whether or not she read Gilman’s work, Gilman’s ideas certainly circulated among the thinkers and writers of the East Coast; Kelley’s own writing shows she was familiar with Gilman’s platforms and activism. Kelley was Upton Sinclair’s secretary during his administration of the short-lived experiment in cooperative living, Helicon Hall, which operated in New Jersey from 1905 to 1907. She had opportunity to hear Gilman speak at Helicon Hall about women’s rights and social reform—in “Helicon Hall: An Experiment in Living” (1934), Kelley includes...