Domestic Data and Feminist Momentum: The Narrative Accounting of Helen Stuart Campbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Narrative Accounting: Efficiency and Empowerment, on a Modest Scale

As American literary naturalists collected and grappled with a vast body of social data and scientific discourses, the continuing development of women's domestic and clerical sciences also commanded literary and popular attention. Detailed organizational and efficiency measures were introduced in Catharine Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and refined in subsequent domestic science publications and home economics curricula.¹ Women also entered the modern office after 1870, prepared by secondary education and trade-school training, filling emerging positions in stenography, secretarial work, telegraphy, and bookkeeping.² Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Helen Stuart Campbell, social economists of female labor, incorporated this household and data management into fiction, experimenting with the potentials of domestic economy and narrative form. This essay considers the bookkeeping and budgeting that saturate Campbell's Miss Melinda's Opportunity: A Story (1886) and Gilman's serial Forerunner novel, What Diantha Did (1909–1910). These "narrative accounts"—or data fictions, if you will—do not merely portray women's meager finances and domestic details, but itemize, recalculate, and employ them strategically. Read alongside naturalist works, these domestic data fictions insist upon the empowering reform potential of women's modern domestic and clerical skillsets.

By 1886, Campbell had already taught and published in the early home economics movement and was working to draw middle-class attention to the condition of poor working women through Good Housekeeping columns on "Women's Work and Wages" and studies of city missions, women's labor, and poverty. She had also begun to employ the tools of domestic economy in fictional portrayals of the personal and professional lives of young working women.³ In Miss Melinda's Opportunity, Campbell imagines a collaborative encounter between a collection of poor "working girls," an aging woman in a mortgaged house, and her wealthy cousin. The novel solves their problems, not with a romantic or institutional intervention, but with a set of careful budgets, compromises, and collaborations between women of diverse talents and backgrounds. Complementary professional talents, cooperative household planning, and a shared investment in the group provide the women with improved space, security, and community. Campbell both acknowledges the fictionality of Melinda and insists upon the utility and reliability of its economic calculations and conclusions. Her novel bypasses contemporary, authoritative modes of narrative classification and control, with information spoken, exchanged, and reviewed among women.

Campbell was a valued mentor and friend to Gilman; together the two would room together and edit a journal in San Francisco, contribute to Chicago's settlement-houses, and found a local branch of the National Household Economics Association. Dolores Hayden notes that Campbell introduced Gilman into "home economics circles" and dedicated Household Economics to her friend (185).⁴ More than twenty years after Camp-bell's Melinda, and after her own Women and Economics (1898) and The Home (1903), Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her serial novel, What Diantha Did. The first of her Forerunner serial novels, Diantha proposes to remake household labor into a respected, efficient, and profitable professional venture. A "young Amazon of industry," Diantha builds a domestic empire structured around professionalized, public housekeeping services (176). Her careful accounting demonstrates both the exploitative inefficiency of single-household labor and the viability of professionalized housekeeping. The novel's pages are saturated with accounts of her growing household reform efforts, including a recalculation of the family economy, a contract for domestic labor, and a budget for a food delivery scheme. With these details, Gilman promises the tenability of such proposals for paid laborers and housekeepers. Though she writes extensively on household economics, in this narrative she employs her most specific budgets and extended case studies, "neat figures … full of exasperating detail" (16).

I would be remiss in introducing narrative accounting without acknowledging its many intellectual debts.⁵ Campbell's and Gilman's working-girl fictions participate in the post-1870 explosion of women's utopian writing, which proposed innovations in architectural design, domestic management, and occupancy practices. Gilman responds to Bellamy's writings and Nationalist movement...