American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois

3: The Feminism of American Socialism: Gilman and Company at Work, in Love, and on Trial

chapter three the feminism of american socialism: gilman and company at work, in love, and on trial The career of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her brand of socialist feminism provide further evidence for the continuity of American socialism before and after the turn of the century. Although Gilman, like other pre-1900 socialists, tended to eschew the socialist label and regard Marxism with some anxiety, the perspective upon women’s equality that she learned in the Nationalist movement and elaborated upon in her own intellectual work was, in fact, shared by Marxists before the turn of the century and proved deeply in›uential upon American socialists after it. The Nationalists made gender equality a central tenet of their philosophy, as had the Knights of Labor and the Fourierites before them. The Fabian Society, in whose American branch Gilman was active, took the economic situation of women as both paid and unpaid laborers to be a core area of research and activism .1 At its founding in 1901 the Socialist Party of America rati‹ed a platform that included “equal civil and political rights for men and women” among its “immediate demands,” and women exercised a visible role in the organizational life of the movement through independent socialist clubs.2 In a concession primarily to southern delegates, the People’s Party did not include a women’s rights plank in its platform.3 Many individuals in the Populist movement were strongly committed to women’s equality, however. The ardent Populist and realist author Hamlin Garland, for example, focused his attention upon the subject in his best novel, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly. There was something of a generational change in the direction of feminism within the socialist movement, but the change transcended the Marxist and non-Marxist divide. Garland was part of the younger generation of so100 cialists who came of age in the 1890s and the following decade, in which Gilman was in the avant-garde and Upton Sinclair in the immediately following wave, who sought not only to agitate for gender equality but to implement that equality in their private relationships. This was in keeping with Gilman’s feminism as it developed in the 1890s, for Gilman’s complicated understanding of the relationship between bourgeois ideologies of gender and the durability of capitalism predicated that socialists must both attack gender inequality in the public sphere and seek to transform their own private relationships. This further re‹nement, a matter of praxis as well as theory , also showed just how far the socialists had to go. On the theory of gender equality, Gilman and some of her comrades articulated a dialogic understanding of the relationship between the political and the personal long before these became the catchwords of a later generation of progressive feminists . In application, however, socialists often did little better than their nonsocialist peers—as we will see in the latter half of this chapter by an examination of the personal relationships of Garland, Sinclair, Du Bois, and Gilman herself. the ideology of bourgeois marriage “That relic of the patriarchal age,—the family as an economic unit.” At bottom, Gilman’s exploration of gender ideologies may be seen as a response to this fundamental question: if the bene‹ts of women’s economic and social equality were so transparently clear, as they were to Gilman, Bellamy , and other socialists, then why were all women not actively involved in the movement for equality? Why were a considerable number of women mobilized , instead, in an antisuffrage campaign? Why were so many women in the suffrage movement content to agitate merely for a narrow de‹nition of political equality? Gilman had arrived at a similar impasse at the height of her Populist enthusiasm, when exulting in the democratic philosophy of the People’s Party she had also wondered whether a democratic majority could actually be persuaded to vote the party ticket. In Women and Economics, Gilman’s reassurance that women’s industrial development was laying the groundwork for social, legal, and political equality is balanced by deep concern about the ideological webs that continued to entrap women. While “What the People’s Party Means” asserts that conservative ideologies are mostly foisted upon workers by political parties external to them, Women and Economics explores the ways that repressive domestic The Feminism of American Socialism 101 ideologies are fostered by women themselves. Whereas Edward Bellamy and August Bebel, like Gilman, are...