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m a r i e t. f a r r Home Is Where the Heart Is – Or Is It? Three Women and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Theory of the Home Contemporary scholars of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work examine her fiction – especially the short story ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper ’’ – occasionally her poetry, but rarely, and then only glancingly , her drama. Yet some of her most radical ideas are embodied in her plays. Scholars, as Joanne B. Karpinski points out, have also been interested in her ‘‘relationships to other major thinkers of her era’’ as well as ‘‘her life and thought in the context of social issues’’ (Critical Essays, 9). A central issue for Gilman was the replacement of the sentimentalized idea of home with practical measures of reform, an idea she developed through the first decades of the twentieth century in her fiction, prose, and especially drama. Theatre was dear to Gilman’s heart: she loved attending performances and even acted in a troupe in Pasadena. As early as 1888 and as late as 1921 she was collaborating with Grace Ellery Channing in playwriting, though few of these plays apparently reached publication. Gary Scharnhorst’s bibliography lists two one-act plays published in Gilman’s journal the Forerunner, and Ann Lane’s biography describes a third, presumably unpublished. Gilman’s interest in the theatre, however, developed at a time when parlor theatricals, evolved from the charade, became acceptable to the middle class and when both feminists and antifeminists began to use them to spread their messages for and against woman suffrage.1 Gilman was not slow to see the possibilities of parlor theatricals for delivering her messages on social reform. Although she claimed that ‘‘the basic need of economic independence seemed to me of far more importance than the ballot,’’ she nevertheless worked for what she termed this ‘‘belated and legitimate claim,’’ most specifically by writing the pro-suffrage play Something to Vote For in 1911 and publishing it in the Forerunner one month after Three Women (Living, 131; Friedl, On to Victory , 24–25). In the next month’s issue she advertised performance rights to either play for $5.00 or a subscription to her journal , offering ‘‘Suffrage organizations or Clubs’’ the opportunity to receive commissions for selling Forerunner subscriptions at these performances (‘‘About Dramatic Rights,’’ 179). Evidently, then, Gilman was aware of the efficacy of using dramatic form to embody her ideas for social improvement. A number of critics, of course, have commented on her use of fiction in this way. Polly Wynn Allen, for example, says that Gilman knew of stories’ ‘‘educational potential. She recognized the capacity of strong fiction to move people, confiding to her diary in 1893, ‘If I can learn to write good stories it will be a powerful addition to my armory’’’ (Building Domestic Liberty, 145). Indeed, she used both fiction and drama to embody her ideas, first, about women’s economic and social subordination to men, elaborated theoretically in Women and Economics and The Man-Made World, and, second, about the retardation of human progress caused by the restriction of women to the domestic sphere, an idea summed up in The Home, which she called ‘‘the most heretical – and the most amusing – of anything I’ve done’’ (Living, 286). And her ideas were heretical, for they called for the emancipation of woman from the home, not as a matter of equality but, due to the home’s wastefulness and inefficiency, as a matter of logic. Her ‘‘heretical’’ ideas about the home may have begun coalescing as early as 1895, when she participated in the second convention of the Woman’s Congress Association of the Pacific Coast, which had as its theme ‘‘The Home’’ (Lane, To Herland and Beyond , 164). Not only does restricting women to the home keep them from developing their potential, she believed, but also that of the child and husband. The outdated concept of home itself ‘‘hinders, by keeping woman a social idiot, by keeping the modern child under the tutelage of the primeval mother, by keeping the social conscience of the man crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of the domestic conscience of the woman. It hinders by its enormous expense; making the physical details of daily life a heavy burden to mankind; whereas, in our stage of civilisation, 94 Women, Work, and the Home they should have been long since reduced to a minor incident’’ (315). These ‘‘primitive industries’’ of cooking...

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