Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics: A Classic Feminist Critique

Publication and Core Thesis. At the turn of the 20th century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman established her international reputation as a social critic and authority on women's subjugation when she published Women and Economics. In this book, she critiques the socioeconomic system that restricted turn-of-the-20th-century women to the private home, making them wholly dependent on men. Women remained in a state of arrested development both intellectually and emotionally, a situation that proved damaging to men, women, and society as a whole. In her treatise, she sketched out broad themes related to women and work, kitchenless homes, social motherhood, and “baby gardens” (child care centers) staffed by professionals.

These very ideas provided material for future books (such as, Concerning Children, The Home: Its Work and Influence) and copious articles that she wrote well into the 20th century. Gilman lived at a time when women were expected to remain in the domestic sphere as homemakers, mothers, and sexual partners; men were the sole providers. In fact, American women did not have the right to vote until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 (although some individual states granted suffrage sooner). Throughout the 19th century, a woman's ability to hold any property depended on the state in which she lived.

Disturbed by these facts, Gilman explored in Women and Economics the origin of women's economic dependence upon men and, akin to Thorstein Veblen, advanced the view that female oppression dates to prehistoric times, when men used their physical superiority to subjugate women, exploiting them for their domestic labor. The socialism of Edward Bellamy and the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin influenced her vision for social change in this classic feminist text. Gilman aimed to liberate women from economic dependence; freed from domestic bondage, women could contribute to the work of the world and the worth of society.

The Sexuoeconomic Condition. Gilman coined the term sexuoeconomic condition to illustrate how in the case of human females, sexuality had an economic function: A woman's success was measured by her ability to attract a mate, and she was bound to her mate for her very survival. To Gilman, this situation was contrary to nature, and she believed that the human female—in contrast to females of a range of animal species—had, as a result, grown completely dependent on the human male: “We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation” (Women and Economics 5). As a result, women are viewed as chattel, not valuable members of society.

In her preface, she proposed to remedy “the worst evils under which we suffer, evils long supposed to be inherent and ineradicable in our natures, but are the result of certain arbitrary conditions of our own adoption, . . . by removing those conditions, we may remove the evils resultant” (xiii). Restructuring society along feminist and socialist principles became Gilman's answer to improving the lives of both men and the “thinking women of today” (xiii). This foundational critique of patriarchal economic structures continues to inform contemporary gender studies and labor discourse.

Critical Reception and Legacy. Literary reviewers and women intellectuals of her day praised Women and Economics, which became a popular college text in the 1920s. A June 8, 1899, review in the Nation compared it to John Stuart Mill's “The Subjection of Women,” and in July of that same year, Charles Lummis dubbed it “an ending meteor in the sky, a flaming sword which wise enemies will shrink from” in Land of Sunshine (qtd. in Scharnhorst, Charlotte Perkins Gilman 55). By 1911, it had gone through seven English editions, and it was also translated into seven languages: French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Hungarian, and Russian.

It stopped selling when, after World War I, Gilman lost much of her influence. In 1966, at the onset of second-wave feminism, Carl Degler reprinted Women and Economics, redirecting attention to a work that women's rights advocates still praise for its many insights about the status of women. The text remains a seminal work in the canon of feminist socioeconomic literature.

For Discussion or Writing. The following prompts facilitate critical engagement with Gilman's text and its contemporary relevance.
1. How would you define Gilman's term sexuoeconomic condition? Gilman coined this term in 1898; is it still relevant today now that women are wage earners? Which of Gilman's ideas to improve society—kitchenless homes, child care centers, dress reform, women and work, or others—are most appealing?

2. What reforms that Gilman proposed at the turn of the 20th century would still benefit men and women today? Does Gilman direct her reforms to all of America or to a distinct community within American culture? If so, how would you define that community?