Herland

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

Herland (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 80

Sample

At the time of her death in 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was as famous for her political and journalistic writing as she was notorious for her unconventional personal life. In her time, Gilman was known as a crusading journalist and feminist intellectual, a follower of such pioneering women’s rights advocates as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman’s great-aunt. Gilman was concerned with political inequality and social justice in general, but the primary focus of her writing was the unequal status of women within the institution of marriage. In such works as Concerning Children (1900), The Home (1904), and Human Work (1904), Gilman argued that women’s confinement to the domestic sphere robbed them of the expression of their full powers of creativity and intelligence, while simultaneously robbing society of women whose abilities suited them for professional and public life. An essential part of her analysis was that the traditional power structure of the family made no one happy—not the woman who was made into an unpaid servant, not the husband who was made into a master, and not the children who were subject to both. Her most ambitious work, Women and Economics (1898), analyzed the hidden value of women’s labor within the capitalist economy. She argued, as she would throughout her work, that financial independence for women could only benefit society as a whole.

Gilman’s analysis of women’s status in society was deeply rooted in her own situation. In 1886, early in her first marriage and not long after the birth of her daughter, Charlotte Perkins Stetson (as she was then known) was stricken with a severe case of depression. In her 1935 autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she describes her “utter prostration” by “unbearable inner misery” and “ceaseless tears,” a condition only made worse by the presence of her husband and her baby. She was referred to Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, then the country’s leading specialist in nervous disorders, who believed that such postpartum depression was brought by too much mental activity and not enough attention to domestic affairs. Mitchell’s treatment in such cases was a “rest cure” of forced inactivity. For Gilman, this treatment was a disaster. Prevented from working, writing, and even reading, she sank deeper into depression, and she soon had a nervous breakdown. At her worst, she crawled into closets and under beds, clut. . .