Charlotte Perkins Gilman Essay

Broad Themes of Feminism in the Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman In the 19th century and at the turn of the 20th century, it was a very difficult era to be a woman. It was even more difficult to be an enlightened female. This time in our history was tainted by the objectification of human beings by slavery. Men of that time patronized and stigmatized the women. The narrow roles women were allowed caused Charlotte Perkins Gilman to seek to change people’s ideas about women and women’s place in society through her writing and lectures. Her feminist ideas were based on the trauma of her life and those women who were her friends. In those times, women were deemed “weak” and unable to cope with the rigors of education and intellectual

In the 19th and 20th centuries, men discussed the limits of the “female mind.” Ms. Gilman responded, "There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver" (Gilman 1900). Gilman sought to emancipate women by associating their limited roles and lives of drudgery with slavery, which was abolished by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and then by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. Gilman wrote with staggering impunity to describe the conditions of women in their homes. She worked to gain rights that many women enjoy today, but she had to begin writing secretly. Her words and ideas were too revolutionary for main stream media. Inequality of gender roles was widely practiced and accepted. Gilman lectured that women were essential to the economic independence and freedom of her fellow countrymen. She wrote, “The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses” (Gilman