Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote for and spoke to an audience throughout the United States during the Progressive Era where changes were occurring due to industrialization. In “Women and Economics”, Gilman, described the constraints American women faced for economic freedom. Gilman began her analysis by exploring in depth the values of a wife/women, and the restrictions on women’s work within the capitalist economy. She considered the loss of individuality and societal productivity the cause to restrictions of a wife/women’s work and economic dependency on men.
Gilman’s “whole argument” in her book is fairly straightforward. She began by exploring women’s economic dependence on men, forcing women to become more feminine but less human. These women roles would only serve detrimental in their social and economic potential. However, she believed this process or lifestyle would only reverse itself once women learn to stand on their own two feet and fulfill their human potential. Economic independence for women could only benefit the society as a whole and bring true freedom.
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Change is often greeted with resistance. Historical changes in the 19th century were no different. Feminist critics were quick to respond to Gilman’s publications. During the 1800’s, it
The literature of the nineteenth century cataloged the social, economical and political changes during its period. Through it many new concerns and ideologies were proposed and made their journeys through intellectual spheres that have endured and kept their relevance in our own period today. The literature, sometimes quite overtly, introduced the issues arising with the changes in society specifically due to the industrial revolution. In this mixture of new ideas was the question of women's labor and functions among this rapidly changing society. American authors as well as Victorian authors, like George Gissing and Mabel Wotton, explored these issues somewhat explicitly during this period. In America, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed these issues in short stories with strong implications of the dangers of unfulfilled or unsatisfying labor available to women.
Since the beginning of the 17th-century and earlier, there has always been different perspectives on women 's rights. Men and women all over the world have voiced their opinion and position in regard to the rights of women. This holds especially true in the United States during the 18th and 19th century. As women campaigned for equality, there were some who opposed this idea. There was, and always will be a series of arguments on behalf of women 's rights. Anti-women 's rights activists such as Dr. John Todd and Pro-women 's rights activist Gail Hamilton argued intelligently and tactfully on the topic. There were many key arguments made against women’s rights by Dr. John Todd, and Gail Hamilton 's rebuttal was graceful and on par with her male counterpart. Let 's examine some of Dr. John 's arguments against women 's equality.
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” (US Constitution, Amendment XIX). The above is the 19th amendment of the United States of America Constitution. Ratified in 1920, after supporters worked tirelessly to change the mindset of a nation. But even with the law, there are still stereotypes. There are still people set on what they think. The issue is not the rights of women. Since 1920, they have had the rights. The issue does not even focus on disputes such as money, working, or privileges. The issue is being understood. In the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents a clear and relevant example of the suppression
Weiner, Lynn Y. From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 1985.
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s bodies of work, Gilman highlights scenarios exploring traditional interrelations between man and woman while subtexting the necessity for a reevaluation of the paradigms governing these relations. In both of Gilman’s short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Turned”, women are victimized, subjected and mistreated. Men controlled and enslaved their wives because they saw them as their property. A marriage was male-dominated and women’s lives were dedicated to welfare of home and family in perseverance of social stability. Women are expected to always be cheerful and good-humored. Respectively, the narrator and Mrs. Marroner are subjugated by their husbands in a society in which a relationship dominated by the male is expected.
Gilman made a huge attempt to, in a way, rewrite history while emphasizing and including the white, civilized woman in the discourse. Bederman uses Gilman’s work to show how she used her race (white) to demonstrate the superiority of the white woman and therefore the need for equality between men and women but completely excluding other races. In effect, labeling her as racist. She writes, “Gilman was merely proposing to replace one type if exclusion with another. White women’s inclusion in civilization, under her scheme, was predicated on the exclusion of nonwhite men and women” (168).
Gilman’s story effectively illustrates the natural superiority role men have over women, and portrays how women naturally submit to the supremacy of men. I began looking back at my experience of growing up in Texas, and I began to see how these gender roles are enforced by society, and applied to the people living there. Growing up in a small town, made it hard for women to escape their gender role, because it was considered “unnatural” to do anything else besides be a wife and mother. Gilman understood the naturalness of gender roles to men and women, she explains in her autobiography, stating it is something we are born with and bred to become, she even coined this phenomenon, calling it genealogy (Weinbaum). Through Gilman’s story, the conflict of genealogy is expressed through the narrator and her husband. The narrator becomes more aware of the conventional role that she is destined to become, and that is why she begins to visualize women stuck in the wallpaper. I felt as if I began seeing things, like the narrator. However, my convulsions were about myself, I began visualising a future that does not have to be centered around finding a good wealthy man and having children. That I as a woman, can step aside from my conventional gender role, and rely on myself, and that I do not have to find a man to fulfill my
Kessler, Carol Parley. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 -1935." Modem American Women Writers. Ed. Elaine Showalter, et al. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991. 155 -169.
Until the last hundred years or so in the United States, married women had to rely on their husbands for money, shelter, and food because they were not allowed to work. Though there were probably many men who believed their wives could “stand up to the challenge”, some men would not let their wives be independent, believing them to be of the “inferior” sex, which made them too incompetent to work “un-feminine” jobs. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, feminist writers began to vent their frustration at men’s condescension and sexist beliefs. Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” and Zora Neale Hurson’s “Sweat” both use dialogue to express how women are capable of and used to working hard, thinking originally, being independent
In the nineteen twenties, the crusade for women’s rights gained a much greater force than it had in the past. What helped to make this possible was the economic upturn. The wages of workers increased, and women also began to weigh more heavily in the workforce. Beginning in World War One, American women began to take the jobs of their spouses to support their families. They continued to work even after the war was over. The amount of women making up the overall labor forced increased about two percent in the time between 1920 and 1930, totaling to about twenty two percent in 1930 (“Women in the Labor Force”). Although they did not take the same jobs that men did, women were still an important ...
Susan B. Anthony, a woman’s rights pioneer, once said, “Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done” (“Women’s Voices Magazine”). Women’s rights is a hot button issue in the United States today, and it has been debated for years. In the late 1800’s an individual named Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote literature to try and paint a picture in the audience’s mind that gender inferiority is both unjust and horrific. In her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman makes the ultimate argument that women should not be seen as subordinate to men, but as equal.
... a feme covert, a dependant. Jeanne Boydston paints a wholly different picture of Eighteenth Century America and women’s involvement in the burgeoning labor market. In The Woman Who Wasn't There: Women's Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States Boydston points to the emphasis on household productivity in order to deal with an erratic economy. She tells us that by the mid-eighteenth century the flexible nature of “woman’s work” (which could be done at home, with tools that were readily available) gave rise to the role of wife as “deputy husband”. Though soon the growing linkage between what Boydston calls “independent manhood” and “economic agency” began to overwhelm. There was a reordering of the concept of gender in late eighteenth century America, and the concept of separate spheres that Linda Kerber eloquently debunks began to take hold.
The Yellow Wallpaper, Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is comprised as an assortment of journal entries written in first person, by a woman who has been confined to a room by her physician husband who he believes suffers a temporary nervous depression, when she is actually suffering from postpartum depression. He prescribes her a “rest cure”. The woman remains anonymous throughout the story. She becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper that surrounds her in the room, and engages in some outrageous imaginations towards the wallpaper. Gilman’s story depicts women’s struggle of independence and individuality at the rise of feminism, as well as a reflection of her own life and experiences.
Advocating social, political, legal, and economic rights for women equal to those of men, Charlotte Perkins Gilman speaks to the “female condition” in her 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by writing about the life of a woman and what caused her to lose her sanity. The narrator goes crazy due partially to her prescribed role as a woman in 1892 being severely limited. One example is her being forbidden by her husband to “work” which includes working and writing. This restricts her from begin able to express how she truly feels. While she is forbidden to work her husband on the other hand is still able to do his job as a physician. This makes the narrator inferior to her husband and males in general. The narrator is unable to be who she wants, do what she wants, and say what she wants without her husband’s permission. This causes the narrator to feel trapped and have no way out, except through the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom.