This research examines how feminist themes surface in and resonate with the pattern of ideas in three works written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short story; Herland, a utopian novel; and Women and Economics, a nonfiction commentary. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social context in which the texts were produced and than discuss ways in which the texts articulate strands of feminist thought current in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and that retained cogency through the 20th century.
Gilman's fiction and nonfiction must be located in the context of the American Progressive Era's rampant and vigorous American industrial capitalist expansion supported by patriarchal social values and reinforced by the politics of nascent American economic imperialism. The Progressive Era of the early 20th century, like the latter half of the 19th century, was also informed by the women's suffrage movement and the zeal among activists for the enlargement and institutionalization of women's rights more generally. Indeed, much of the women's rhetoric of the period was retained by the modern feminist social critique.
In Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, sociologist Thorstein Veblen captures the second-class status of middle-class women as equivalent to the status of slaves, being "exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful employment--in order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute of her natural (pecuniary) guardian. These offices are the conventional marks of the un-free . . . [and] incompatible with the human impulse to purposeful activity" (Veblen 314). Confined to a "sphere" of activity--specifically domestic--determined by their guardians, they cannot be taken seriously as either thinkers or full-fledged partners in the economic and social environment.
Despite measurable, observable enlargement of women's "sphere" after 1899, much the same message could be found in F...