Free Sample Essays > Sociology
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer, educator, philosopher, and activist. She was one of many female intellectual leaders around the turn of the century. Do to her radical beliefs Gilman received the most criticism for her writings dealing with feminism. Gilman was an extraordinary woman who throughout her life battled for women’s rights and suffrage in a patriarchal male society of the early 20th century. Through these battles, Gilman developed a controversial conception of womanhood.
Born in 1860, Gilman was self-educated woman with many talents. Some of which included the arts, teaching, and writing. Raised without a father, her mother supported both Charlotte, and her older brother Thomas. They lived in a state of poverty, filth, and isolation and often moved from place to place leading to a lonely bitter life. Then at the age of 24 she married Charles Stetson and assumed the traditional roles of being a wife and mother, only before suffering a nervous breakdown causing her to divorce her husband and eventually leave her child. She then began to write and engage in many of the social women’s movements of the time.
Looking back at her humble, yet extraordinary life experiences of a female within a patriarchal system, Gilman redefined the term womanhood, declaring women equal to men in all spheres of life. This “new woman” was to be an intelligent, well-informed, and well-educated person capable of forming and expressing her own thoughts and ideas. This “new woman” would be economically and socially independent as well as politically active. This “new woman” would be able to compete, share, and hold all duties and responsibilities within the workplace, and at the same time still be a loving, nurturing, compassionate, and sensitive individual, like the traditional woman of the home. Gilman’s visions were challenged by all who read them, while her feminist ideas were called “the cult of true womanhood”, yet she never backed down. Gilman’s writings of tensions and struggles between marriage and career, social expectations, and personal goals continue to influence women’s decisions even today. Her arguments greatly heightened our overall awareness of understanding the power of social norms on an individual, especially women.
Although most of Gilman’s works dealt with women and education, Gilman’s ultimate goal was to develop self-governing men and women who could connect knowledge of her works with action. Gilman once stated, “Until we can see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.”
Gilman’s fiction was an essential part of her writing. It stated her ideological worldview of things, thus giving her works profound interest and uncanny power. Gilman herself envisioned a completely ideal utopian society in which “profit motive is removed from social life and where genuine community dominates” (1). A prime example of this would be her novel Herland. In this book, Gilman suggests how society might be different if motherhood rather than manliness became the cultural ideal. Here [next page]