Published in 1898, this is a public domain book, although not transcribed by Project Gutenberg as yet. Open jobs to women, she argued, and provide home roles for those men who chose to do them.Īt the time of its publication, the London Chronicle had this to say about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics: 'Since John Stuart Mill's essay there has been no book dealing with the whole position of women to approach it in originality of conception and brilliancy of exposition.' Gilman was especially insistent that the condition of motherhood not only did not unfit women for positions in the workforce, but actually should be a pathway for women to work. It was ridiculous, she thought, to believe that the function of marriage and motherhood unfit women for an economic role, and especially for economic production. To Gilman, it seemed merely logical that women be entitled to work outside the home for wages. And yet, absent women in the home, men would be unable to work outside it, and families unable to survive. Dependent on men and confined to the home, women remained helpless to protest mens' decisions. Women and men, she argued, were both essential for economic survival. Gilman's first book, Women and Economics, published in 1898, addressed the marriage question indirectly. Her attention to the problem at a time when others were beginning to confront the issue allows us a glimpse into the newly evolving identities of women. The Bad: straight up Social Darwinist and probably eugenicist lots of emphasis on 'reason vs nature' (which is strange because she at least recognizes that structures like gender roles and what we think of women's 'nature' are artificial, but still veers towards essentialism) excuses women's oppression as a 'necessity in the process of social evolution' and uses this line of thought to basically say 'women don't need to be oppressed anymore because of our present economic conditions, so inevitably our liberation is imminent!' which clearly, to her great disbelief, is not the nature of social change.Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman, an early critic of marriage, was not the first to ask questions about what marriage meant for women. The Good: I enjoyed her views on the sexuo-economic relation between men and women, her proposition of re-constituting the 'home' to professionalize household duties, her striving towards a society of equal rights to housing, education and income where women are integrated into the social structure without artificial gender roles (she is a utopian feminist after all), and her belief that the economic independence of women will rectify the many ills she sees as consequences of women's dependence on men for their livelihoods (such as over-sexualization of women, poor parenting, lack of friendship between men/women/husband/wife, disconnection of women from 'communal society').

Charlotte gilman women and economics