Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The focus of Carol Farley Kessler’s work is how Charlotte Perkins Gilman developed as a writer and how she imagined a full-blown utopia for women. This book, which offers a fresh reading of Gilman’s fiction, fills a void in Gilman scholarship, in feminist utopian scholarship, and in American literary studies.

Kessler provides three journeys through Gilman’s life: “A Biographical Exploration” discusses facets of her life having a substantial impact upon her utopian writing. Four themes influence this development: the legacy of ancestral expectations; her relationships to father, mother, and daughter; the experience of two marriages and a divorce; and her friendships with women.

Gilman and her “Prancing Young Utopia” presents three stages in the development of Gilman’s utopian writing. First, she imagined neighborhoods-writing alternately fiction and nonfiction. Second, she tested in fiction the expression of utopian principles explained in her nonfiction. Finally, she created the whole society in her 1915 satire Herland.

All of the foregoing writing represents Gilman’s effort to imagine in fiction solutions that she recommended in her 1898 feminist treatise, Women and Economics. “Writing to Empower Living” connects Gilman’s biography to her utopian writing as both personal expression and public activism. The writing can be understood as “equipment for living.” Ten hard-to-locate utopian short stories and chapters from four novels conclude the volume.