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Post by snacky on Nov 24, 2014 2:20:24 GMT
I'm getting obsessed with Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She was a famous Woman of Action at the time of MM. She made a scandalous amicable divorce and fled to California to live as a free woman. Her most notorious book is The Yellow Wallpaper - the story of a woman being driven mad by the expectations of husband, society, and expert physician/psychiatrist. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Perkins_GilmanShe also wrote Women and Economics - that explained how society had distorted female Darwinian evolution. This was the cafe chat book for Vassar women. She felt men had hijacked universal human qualities, and women needed to reclaim common humanity from Masculinist society. Sadly she was also bound by her time, and her writing has traces of anti-semitism, anti-immigration sentiments, and racism. But in my view, she was well ahead of many of the male social thinkers of the day! I actually have a copy of her utopian work Herland from waaaaaaaay back when I was an undergrad, but I never read it. Am reading it now.  |
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Post by snacky on Nov 24, 2014 2:26:58 GMT
I should also mention Gilman was a friend of Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward - a utopia that inspired Nationalist clubs/movement - an American socialist reaction to social Darwinism). There might be a Margaret Haile connection. I'm wondering if Divorcee Julia was a little inspired by Gilman. I hope so!
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Post by snacky on Nov 26, 2014 6:07:03 GMT
Almost forgot to mention I found Women and Economics free to read online: digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/economics/economics.htmlThis is the book all the suffragettes Emily's age were reading in their book clubs and debating over tea! Just as Marx might be described as an "ideologue" of Communism, Perkins can be described as an "ideologue" of the suffragettes. She was kind of the Malcolm X to Susan B. Anthony's Martin Luther King. That said, I haven't read Women and Economics yet - real life got in the way. But I'm intrigued by all the references about how it uses Social Darwinism on behalf of women's liberation by arguing that women haven't been able to evolve naturally because patriarchal culture has been blocking them. You go, girl! |
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Post by snacky on Nov 30, 2014 2:54:11 GMT
While reading Gilman today, she gets into the most hilarious rant about "sex-sodden psychoanalysis" and Freud! This article is from the 1930s, and by then Gilman is old and fending off the new-fangled social evils of birth control, short skirts (and even pants!), and women using their freedom to party with the men. Anyway she also sheds some light on how this "sexual revolution" started back in William and Julia's day. In her memory it started with the decadent-sensual drawings and poetry in a journal called The Yellow Book. Aubrey Beardsley did the illustrations. Oscar Wilde was one of the most famous writers/editors associated with the journal - after repeated scandals, he was convicted of homosexuality. Gilman takes this as a token conviction of the high profile person, representative of the sins of all the underlings - i.e. the bohemian party of Sally Pendrick (or possibly the decadent lover's tryst of Giles). Gilman also mentions the French "erotic" poetry of Baudelaire (Fleurs du Mal) and Verlaine. Then she labels the whole movement as "Fin de Siecle". She associates Freud and his "sex-sodden psychoanalysis" with this movement, but then she skips ahead to her own time, so there's no sense of a progression. Interested in seeing Julia step up with some of this "sex-sodden psychoanalysis" - lol! |
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