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In 1898, Charlotte Perkins Gilman boldly pronounced economic independence to be the answer to the Woman Question.1 Readers of her internationally-acclaimed Women and Economics were prepared to take her solution seriously. As one reviewer wrote, "Each of us was mulling away on her own little corner of the problem, with no idea that it [woman] was a Question, until Mrs. Stetson [as she was then known] dared get it into print" (Perry 892). Another concluded, "No woman, whatever her position or the conditions surrounding her, can read the book and not feel that the whole argument applies to herself and her concerns almost like a personal appeal" ("Charlotte Perkins Stetson" 115).
Gilman's "whole argument" in Women and Economics is fairly straightforward: as a result of middle-class women's economic dependence on men, they had become more feminine and less human, thwarting what Gilman took to be evolution's plan. The process would only reverse itself once these women learned to stand on their own two feet. And once they did, both they and the men, also stunted by current inequities, would finally fulfill their human potential, to the world's great benefit. Though others had made similar arguments, few had stated the case so succinctly or persuasively. Suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt deemed Women and Economics an "immortal book on the status of women,... utterly revolutionizing the attitude of mind in the entire country, indeed of other countries, as to woman's place" (qtd. in "Charlotte Gilman" 3). In her day, Gilman was considered the brains of the woman's movement and Women and Economics "the outstanding book on Feminism" (Schwimmer). Her thoughts on women's rights and wrongs were seen as visionary, providing the necessary answers to the day's burning questions, chief among them questions of gender.
Among the many reviews and commentaries devoted to Women and Economics was a dialogue published in the Critic, featuring a "Tea with a Subject" held to discuss Gilman's influential views on the Woman Question. The attendees' opinions of the book vary, but they concur when one of their number faults Gilman for failing to mention "the power of love" as the reason women marry and stay married (Perry 892). This seems an odd indictment, for two reasons: first, the author was falling in...