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When we first compare the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman with those of her great-aunt, Catharine Beecher, we are likely to conclude that the two could not have had more disparate notions about the kind of lives American women should lead. Beecher, who by the age of thirty-five had founded and supervised two female academies (the Hartford Female Seminary and the Western Female Institute), achieved recognition when her book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, appeared in 1841. She became known as the proponent of a domestic ideology in which men and women by definition occupy "separate spheres," the men's "sphere" being the public realm of commerce and politics, and women's the contained environment of the home. Giving free rein to the appetite for systematization and homology that had led her, years earlier, to impose Butler's Analogy of Religion on her students, Beecher developed a vision of gendered propriety in which a woman's arrangement of rolling parlor screens was subtly but undeniably linked to social and divine order. Powerfully reinforcing the boundary between private and public space, Beecher codified femininity in the spatial and material layout of the home, creating, thereby, a rhetoric of containment for women that passed itself off as a recognition of influence. The formulation of American womanhood as a pious blend of self-denial and influence exerted within the four walls of the home went over well with Beecher's audience. The Treatise was reissued fifteen times within fifteen years of its publication, and was given a second life when Beecher and her younger sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, revised it as American Woman's Home in 1869.
Gilman, by contrast, expended much of her intellectual energy trying to undo the domestic ideology to which her great-aunt so ambitiously contributed. In print and in public lectures, Charlotte Perkins Gilman attacked the nineteenth century's configuration of private space as woman's domain and its attendant generalizations about femininity. Whether speaking before a crowd at Cooper Union in New York, or addressing the readers of her own monthly magazine, the Forerunner, Gilman unflaggingly urged her audience to consider their logic in assigning women to the home. Hadn't the composition of home life altered radically between the beginning and final decades of the nineteenth century? Americans had witnessed the decided...