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Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer
Edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. 328 pp. $37.95/$17.95 paper.
A spinoff from the first international Charlotte Perkins Gilman conference in Liverpool in June 1995, this collection of fourteen essays attests to Gilman's intellectual versatility, the growing interest in her work among scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, and her continuing appeal a generation after her initial revival. The best of these essays plumb the seldom-explored recesses of Gilman's writings. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for example, in "`Fecundate! Discriminate!' Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity," trace the implications of Gilman's misreadings of Lester Frank Ward's feminist theories. Similarly, Catherine J. Golden, in "`Written to Drive Nails With': Recalling the Early Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," reads the unapologetically didactic verse in In This Our World against the background of Gilman's treatise Women and Economics, "a reform tract written at times as a pseudo-scientific study" (246). To her credit, Golden confronts Gilman's racism and ethnocentrism as well as her surprising (for...