Psy Essay Research Paper Within the last

Psy Essay, Research Paper

Within the last decade or so, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has been experiencing something of a renaissance. While this prominent turn-of-the-century intellectual leader languished in obscurity until Carl Degler resurrected her in the mid-1950’s, today there are two biographies, two collections of her writings, numerous literary criticisms; and “The Yellow Wallpaper’ proclaims her “feminist manifesto,” not only in print but as adapted for Masterpiece Theater, the opera, and the ballet.l Why all the renewed interest in Gilman. According to Mary Hill and Ann Lane, the answers lie in the life experiences of a rather extraordinary woman who waged a lifelong battle against the restrictive patriarchal social codes for women in late nineteenth-century America. From this battle, Gilman developed a controversial conception of womanhood.

Born in 1860, Gilman, a self-educated intellectual, dedicated her life to serving humanity. When her lover unexpectedly proposed, she was suddenly torn between work and marriage. After years of debating whether to marry or not to marry, she consented and to the best of her abilities assumed the traditional roles of wife and mother, only to suffer a debilitating nervous breakdown. When her treatment of total rest drove her close to insanity, she was cured by removing herself physically from her home, husband, and finally her child, and by engaging in and writing about the social movements of the day.

Using her extraordinary life experiences as a female within a patriarchal system, Gilman redefined womanhood, declaring women the equal of men in all spheres of life. This “new woman” was to be an intelligent, well-informed, and well-educated free thinker, the creator and expresser of her own ideas. She was to be economically self-sufficient, socially independent, and politically active. She would share the opportunities, duties, and responsibilities of the workplace with men, and together they would share the solitude of the hearth. Finally, the new woman was to be as informed, assertive, confident, and influential as she was compassionate, nurturing, loving, sensitive–a woman of the world as well as of the home. Gilman’s vision of an autonomous female challenged not only the traditional “cult of true womanhood” but the concepts and values of family, home, religion, community, capitalism, and democracy.2

Moreover, Gilman’s writings about these tensions and struggles between marriage and career, social expectations, and personal goals continue to impact women’s decisions to day, while illuminating her arguments for abating them has greatly heightened our understanding of the power of social norms on the individual. More importantly, Gilman’s life and works provided us a role model.

content and philosophy as well as in its methods and pedagogy. Building upon the earlier efforts of Francis Wright and Catharine Beecher towards establishing alternative philosophies of instruction, Gilman maintained that the predominant educational philosophy was still too narrow since masculine traits were defined as human traits and female traits were defined as other.17 Thus, women’s emergence into primary, secondary, and higher education was but further immersion into institutions marked by the male characteristics of competition, self- interest, and self-expression. In both The Man-Made World and His Religion and Hers, she argued that this imbalance in the nature of women’s education resonated in the types of knowledge extended to women: the knowledge considered of most worth to women was the knowledge determined, accumulated, and organized by men; it was masculine knowledge presented within a masculine culture in a masculine way. l8

In Herland, her all female utopian novel, Gilman suggested how society and education might be different if motherhood rather than manliness became the cultural ideal. In a land where neither the private home nor the nuclear family existed, the characteristics of love, service, ingenuity, and efficiency became the dominant social norms and motherhood became a social rather than a biological category. “Here we have Human Motherhood–in full working use,” explained a Herlander to a male intruder in her country. “The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them–on the race. You see, we are Mothers.”l9 Therefore, education became the “highest art, allowed only to our highest artists” and childrearing emerged as “a culture so profoundly studied, practiced with such subtlety and skill, that the more we love our children the less we are willing to trust that process to unskilled hands–even our own.”20 As Jane Roland Martin so aptly noted, in Herland “the interests of women, children, and the state become one, so that an education for citizenship is an education for motherhood, just as an education for motherhood is an education for citizenship.”21

In comparing education for citizenship with education for motherhood, Gilman stressed social responsibility as central to education. Moreover, she illuminated the imbalanced nature of the androcentric society and its disregard for the qualities of womanhood evident in citizenship. Accordingly, the existing male-dominated culture needed to be feminized; it needed to reevaluate social values and attitudes towards women and women’s role within