Hijack the seas tsunami, p.1
When I Was a Witch & Other Stories, page 1
When I Was a Witch & Other Stories
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
With a Series Foreword by Ruth Robbins and
an Introduction by Dr. Catherine J. Golden
flametreepublishing.com
FLAME TREE 451
London & New York
Series Foreword
What did feminism – in fiction and in reality – mean at the turn of the twentieth century? This series of reprints of rare and often forgotten texts from that period answers this question in the widest possible way. For some of its authors, it meant the representation of the New Woman, the sometimes hostile term applied to women who sought the vote, the opportunity for higher education, access to the professions (or just to jobs), or who just wanted their independence from the stifling conventions of the nineteenth century where a woman’s place was definitely ‘in the home’ and where venturing out meant chaperonage or else a risk to reputation. So, some of our chosen texts (for example, The Job by Sinclair Lewis) show those women achieving a measure of independence. In the spirit of the realism which was his hallmark, Lewis also shows that getting a job is actually an illusory form of freedom. The daily grind of the office or factory is not the utopian dream that some seekers after female emancipation had hoped. In other terms, and for other reasons, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening also shows that women could not easily free themselves from standards of sexual propriety: sexual choice is not the route to utopia any more than earning capacity is. Her heroine briefly tastes the pleasure of sexual liberation but cannot escape the judgement of her society: her story does not end well.
For other writers (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for instance), the representation of life as it is that realism demands was also problematic. Realism permitted only the diagnosis of social ills: it could not manage the process of prescribing solutions for the problems it uncovered in the world as it was then constituted. The construction of fantasy worlds, in which current imbalances between the sexes could be redressed in an imagined future was Gilman’s solution in Herland. This is a speculative fiction, a ‘what if?’ world rather than a ‘what is’ world, though in common with all fantasy, it also speaks of the limitations of its own moment of production.
Long ago, Elaine Showalter pointed out, in A Literature of their Own (1977), that focusing purely on representation whether realistic or fantastic can be a kind of dead end. If readers only look at false pictures of reality or at impossible visions of futurity, they get stuck: despair or dreamscapes. A third possibility is to look at the woman writer herself, what she does, often slyly and obliquely, with genre and form. Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett), a woman writer cloaked by a male pseudonym, offers another potential meaning for the first wave of feminism: the professional woman writer, using man-made genres for her own ends, both aesthetic and financial. She belongs to a category that frighteningly often overtakes the woman writer – the forgotten novelist. In recovering and reprinting her work, the series shows both her indebtedness to, and her distinctiveness from, the male models of the adventure fiction genre and the weird tale which, along with romance and crime, were the mainstays of the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century. She also made money – an important consideration for the woman who wants independence – in her chosen domain.
If Stevens stands for ‘pulp’ and popularity, Virginia Woolf is the highbrow novelist par excellence (though she also sold pretty well and was also very interested in the money she could make from her pen as her extended essay A Room of One’s Own makes clear). Her works span a massive range of reviews, short fiction, novels and polemics, and she often returns to the figure of the woman artist and/or writer to demonstrate the ways in which women can be denied their creativity (‘Women can’t paint, women can’t write’, Mr. Tansley says dismissively to the artist Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse) and opportunity (‘Why are women poor?’ she asks in A Room of One’s Own).
For this series, we have brought together texts which showcase women’s talents and their frustrations in a historical moment that is not so very long ago. The battles that the New Woman, the Suffragists and Suffragettes, and the founders of women’s colleges and union members fought on our behalf may all seem to be won. But they only seem that way. Count the women politicians in the House of Representatives and the House of Commons. Check how much an average woman earns over her lifetime and compare it to the average man’s earning capacity. Ask yourself who cleans the bathroom in your house and who does the double shift at work and home. And pay attention to how easily some rights can be lost by the flick of a legislator’s pen and a minor political shift.
The feminism of the early years of the twentieth century had its own blind spots: it was not inclusive of women of colour, nor of women from working-class backgrounds, nor of those women for whom heterosexual romance was not their choice, nor of those women who lived at the intersections of multiple disadvantages. Early feminists were also very often conflicted about the ‘sex’ part of sexual liberation. Nonetheless, those early struggles for white middle-class women’s rights have resonance and lessons to teach for the broader struggles for all women, and for other dis-privileged groups. And representation in its broadest sense (of characters, but also of the women writers we might read) is one of our routes to understanding, action and – let us hope – change.
Ruth Robbins
A New Introduction
In his introduction to the 1966 republication of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), historian Carl Degler calls Gilman ‘the leading intellectual in the women’s movement in the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century’. She won international acclaim for Women and Economics, a major contribution to first-wave feminism that denounces women’s financial dependence upon men (the ‘sexuo-economic relation’). A decade later, however, the market for Gilman’s writing had lessened. She refused to cater to publishers and editors or to submit work to journals run by publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst, who had sensationalized her separation and divorce from Charles Walter Stetson. A woman of action, Gilman devised a solution to this dilemma; as she notes in her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935): ‘“If the editors and publishers will not bring out my work, I will!” And I did’. In 1909 Gilman founded a monthly magazine, Forerunner (1909–16), to showcase her feminism and socialism. The 14 stories in this collection appeared in the first volume of Forerunner (November 1909–December 1910).
Gilman is not unique in launching a journal to publish her work. Charles Dickens, whom she greatly admired, started Household Words (1850–59) to bring out his serial fiction alongside that of other authors (for example Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins). However, Gilman singlehandedly wrote and published every feature of her magazine. Over a seven-year period she filled the issues of Forerunner with her poems, editorials, allegories, book reviews, sermons, advertisements and articles on current events. Each issue also contains serial instalments of her theoretical works and novels, as well as short stories to promote what she calls a more ‘human world’.
These short stories demonstrate Gilman’s unfailing commitment to write with a purpose. In 1896 she told a reporter for the Topeka State Journal that her first book of poems, In This Our World (1893), was ‘a tool box. It was written to drive nails with’. This same metaphor applies to Gilman’s Forerunner fiction, designed to dismantle patriarchy and improve society. Indeed, in an undated paper from her collected ‘Thoughts & Figgerings’, Gilman ponders:
If I can learn to write great stories, it will be a powerful addition to my armory.
To reach a wide audience, she filled her ‘armory’ with poetry, nonfiction and short stories to emancipate women from the home, freeing them to contribute to the ‘world’s work’. Such messages were the driving force behind her writing, as critics have acknowledged. ‘Gilman gave little attention to her writing as literature, and neither will the reader,’ notes Ann J. Lane in her introduction to The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (1980).
There are exceptions, however. Gilman’s best-known and oft reprinted ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892) has real literary merit. Its denouement is also richly ambiguous, unlike much of her short fiction with pat endings. Critics including Gary Scharnhorst and Lane praise Gilman for her skill in dialogue. Also worthy of note are her older women characters who are resilient, capable and wise. Nevertheless, Gilman wrote much of her fiction hastily to make a deadline, sacrificing artistry to nail a point. Although the writing in her short fiction may seem uneven, these stories reflect her mission to convey ‘important truths, needed yet unpopular’, as she expresses in her autobiography.
Gilman’s ‘Mixed Legacy’
Some of Gilman’s ‘truths’ come off as heavy-handed. Worse, her dreams for a better world do not include racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants or the working classes. Gilman focused her agenda on improving the lives of white middle- and upper-class women. Her repugnant nativist views about race, social class, ethnicity and anti-Semitism rear their ugly heads in these stories and will rightly offend readers today. In ‘Three Thanksgivings’, old Sally, ‘a colored lady’, cheerfully serves Mrs. Morrison and the white ladies at the women’s club. In ‘Making a Living’, Arnold Blake hires ‘an Italian from Tuscany’ and ‘other sturdy Italians’ to build his mill. In ‘Boys and the Butter’, missionaries travel ‘to those dark lands where the heathen go naked, worship idols and throw their children to the crocodiles’. ‘Solomon’ sounds like a Jewish name in ‘According to Solomon’, and Mrs. Grey in ‘A Word in Season’ is described as being ‘as rich as a Jew! …And never spendin’ a cent!’. Gilman also stigmatizes physical difference, referring to Mrs. Joyce in ‘Martha’s Mother’ as ‘a cripple’.
These prejudices, evident in the work of other Anglo-American writers of her time, lessen our appreciation of Gilman as a feminist visionary. Hers is a ‘mixed legacy’ – the subject of a book entitled The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (2000), edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando – and we must approach her oeuvre critically. Radical in her time, Gilman nonetheless remains an influential figure in the history of feminism because she foregrounded previously invisible forms of gender oppression. These Forerunner stories offer solutions to problems easily achieved when women and men work together, support each other and use their initiative. They preview Gilman’s enlightened feminist and civic agendas, including kitchenless apartments, housekeeping services, public safety, dress reform, responsible journalism and economic independence for women – all ideas she developed in her fiction and nonfiction published before and after them.
The Progressive Era in America
Gilman published Forerunner during the Progressive Era in US history (1890–1920). The Gilded Age (c. 1877–96), a period of rebuilding following the Civil War, witnessed excessive materialism, corporate growth and wealth for a distinct elite. The Progressive Era, in contrast, aimed to improve the lives of the rapidly growing US population, not just a privileged few. As Judith A. Allen describes in The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (2009), on
the lecture circuit, and as an editor, journalist, and publisher, she [Gilman] addressed sex parasitism, “masculism”, sexual economics, birth control, eugenics, motherhood, pacifism, food adulteration, humanism and Progressivism itself.
Although Gilman’s vision for a more ‘human world’ was narrower than that of many progressives, it does match the tenor of an era known for vast legislative and social reforms.
Some reforms arose from tragedies in American sweatshops, where workers laboured long hours in overcrowded factories with poor ventilation, inferior lighting and extreme temperatures. Notorious among them is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which led to the deaths of 146 people, many of them young immigrant women, trapped in a burning building that was locked to guard against theft. From this disaster grew a commission to investigate the fire, leading to sweeping changes in New York City (for example fire safety codes and child labour laws) to improve workers’ health and safety.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) proved instrumental to reforming the food industry. Sinclair, a muckraker who began his career investigating labour conditions in Chicago, exposed the unsafe working conditions and unsanitary practices in meat packing factories. His novel sparked public outcry, and an investigation was launched by President Theodore Roosevelt. The result was the passing in 1906 of two pieces of legislation, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Gilman supported the latter in the Woman’s Journal of 1904.
This transitional time in American history also witnessed a widening of the domestic sphere and greater equality between the sexes. Jane Addams, a leading progressive, established Hull House (1889) in Chicago to provide childcare, a community kitchen, a gymnasium and education for the urban poor. Proponents for women’s suffrage, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, pushed for women’s right to vote in US elections, resulting in the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920. Gilman met both Addams and Stanton when she organized the Woman’s Congress in 1895. Addams asked Gilman to visit Hull House, which inspired her utopian writings. Of these, Herland (1915), which describes an idyllic society inhabited only by women, is her best known. Stanton invited Gilman to attend the 1896 Women’s Suffrage Convention held in Washington, D.C., where she spoke in favour of suffrage to the House Judiciary Committee.
The onset of the First World War saw the decline of the Progressive Era. Nonetheless, the liberal legislation enacted during this period and the social reforms that Gilman supported continued to shape US society.
Gilman’s Life up to 1909
When Gilman launched Forerunner, she had already been married to Providence artist Charles Walter Stetson (1884), become a mother (1885), separated from Stetson (1888), divorced him (1894) and married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman (1900). The birth of her only child, Katharine, born ten months after her marriage to Stetson, triggered a debilitating breakdown. An enforced rest cure at the Philadelphia sanitarium of leading nerve specialist Dr. S. Weir Mitchell – whose parting advice, as noted in Gilman’s autobiography, was to ‘never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live’ – stirred Gilman to write her autobiographical story ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ (1892), a searing indictment of Mitchell. The nameless narrator of ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, a young wife and mother undergoing a rest cure administered by her husband/physician in a rented country mansion, stays in a former nursery with noxious yellow patterned wallpaper; this at first disgusts and then fascinates her. In the denouement, the narrator rips the wallpaper, allegedly to free a woman trapped behind its pattern (arguably the narrator’s double), and crawls over her husband, who faints upon seeing her. Critics have endlessly debated the story’s ending. In the ‘Afterword’ to the 1973 Feminist Press edition, Elaine Hedges argues that the narrator ‘has been defeated. She is totally mad’. In contrast Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that ‘the narrator has enabled this double to escape from her textual/architectural confinement’ and that Dr John ‘has been temporarily defeated, or at least momentarily stunned’. Stetson, a loving but extremely traditional husband, is the presumed model for Dr. John.
Divorce from Stetson freed Gilman to establish herself as a leading feminist thinker, although she repudiated the term ‘feminist’, coined in the London Athenaeum book review in 1891. Gilman considered herself a ‘humanist’ whose mission was to promote gender equality. She did not at first plan to remarry, but she went on to wed Houghton, a patent attorney, on the condition that she continue her mission to make a better world. Like activists Stanton and Catt, Gilman this time balanced marriage with a full career of writing and speaking engagements. Houghton, Gilman’s unfailing advocate, assisted her research, read her work and attended her lectures. He is arguably the model for the enlightened men who populate her Forerunner fiction. Charlton, the name of Gilman’s publishing company, fittingly combines their two first names: Charlotte and Houghton.
Gilman brought editorial and writing experience to Forerunner, published by the Charlton Company. In 1894 she served as editor, manager and writer for Impress, the voice of the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association (PCWPA) based in San Francisco, CA. Hoping to turn Impress into ‘a good family weekly’, as she calls it in her autobiography, Gilman wrote an inventive ‘Studies in Style’ column. In this she imitated writing by noted authors (for example, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and George Eliot) to expand her readers’ appreciation of literature. The Impress was short-lived, however, because the PCPWA was unable to ‘surmount the liability of Stetson’s [Gilman’s] local reputation as a divorced woman and “unnatural mother”’, as Scharnhorst notes in Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1985). Following her divorce, Gilman had given custody of her then nine-year-old daughter to Stetson, who married Gilman’s close friend Grace Ellery Channing. Forward thinking, Gilman considered Grace her co-mother, but she faced harsh criticism for being both a divorcée and an ‘unnatural mother’, a title she used for a short story. Ever resilient, Gilman left San Francisco and over the next years travelled widely on the lecture circuit, aiming to broaden her audience.
Gilman’s position as assistant editor of Woman’s Journal, the mouthpiece for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, also prepared her for the launch of Forerunner. In 1904 Gilman (together with Florence Adkinson and Catharine Wilde) assumed the post of assistant editor of the influential Boston-based woman suffrage magazine founded by Lucy Stone, a leading suffragist and abolitionist. For an entire year Gilman published without pay a weekly column called ‘Vital Issues’, in which she presented enlightened views on work, the home, childcare, Santa Claus, cremation, maiden names, clean air and water and suffrage.
