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Within the last decade or so, Charlotte Perkins Gilman has been l experiencing something of a renaissance. While this prominent turn-of-the-century intellectual leader languished in obscurity until Carl Dealer 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 expressed 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.
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. Unfortunately, this focus on Gilman's life experiences has lead scholars to view Gilman first and foremost as a feminist and her place within women's history. However, Gilman's feminist ideas clearly have a place within educational history and the long tradition of female authors who wrote in order to transform society by educating other women. Like her great aunt Catharine Beecher, Gilman illustrated the need to systematize instruction in the domestic realm and to develop institutions for teacher education. Like M.
Carey Thomas, she emphasized the need to offer an intellectually challenging higher education for women that was on par with the collegiate liberal arts education, one that would train women in critical and analytical thought. Like Jane Addams, she viewed education as integral to democracy, and she wanted children's schooling to promote unity by teaching them to direct and adjust their own actions to those of others. Only Jane Roland Martin in Reclaiming a Conversation has explored Gilman's ideas on education. Yet Martin placed Gilman within the historical and philosophical discussion regarding the ideal of an educated woman. Neither Gilman's critique of the educational system at the turn of the century nor her ideas on early childhood education were considered fully. Further, her ideas on citizenship education were explored only within the context of motherhood and a female utopia.
Thus, Gilman has not been viewed within the context of progressive education, early childhood education, or citizenship education. Moreover, the centrality of education within Gilman's feminist philosophy has been lessened. Like John Dewey, Gilman sought through education to create a more democratic society. Yet Gilman's conception of education and vision of democracy were more radical than his. In reaction to the patriarchal nature of society, Gilman envisioned a feminized educational system and a feminized society.
By feminizing the values, attitudes, and sensibilities of education, as well as the content, methodology, and philosophy, Gilman hoped to end gender discrepancies within society by creating a fundamentally new woman. Gilman shared many basic educational ideas with the generation of thinkers who matured during the period of "intellectual chaos" caused by Darwin's Origin of the Species. 4 Marked by the belief that individuals can direct human and social evolution, many progressives came to view education as the panacea for advancing social progress and for solving such problems as urbanization, poverty, or immigration. The feminized educational system that Gilman devised was based on this belief in the powers of education and her knowledge of the educational experiments undertaken at Hull House in the 1890 's. She spent three months at Hull House during the period when John Dewey was active there, and Dewey's influence on Jane Addams and hers on him, are well documented. No clear evidence indicates that Gilman read or corresponded with John Dewey, although she often recast others' ideas, blending them with her own, without acknowledging the originator.
Whether the result of observation, reading, or conversation, the similarities between these three educational theorists are marked. All emphasized the importance of environment in education, all sought to connect learning to the experience of the child and to the needs of society, all recognized the direct relationship between education and de moray, and all advocated learning by doing. Yet only Gilman discussed education in terms of gender discrepancy and the impact of education (or the lack of education) on women. Gilman had begun to explore the issue of gender discrepancy within society in the mid- 1880 's when she first began her career as a writer. Her first published essays focused on the inequity found within marriage and child-rearing.
Her collection of poetry, In This Our World, furthered her reputation as a writer about women's condition as her poems criticized suffocating love and the association of women with sin. Gilman emerged as an acknowledged force on the literary scene with her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper. " Her gripping tale of a new mother's descent into madness brought to light the inequity between men and women within the family and the overwhelming nature of Victorian social norms for womanhood. Not until the publication of Women and Economics, however, did Gilman systematically analyze issues of gender discrepancy or the relationship between education and women. Arguing from the vantage-point of evolutionary science, Gilman illustrated how humans "are the only animal species in which the female depends upon the male for food, the only animal in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation. " 6 Women's economic dependence resulted in their being "denied the enlarged activities which have developed intelligence in man, denied the education of the will which only comes by freedom and power. " 7 The liberation of women thus required education and the opportunity to use the fruits of their studies to establish social as well as economic independence. After the success of Women and Economics, the issue of female education became a familiar theme in Gilman's works. A prolific writer, she published one collection of poetry; seven theoretical treatises, countless essays for popular and scholarly journals, and her own journal called the Forerunner, which she alone wrote for seven years and in which she serialized four full-length novels.
Gilman's work constantly explored the role of women in society, questions of what knowledge was of most worth to women, ways women might use that knowledge to improve society. Though she had a mixed audience in both Europe and the United States, Gilman directed her message to those women whom she felt were not engaged in the larger movements of the time and therefore needed to expand their sphere outside the home. While much of her work dealt with education implicitly, a great deal of the discussions were explicit. In an article she wrote for the Independent titled "Child Labor and the Schools, " Gilman painted a broad view of education, defining its "real interest" as "the free exercise of natural faculties, the pursuit of knowledge for the love of it, the reverence for the truth, the delight in feats of mental skill, and in all daily wonders of an unfolding world of fact and law. " 8 In the Forerunner she said the goal of education was to teach individuals to "see clearly, to understand, to properly relate one idea to another, to refuse superstition and mere repetition of other people's opinion. " Throughout all her works on women and education, Gilman's ultimate goal was to develop autonomous individuals, for rational behavior was possible only if self-governing men and women could connect knowledge with action and could judge others' opinions in relation to their own. Autonomy depended on the development of two powers, "a clear, far-reaching judgment, and a strong, well used will. " 10 Judgment and will were the crucial ingredients of citizenship in fostering respect for others, in developing critical thinking skills, and in guarding against "the habit of acting without understanding, and also of understanding without acting. "ll For Gilman, criticism was based in experience and imagination; for how could we criticize something without some knowledge of it or without some vision of what it might be? Therefore, education must emphasize imagination as well as truth and reason, self-discipline as well as self-restraint.
Moreover, education must combine all these skills to develop the faculties of reason so essential to rational and judicious-acting individuals and so crucial to avoid "that fatal facility in following other pe...
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Research essay sample on Men And Women Turn Of The Century
