Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Feminist Theorist & Author

Posted on May 12, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Life Highlights

  • Charlotte Perkins Born on July 3, 1869 in Hartford, Connecticut
  • Attended the Rhode Island School of Design in 1878-1879 and trained as a commercial artist
  • Freelance lecturer and author
  • Perkins was a pivotal feminist theorist and allied with progressive political movements
  • The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
  • women and Economics (1898)
  • Committed suicide on August 17, 1935 in Pasadena, California

Core Ideas

  • Gilman’s multidimensional theory of gender inequality combines:
  • a Marxist emphasis on the economic and political basis for gender inequality
  • a Symbolic Interactionist emphasis on how these gender differences are reinforced and institutionalized through the process of socialization/ social production
  • an emphasis on the socio-biological underpinnings of gender differences

Core Ideas: Gilman & Marxism

  • Following the Marxist tradition, Gilman analyzed the political and economic factors that produce and reproduce gender inequality (Structural Conditions)
  • Gilman sought to show that the traditional division of labor of the family (breadwinner husband/ housewife) was inherently problematic because it makes women economically dependent on men

Symbolic Interactionism

  • What accounts for gender difference?
  • In conjunction with the Chicago School and the symbolic interactionist tradition, Gilman emphasized how differential socialization leads to and sustains gender inequality
  • She challenged the long-lasting assumptions that inherent biological differences deterred men and women from freely and effectively pursue overlapping social activities

Socialization

  • Gilman maintained that from the earliest age, young girl were encouraged, if not forced, to act, think, look, and talk differently from boys, through their interests and capabilities at that age might be identical

Biology

  • Gilman did not deny that biological differences exist between men and women
  • Different biological “principles” to which they adhere
  • Women have unique and underappreciated capabilities
  • Particularly their love and concern for others
  • Women are the superior sex

Core Ideas

  • Gilmans metaphor of the corset is similar to Marx’s notion of false consciousness
  • In both cases, “the facts are there” – the inequality is there- but the person “does not feel it”, he does not see or know of it, she has internalized the pressures and constraints as her own
  • At the same time, Gilman argues that women learn to accept and internalize such pressures
  • In fact, women are so indoctrinated that they resist their own “freedom.”

The Yellow Wallpaper

  • Semiautobiographical fictionalized story about a woman’s experiences of falling into ‘madness’
  • The reader experiences the protagonist’s mental breakdown from the inside out
  • What is the cause of this ‘madness’?
  • Late 19th / early 20th century- women were expected to physically as well as intellectually be “the weak sex”, “childlike” and fragile”
  • These constraints placed on women’s freedom and autonomy drive healthy, independent women to insanity
  • The “rest cure”- at the heart of both Gilman’s personal post- partum depression and that of her protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper”- was the most widely accepted treatment for “female” ailments in the Victorian era
  • Gilmans main point- that social bonds are essential to mental health – coincides with that made by Durkheim in Suicide
  • (i.e, that social processes constrain/ produce individual behavior)
  • In the story, “truth” is the domain both of science and of men
  • The protagonist in the story is at the mercy of her husband not only because he is “The Man,” but also believe he is “The Doctor”
  • This dual legitimacy means that it is his- and only his- assessment of the protagonists health and treatment that counts; a masculinist logic
  • Gilman is waging a deep critique of patriarchal structures in our society:
  • At the rational level, women are not able to do as they please (dependency/freedom of action)
  • At the non-rational level, women are not encouraged to think (freedom of thought)
  • Gilmans critiques and debunks the assumption that women were incapable” of rational, scientific, logical thought
  • She also highlights that women were not valued for their “feminine” ways of knowing either

Women and Economics(1898)

  • Gilman compares the traditional position of the woman to the domesticated horse: Neither the horse nor the woman is “free:
  • The horse, in his free natural condition, is economically independent
  • He gets his living by his own exertions irrespective of any other creature
  • The horse, in his present condition of slavery is economically dependent
  • *He gets his living at the hands of his master; and his exertions, through strenuous, bear no direct relation to his living… The horse works, it is true; but what he gets to eat depends on the power and will of his master
  • From the day laborer to the millionaire, the wife’s worn dress or flashing jewels, her low roof or her lordly one, her weary feet or her rich equipage, – these speak of the economic ability of the husband
  • The comfort, the luxury, the necessities of life itself, which the woman receives, are obtained by the husband and given her by him
  • And when the women, left alone with no man to “support” her, tries to meet her own economic necessities, the difficulties which confront her prove conclusively what the general economic status of the women is
  • Specifically, Gillman argues that if women were actually compensated for their work in the home, poor women with lots of children would get the most money (for they are doing the most work)
  • While women with no women children and those who do no work in the home (ie., those who have nannies, maids, etc.) would get no compensation
  • For those who argue that “a woman’s place is in the home” because of her childbearing responsibilities, Gilman argues that “women’s work is actually mostly house service (cooking, cleaning, mending, etc.) not child service (bearing children, breastfeeding, etc.)
  • Thus, Gilman contends that the traditional division of labor is not biologically driven
  • Gilman argues, rather than develop her own capabilities, women reduce themselves to attracting a viable life partner
  • Economically, this makes sense for women, because “their profit comes through the power of sex-attraction,” not through their own talents
  • The problem with women’s economic dependence on men is that their energies are focused on “catching” a man rather than on being productive citizens
  • Gilman saw it as tragic waste that women were focused to spend their time and energy on grooming and “finding a man” rather than on intellectual concerns
  • In denying her capabilities, she reduces herself to being, literally, the “weaker sex”

The life of Du Bois

  • Born February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, MA
  • First African American to earn a PhD from Harvard
  • Taught at Atlanta University in Georgia from 1897 to 1910
  • The Philadelphia Negro (1899)
  • The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
  • Left academia to work full-time for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in New York City
  • founded the journal Crisis
  • The Souls of White Folk (1920)
  • Du Bois conducted three types of research
  • Empirical Studies
  • Interpretive Essays
  • Political Essays

Core Ideas: The Talented Tenth

  • Du Bois studied less impoverished and oppressed African American communities too
  • The Talented Tenth
  • ” The better classes of Negroes should recognize their duty toward the masses”
  • Winning freedom and justice for all African Americans rested on the shoulders of those who were best prepared, educationally and economically
  • Lead the fight against racial discrimination
  • Du Bois systematically outlines relevant demographic and other information about the black population including:
  • Size
  • Age
  • Sex
  • Family
  • Marriage
  • ” Education and illiteracy
  • Housing
  • Occupations
  • Institutions (especially the Black church)
  • The Philadelphia Negro is the first major sociological study of an African American community ever published in the U.S
  • Du Bois presents a rich array of empirical information about the lives of Philadelphia African Americans, focusing on the “social condition of the Colored People of the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia”
  • Du Bois carried out some 5,000 surveys and interview with African Americans in the Seventh Ward
  • Du Bois and his wife, Nina, also directly experienced many of the conditions- living in the Settlement House, in the heart of the Seventh Ward
  • Du Bois utilized:
  • Statistical research
  • Ethnographic research
  • Historical information
  • Du Bois does not lay all the problems in the Seventh Ward at the doorstep of the white population
  • Instead, he outlines black individuals own role in creating pauperism, alcoholism, and criminality in the black population

The Souls of Black Folk

  • The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is a compilation of 14 essays that Du Bois published previously in the Atlantic Monthly, the New World, and other journals
  • Historically, The Souls of Black Folk is important because it explicity exposed important intellectual and political schism in the black community
  • More moderate Booker T Washington and more radical political activists, such as Du Bois (and also journalists Ida B Wells-Barnett, a feminists and anti-lynching activist)
  • Second, from a social science standpoint, The Souls of Black Folk is significant because Du Bois writes in a new voice
  • He turned away from the more empirical, strictly scientific accounting of race after writing The Philadelphia Negro, convinced that facts alone did nothing to influence people toward improving conditions for black
  • He began to write more “soulful” voice, because he recognized that race does not work or exist solely at the rational level
  • Thus , Du Bois himself “stepped within the Viel raising it that you[the presumably white reader] may view faintly its deeper recesses- the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” (1903/1989)
  • “Need I add that I who speak here am bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the veil?”
  • Du Bois pointly used his own biographical experience to illuminate the reality of race in the United States
  • Du Bois underscores the tremendous social significance of the NEGRO CHURCH. He calls the church the “social center of Negro life in the U.S
  • He notes “in the South, at least, practically every American Negro is a church member”
  • This is why precisely why Du Bois was critical of the Negro church as wel; given its social and institutional vitality, Du Bois felt that the Black church could and should do more for its people
  • Social scientifically, Souls of Black Folk contains a crucial methodological lesson:
  • The workings of such complex phenomena as race and class cannot be fully understood using only “scientific” means
  • Du Bois explored subjectivity because he believed that race and racism did not work at a strictly rational level
  • Interestingly, today this position is not only full embraced by postmodernists- it is taken to a radical extreme
  • The souls of black folk is important theoretically because it contains three interrelated concepts for which Du Bois is now famous
  • the color line
  • Double consciousness
  • The veil

The Color Line

  • The color line is both a preexisting social and cultural structure and an internalized attitude
  • “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line— the relations of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa and the islands of the sea”
  • Du Bois maintains that once “the ‘Color Line’ began to pay dividends” through the colonization and exploitation of Africa and Africans beginning in the fifteenth century, race became central to world history
  • The color line addresses the historical and institutional (esp. colonial) dimensions of race

The Veil and Double- Consciousness

  • The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world- a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un reconciled strivings; two warring deals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder

Double Consciousness

In exploring the subjective dimensions of racism, Du Bois never lost sight of its “objective,” historical origins; the subjective experience of race- “double consciousness” is rooted ultimately in the marginal structural position of “blacks”Du Bois argument can be said to parallel that of MarxMarx always ties the subjective experiences of alienation and “estrangement” to workers relationship to the means of production, that is to class structure

Souls of White Folks

After World War I, Du Bois stepped up his demands for emancipation, and his work acquired a more aggressive toneAfrican American coming home from battle in Europe were incensed to find that despite their wartime contributions, they were treated, at best, as second-class citizensThe Souls of White Folks was originally published in 1910, but it was revised with prefrences from World War I for republication in Darkwater in 1920Darkwater set off a tremendous public storm, in large part because Du Bois asserted that “the dark was preparing to meet the white world in battle”“The Souls of White Folk” reads far more militantlyDu Bois reverses the gaze of racial dominationHere it is white consciousness (or the lack thereof) that is being explored“The Souls of White Folk” has been called “the first major analysis in Western intellectual history to probe deeply White identity and the meaning of Whiteness”First, Du Bois suggests that privilege, ironically, is invisible to whites.Du Bois contends that while African Americans have a “double consciousness,” whites have no racial consciousness at allUnknownst to whites, African Americans can see what it means to be whiteBlacks “clairvoyance” comes from their subordinate social positionAs servants in one form or another, blacks are exposed to the intimate details of whites’ lives; hence they see whites as they really are

Intellectual Influences & Core Ideas

Three of the most significant theoretical influences on Meads work were pragmatism, behaviorism, and evolutionismPragmatism- meaning of objects or social interaction is rooted in action: practical aspects of objects and objects is what mattersEX: What a tree is 0- its meaning- depends on how it is usedShade for a couple om a picnicPlywood for the carpenter

Intellectual Influences & Core Ideas: behaviorism

-Psychological behaviorism is a resolutely empirical branch of psychology that focuses solely on observable actions

-Its proponents argue that the only overt behaviors are open to scientific investigation

-It is against this picture of passive, nonreflexive individuals that Mead fashioned his social behaviorism

-For Mead, the mind is not an ephemeral “black box” that is inaccessible to investigation

-Instead, Mead viewed the mind as a behavioral process that entails a “conversation of significant gestures”

-In this internal conversation, an individual’s takes the attitude of the other, arousing in his own mind the same responses to his potential action that are aroused in the other persons

-Individuals then shape their actions on the basis of the imagined responses they attribute to others

-Mead emphasized that the individual and the society to which she belongs are mutually dependent; each requires the other for its progressive evolution

-Thus, for Mead, “social control, so far from tending to crush out the human individual or to obliterate his self-conscious individuality, is, on the contrary, actually constitutive of and inextricably associated with that individuality” ( 1934/1962: 255)

Intellectual Influences & Core Ideas: Evolutionism

-Darwinian evolutionism

-Mead saw humans as the most advanced species

-Humankinds superiority lies in the capacity to communicate symbolically

-Through the use of language, we are able to take the attitude of the other and respond to our behavior in the same way as those whom it is directed

-Language thus allows us to see ourselves as an object

-Symbolically casting off one’s self, something other animals do not possess

-Instead, other animals react to each other and their environment on the basis of instinct without anticipating the possible effects of their behavior

-Meads view of social progress

-Meads outlined both a practical and a utopian version of progress

-His practical view highlighted the role of science as an instrument for addressing the problems that we confront in the natural and social environments

-Meads utopian view of social progress rests with his emphasis on language and the eventual creation of democratic “universal society”

                                                            “Mind: (1934)

-There are 3 central themes in Meads work: Mind, Symbols, and Language, and The Essence of Meaning

–            – For Mead “mind” is a process or behavior that allows for the consciousness of one’s actions

–            – The mind involves an internal conversation of gestures that make possible the imagined testing of alternative lines of conduct

–            – In the delay of responses produced by such testing lies the crux of intelligent behavior controlling one’s present action with reference to ideas about the future consequences

-It is through symbols or language, that we point out objects to ourselves and orient our behavior

-It is our capacity to think symbolically- to hold within our minds the meaning of things- that allows us to mentally rehearses lines of action without actually performing them

-Herein lies the locus of behavioral control, Yet, controlling ones behavior through thinking is social process, This is because the mind “emerges” as we point out to others and to ourselves the meaning of things

-Mead defines meaning as a “threefold relationship” between:

·1) an individual’s gesture

·2) The adjustive response by another to that gesture

·3) The completion of the social act initiated by the gesture of the first individual

-How then are you able to ensure the proper interpretation of your actions?

–            *How do you make your intentions known such that you are able to bring out the desired responses from others?

-For Mead, such coordinated activity becomes possible only with the development of language in the form of significant symbols

-Significant symbols are words and gestures that have the same meaning for all those involved in a social act

                                                            “Introduction to Self”

-Two themes that form the core of Meads idea of self:

            – 1) the interconnectedness between the self and social experiences

            2) Language as the tool that mediates this relationship

-The “me” is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes” (ibid:175)

-Thus, the individual self is in large measure a social product that is rooted. In our perceptions of how others interpret out behaviors

-The “I” represents the here-and-now, creative aspect of one’s self

-For Mead, it is this spontaneous, unpredictable aspect of the self and social interaction that sparks personal and cultural innovation

-Without the “I” social life would be static and relentlessly conformist

-According to Mead, the self develops in two stages: “play” and the “game”

-The play stage is marked by the ability to assume the attitude of only one particular individual at a time

-This is the stage of self- consciousness that we find in children until around the age of 8

-In the play stage, children perhaps are pretending to be a parent, a superhero, or a princess, moving from one role to the next in an unconnected fashion

-In play, the child is able to switch successively between discrete roles while taking the attitude of the specific other toward herself

-In the game stage, the child is able to move beyond simply taking the role of particular others and assume the roles of multiple other simultaneously.

-Moreover, the child has the ability to control his actions on the basis of abstract “rules of the game”

-This configuration of “roles organized according to rules” brings the attitudes of all participants together in a symbolic unity called the “Generalized Other”

-The generalized other represents the organized set of attitudes that are common in the group to which an individual belongs

            *Responding to ourselves from the point of view of the whole community makes possible the coordination of diverse activities in large groups or institutions

-Moreover, by assuming the attitude of the generalized other, we are able to orient our behavior toward the realization of abstract ideals such as freedom, individual rights, and fairness

-Mead offers his vision of a possible future, an ideal society where individuals are able to realize their full potential while promoting the advancement of the broader community

                                                            Introduction to Society

-Society’s importance

–            *1) it further crystalizes Meads core ideas concerning the importance of significant symbols in taking the attitudes of others and the fundamental interconnection between the individual self and society

            *2) It provides an important counterpoint to the evolutionary schemes expressed by other classical social theorists (including those presented in this volume)

            *3) Meads notion of the basis for and realization of democracy shares much with the conventional wisdom informing American political culture

-Mead argues, like Durkheim, that modern societies are characterized by a greater degree of complexity and functional interdependence

            *The key to creating a universal democracy lies in how the twin process of social control and individual creativity evolve

-An ideal democracy is one in which an individual or group is able to assert its superior skills without seeking to dominate others who in turn are able to benefit from such superior contributions