A Double Bind

Women's rights advocates were by no means unified in opposition to the concept of the ‘‘unproductive housewife''. They recognized, even empha­sized, a double bind. Too much emphasis on the importance of women's work in the home could strengthen the case that women should be confined there.

No one captured the implications better than a remarkable independent intellectual named Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a distant relative of the Bee­cher sisters who lacked their enthusiasm for domesticity. Gilman's ideas were less embedded in political economy than in the emerging theories of social evolution that were shaping the new field of sociology. Yet she managed to engage a broad audience in a broadside against the Marshallian argument that women should specialize in motherhood.²⁰

Gilman's Women and Economics, published in 1898, made her name. The Nation magazine pronounced it ‘‘the most significant utterance on the subject of women since Mill's Subjection of Woman.''²¹ Its enthusiastic reception enabled her to make a living as a journalist and lecturer, traveling widely in Europe as well as the U.S. In addition to writing more books on the same subject, she pioneered the genre of feminist science fiction, and published, edited, and wrote most of the content of a regular magazine, The Forerunner. A self-described socialist feminist, Gilman was never partisan or doctrinaire. Her naive but charming confidence in economic progress led her to believe that the inevitable dissolution of the patriarchal household would lead to increased social cooperation.

Taking her cue from earlier feminists, Gilman carefully acknowledged the value of domestic labor:

For a certain percentage of persons to serve other persons, in order that the ones so served may produce more, is a contribution not to be overlooked.

“But,” she immediately added, ‘‘so are horses.” She gently suggested that both housewives and horses would soon become obsolete. Women and Economics included a chapter entitled ‘‘Socializing the Household Indus­tries” that advocated innovations such as apartment living and collective meal provision.

Deftly invoking economic principles, Gilman pointed out that households were small-scale, inefficient enterprises, resistant to technological change. Incentives within them were misaligned: However hard wives and mothers worked, they could never capture the benefits of their efforts.²³ In response to the argument that women earned their livelihood as mothers, rather than merely domestic workers, Gilman pointed out that there was no relationship between the quantity or quality of motherhood and the quantity and quality of pay.²⁴ Although she never used Marxian terminology, it would have served her here. Essentially, she argued that capitalism had left women behind within a semi-feudal system.²⁵

Gilman observed that wives and mothers remained dependent on men for financial support. In a public debate sponsored by the Women's Trade Union League in 1909 on the question ‘‘is the wife supported by her husband?” Gilman, arguing ‘‘yes’’, lost the audience vote.²⁶ Yet many of her readers and listeners sympathized with her argument that women’s complete specialization in motherhood was no longer necessary or desirable. Gilman noted that many families were seeking to limit their number of children, partly in order to devote more resources to the care and education of a smaller number.²⁷ Even if domestic labor and childrearing were productive activities, she emphasized, they could never fully utilize women’s productive capabilities.

Some critics labeled her ‘‘antimaternalist’’. She was, certainly, less enthu­siastic about maternity than European counterparts such as Ellen Key, the Swedish activist who had already begun to call for state support of both

258 GREED, LUST & GENDER married and unmarried mothers.²⁸ Unlike Key, Gilman was not particu­larly interested in sexual liberation. Indeed, she voiced prudish concern that competition among women for male support encouraged them to flaunt their sexuality.²⁹ But Gilman's conviction that family work was fundamen­tally different from market work was widely shared by a new generation of professional women learning how to make a life and a living for themselves outside the home.