Catharine Beecher and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Architects of Female Power

Abstract

When we first compare the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman with those of her great-aunt, Catharine Beecher, we are likely to conclude that the two could not have had more disparate notions about the kind of lives American women should lead. Beecher, who by the age of thirty-five had founded and supervised two female academies (the Hartford Female Seminary and the Western Female Institute), achieved recognition when her book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, appeared in 1841. She became known as the proponent of a domestic ideology in which men and women by definition occupy spheres, the men's sphere being the public realm of commerce and politics, and women's the contained environment of the home. Giving free rein to the appetite for systematization and homology that had led her, years earlier, to impose Butler's Analogy of Religion on her students, Beecher developed a vision of gendered propriety in which a woman's arrangement of rolling parlor screens was subtly but undeniably linked to social and divine order. Powerfully reinforcing the boundary between private and public space, Beecher codified femininity in the spatial and material layout of the home, creating, thereby, a rhetoric of containment for women that passed itself off as a recognition of influence. The formulation of American womanhood as a pious blend of self-denial and influence exerted within the four walls of the home went over well with Beecher's audience. The Treatise was reissued fifteen times within fifteen years of its publication, and was given a second life when Beecher and her younger sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, revised it as American Woman's Home in 1869. Gilman, by contrast, expended much of her intellectual energy trying to undo the domestic ideology to which her great-aunt so ambitiously contributed. In print and in public lectures, Charlotte Perkins Gilman attacked the nineteenth century's configuration of private space as woman's domain and its attendant generalizations about femininity. Whether speaking before a crowd at Cooper Union in New York, or addressing the readers of her own monthly magazine, the Forerunner, Gilman unflaggingly urged her audience to consider their logic in assigning women to the home. Hadn't the composition of home life altered radically between the beginning and final decades of the nineteenth century? Americans had witnessed the decided shift of productivity from the home to the factory. Who was to say that women, too, shouldn't resituate themselves outside of discrete homes (a question Gilman asked with characteristic inattention to the migration of working-class women into factories, and a habitual conflation-the legacy of her great auntof womanhood and middle-class interests)? With industrial capitalism having effected so many changes in American society, Gilman sought to remind people that the status quo of women as the overseers of the home was itself open to-in fact, in need of-change. As she queries in 1898, in her book Women and Economics: Is our present home life, based on the economic dependence of woman in the sex-relation, the best calculated to maintain the individual in health and happiness, and develop in him the higher social faculties? The individual is not maintained in health and happiness,-that is visible to all; and how little he is developed in social relation is shown in the jarring irregularity and wastefulness of our present economic system. (210) Like Catharine Beecher, Gilman links the role of women to the general health of the social system; the dependent and isolated situation of women in their separate homes generates irregularity and wastefulness within the larger economic system. Unlike Beecher, however, Gilman does not struggle to proclaim the influence of homebound women on society while maintaining that the two spheres are fundamentally separate. Rather, Gilman seeks to blur the distinction between private and public life. In her novel, Moving the Mountain, for example, Gilman proposes a community in which central housekeeping services and communal eating halls displace the labor of individual households, thus concentrating in the hands of a few the duties of the conventional housewife, while freeing the majority of women for a new range of unorthodox pursuits. …