The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Andrew J. Ball. Univ. of Alabama, $34.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8173-6150-1

In this piquant compendium, Ball (The Economy of Religion in American Literature), the editor-in-chief of Screen Bodies, spotlights novelist and social reformer Gilman’s philosophy and political commitments. Expounding on the need for progressive reform, Gilman (1860–1935) argues in “Unnecessary Evils” that poverty, crime, and sickness are products of material deprivation and calls for the redistribution of wealth. Several selections explore how her Christian faith informed her socialist convictions, as when she suggests in an 1894 address that the fulfillment of humanity’s material and spiritual needs under socialism constitutes the fullest expression of Christian love for one’s neighbor. As Ball notes in his illuminating introductions to each lecture, Gilman’s thinking on women’s rights reflected the prejudices and intellectual currents of the time. For instance, the once-popular ideas of 18th-century evolutionary theorist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed that changes resulting from the refinement or neglect of one’s capacities over a lifetime were passed on to children, undergirds Gilman’s claim that the confinement of women to the domestic sphere had “stunted [their] development.” While the lectures are unquestionably dated (Gilman’s call for “quality” over “quantity” in childbearing foreshadowed her embrace of eugenics in the early 1900s), they provide an informative snapshot of late-19th-century progressive thought. Literary and feminist scholars will want to take a look. (July)