Women and Economics

When Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman passed away in 1935, she was well-known for both her political and journalistic writing as well as her unusual personal life. As a pioneering journalist and feminist scholar in her day, Gilman was a supporter of women's rights activists like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and her great-aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although Gilman was interested in social justice and political injustice in general, her writing was primarily focused on the uneven treatment of women in the institution of marriage. Gilman argued that restricting women to the domestic sphere denied them the opportunity to express their full potential for creativity and intelligence while depriving society of women with the skills necessary for careers in the private and public sectors. Her arguments were made in such works as Concerning Children (1900), The Home (1904), and Human Work (1904). She argued that the conventional family power structure did not benefit anyone, not the wife who was treated like an unpaid servant, not the husband who was treated like a master, and not the kids who were subject to both. Women and Economics, her most ambitious study, examined the hidden worth of women's labor in the capitalist economy.