ABSTRACT

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the 'new women' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - one of a growing number of women who struggled to extend the parameters of their physical abilities within a patriarchal tradition of female confinement and subordination. An exceptional woman of considerable talent, she became a major intellectual force in turn-of-the-century America. As a result of her prolific writing and lecturing on her theory of the evolution of gender relations and women's need to become socially useful in the larger world of production, she became known worldwide as a feminist theorist and iconoclastic social critic. 'Writer, philosopher, socialist and feminist, Gilman has come to stand for the potentialities of American womanhood. "