ABSTRACT
More than any sociologist of her day, perhaps more than any since, Charlotte Perkins Gilman fearlessly bridged the artificial divide between fact and fiction. Herein lies her abiding witness to all women and men who live their lives between doubt and hope wherein the disciplined practice of social theory begins. Without fiction, there is no imagination; without imagination, no dreams; without dreams, facts hardly matter. Theories are the ways people use their imagination to talk about the factual realities that hedge their social dreams.
