ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s connection with the evolutionist ideas of late nineteenth century Reform Darwinism. It focuses on the assumptions that her language and use of metaphor reveal, and upon her vision of human social evolution as a meliorisic process through which the equality of the sexes must emerge. Gilman has been recognized by scholars as one of the major feminist theorists of the period which spans the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dale Spender places Gilman’s work as being at the forefront of feminist theory and regards her as the early feminist most closely embodying the assumptions and aims of the contemporary women’s movement. Gilman was a self-taught economic theorist with a good command of the basic ideas of capitalism and a general understanding of Marxist principles. That she was also a Bellamyite is evident in, among other things, her Utopian vision of the kitchenless home as the beneficiary of many technological advanees.
