ABSTRACT

This chapter argues for privileging “sex” as a primary category of feminist analysis by analyzing one literary context of its usage before “gender” came to signify the social articulation of sexual difference and thereby to dominate the interdisciplinary fields of feminist research. It shows that follows is that Women and Economics provides a valuable source for teasing out the meanings of “sex” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian novel and that it is foundational to the social program she promotes in that text. The chapter suggests that although Gilman’s evolutionary feminism does not provide contemporary feminism with a model to emulate, it does offer an alternative view of the body as the locus of biosocial problems for women. Women’s economic dependence on men and its effect on the “sex-relation” were not for Gilman completely “social” instances of subjection. Rather, they represented the development of a particular social relation through human evolution.