ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the particular genius—and it was more than talent— that Charlotte Perkins Gilman brought to her sociological work. Gilman’s family life as a child was a series of lessons in the gendered configurations of desire and in status inconsistency. Through her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, she was connected to one of the most influential families in nineteenth century America. Among her great-uncles and great-aunts were Henry Ward Beecher, a lionized preache. Gilman grew to maturity during a period of widespread debate over the nature and place of woman, a debate sparked by new opportunities for women in the post-Civil War expansion and by women’s own mobilization for wider public participation. Gilman was surrounded by questions of gender in the painful extremes of her immediate family, the contradictory role models of her aunts, and the culture itself.
