ABSTRACT
In 1915, as war and hatred swept across Europe, prominent American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman shared with readers of her magazine, The Forerunner, an alternative vision of society. With the 1898 publication of her most famous book, Women and Economics, Gilman's matured ideas about sex and gender were widely read, exciting feminists and many socialists as well. In this period, when the imminent threat of world war was anticipated by few, if any, North Americans, "peace was one of the most conventional of values". Gilman's stand on the war was much closer to that of many feminist reformers than it was to the Socialist Party position. Nevertheless, drawing on the writings of several reform Darwinists, as well as on her personal and political understanding of patriarchy, Gilman worked out a theory of men's and women's relation to war and peace that influenced the views of feminists, pacifists and many socialists too.
