ABSTRACT
Commentators have customarily stressed, for good or for ill depending on their perspective, how conciliatory, moderate, and pragmatic American socialism has been in comparison to revolutionary, European, Marxist socialism. In choosing to speak of Charlotte Perkins Stetson instead of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this chapter focuses on the author-activist’s career during her deepest period of socialist involvement. Stetson similarly merged reform and revolution in ways that confound a simple identification of the movement as moderate or radical. The difference separating Edward Bellamy, Stetson, and other reform socialists from doctrinaire Marxists was, rather, where the fault lines between classes were drawn, or could be drawn. Without denying that working-class people suffered the most vicious abuses of capitalism, Stetson and others in the Nationalist, Populist, and Fabian movements also insisted that capitalism was harmful to the vast majority of Americans.
