ABSTRACT
Charlotte Perkins Gilman considered herself a social scientist and a feminist theorist. In Gilman’s eyes, doing social science and doing feminist theory were not two separate enterprises, they were one. This chapter aims to give Gilman’s views of social evolution a sufficient rendering so we may assess her as the foremost early feminist theoretician. It provides some insight into the kind of feminist reasoning that characterized these early social thinkers. The gradual development of the masculine and feminine organs and functions cannot of course be denied as a natural development, but Gilman suggests, most provocatively, an unnatural feature by which our race holds an unenviable distinction consists mainly in this. Most anthropologists have dismissed the notion of an early matriarchy, some feminists object to any use of “androgyny” as a moral ideal, and others might object to placement of “mothering” as the central function of a human society.
