ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s linguistic insights, especially as presented in The Man-Made World and practiced in Herland, a work of Utopian fiction. Herland opens on the eve of World War I, as three American male explorers discover an all-female society near the source of an unnamed river. Deconstruction androcentric semantics is the central linguistic theme of Herland. A decade after Herland was published, however, the establishment of linguistics as a professional discipline apparently ignored the century-old feminist tradition of direct engagement with the politics of language. The idea that later feminists would come to see his work as the first analysis of women and language would have startled Gilman and her generation, and raises interesting questions for our own. A survey of Gilman’s writings between 1892 and 1935 yields over one hundred relevant citations, bits and peices of a mosaic she never finally assembled.
