ABSTRACT
Despite seemingly obvious connections, early literary treatments of women did not generally highlight their citizenship rights as implied by American national identity. In the twentieth century, that changed, at least in the sense that we begin to see prominent works treating national identity from a feminist perspective. In this section of the book, Hogan considers three works that take different, but closely related approaches to this topic. The first, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland , is a feminist utopia, presenting the reader with a society that Gilman imagines as perfect for women, one that corrects the patriarchal inequalities of the U.S. at the time. The crucial context for Gilman’s novel is “first wave” feminism, with its struggle for political rights, particularly suffrage. Herland extends Gilman’s feminist analysis and vision—earlier articulated in scholarly writing—to literary narrative. But there are significant problems with this novel, prominently including its use of identity categories and cognitive modeling.
