In her collection of essays Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, Gilman again lays out her ideas for liberating women. The key step is recognizing marriage as a sexuo-economic bargain, and ridding the culture of the myth of marriage as necessarily natural and born of love. As Gilman sees it, selfishness and stupidity are inherent to the existing household model. The man goes out to make money to bring back to the wife, who is taught to want stupid baubles with no conception of the labor that went into their making, and has no productive or creative outlet of her own. This degrades the mother. The children inherit her degradation both genetically and by observation, and the perpetuation of this cycle is what is keeping “the race” back. The goal is to financially liberate women so they can exercise their breeding power. Concerningly, Gilman’s proposed liberation goes hand in hand with eugenics. Her fixation on breeding and genetics runs through her fiction as well.
Herland, Gilman’s sci-fi novel about a land free of men, is an example of this. The inhabitants of Herland have no crime, no hunger, no conflict (also, notably, no sex, no art). They exist together in dreamlike harmony. Held one way, Herland is a gentle, maternal paradise, and the novel itself is a plea for allowing these feminine qualities to take part in the societal structure. Held another, we see how firmly their equality is based in their homogeneity. The novel’s twist is that the inhabitants of Herland are considering whether or not it would benefit them to reintroduce male qualities into their society, by way of sexual reproduction. Herland is a tale of the fully realized potential of eugenics, and for Gilman, it’s a utopia.
All of this is especially troubling when you consider that Gilman was a staunch and self-described nativist, rather than a self-described feminist, as the texts surrounding her rediscovery imply. Nativists believed in protecting the interests of native-born (or “established”) inhabitants above the interests of immigrants, and that mental capacities are innate, rather than teachable. Put bluntly, she was a Victorian white nationalist. When Gilman is described as a social reformer and activist, part of this was advocating for compulsory, militaristic labor camps for Black Americans (“A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 1908). Part of this is pleading for racial purity and stricter border policies, as in the sequel to Herland, or for sterilization and even death for the genetically inferior, as in her other serialized Forerunner novel, Moving the Mountain.
These ideas of Gilman’s are hard to reconcile with our current conception of her as a brave advocate against systems of oppression—a political hero with a few, forgivable flaws.