Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution - Softcover

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520209982 ISBN 13: 9780520209985

Publisher: University of California Press, 1998

Synopsis

When Charlotte Perkins Gilman's first nonfiction book, Women and Economics, was published exactly a century ago, in 1898, she was immediately hailed as the leading intellectual in the women's movement. Her ideas were widely circulated and discussed; she was in great demand on the lecture circuit, and her intellectual circle included some of the most prominent thinkers of the age. Yet by the mid-1960s she was nearly forgotten, and Women and Economics was long out of print. Revived here with new introduction, Gilman's pivotal work remains a benchmark feminist text that anticipates many of the issues and thinkers of 1960s and resonates deeply with today's continuing debate about gender difference and inequality.

Gilman's ideas represent an integration of socialist thought and Darwinian theory and provide a welcome disruption of the nearly all-male canon of American economic and social thought. She stresses the connection between work and home and between public and private life; anticipates the 1960s debate about wages for housework; calls for extensive childcare facilities and parental leave policies; and argues for new housing arrangements with communal kitchens and hired cooks. She contends that women's entry into the public arena and the reforms of the family would be a win-win situation for both women and men as the public sphere would no longer be deprived of women's particular abilities, and men would be able to enlarge the possibilities to experience and express the emotional sustenance of family life.

The thorough and stimulating introduction by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson provides substantial information about Gilman's life, personality, and background. It frames her impact on feminism since the Sixties and establishes her crucial role in the emergence of feminist and social thought.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Women and Economics is Gilman's most original and famous work of nonfiction. In it she examines the origins of women's subordination and its function in society. Woman, she argues, makes a living by marriage - not by the work she does - and thus man becomes her economic environment. As a consequence, her "female" attributes dominate her "human" qualities because they determine her survival. Gilman's thesis challenges both biological and theological arguments about women's innate passivity and defies the virtual exclusion of women in classical sociological theory. If women are to fully engage in domestic and public life, Gilman contends that their emancipation requires both economic participation and adequate child care. Gilman's argument in this classic work resonates today, as women continue their struggle to find a meaningful independent identity and to balance work and family. Here reprinted with a new introduction, Women and Economics belongs on the same shelf as works by Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, and other pioneering feminists.

About the Author

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), author of the celebrated short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," is regarded by many as a leading intellectual in the women's movement in the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Michael Kimmel is Professor of Sociology at SUNY, Stony Brook, and the author of Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1995). Amy Aronson holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has taught Media Studies at Rutgers University, Hofstra University, and the New School for Social Research.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0520209982
• ISBN 13: 9780520209985
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 396