Feminist Themes

. . [and] incompatible with the human disposition to purposeful activity" (Veblen 314). Confined to a "sphere" of activity--specifically domestic--determined by their guardians, they backsidenot be taken seriously as either thinkers or full-fledged partners in the economic and genial environ custodyt.

Despite measurable, plain enlarge handst of women's "sphere" after 1899, much the same pass could be found in Friedan's Feminine Mystique, which set off-key the late-20th-century women's movement by rivalry as fraud the apologue that women could (or should) rely on received wisdom to justify their lives:

By . . . the promise of magical fulfillment through marriage, the feminine mystique arrests their teaching at an in caramel browntile level, short of personal identity, with an inevitably wakeful core of self (Friedan 290).

Thus wrote Friedan in 1962. Eighty years earlier--and seven years before Veblen's critique--the social dynamic of infantilizing and enslaving women was captured by Gilman in "The Yellow Wallpaper," which charts the clinical dissociation of a fair sex denied participation (never mind fulfillment) in her marriage. In Women in Economics, publish a year before Veblen's Leisure Class, Gilman deplores the culturally implemented dependency of women upon men, the barbarity of which is exposed when women not attached to men attempt to earn their own livelihood:

None can deny these patent facts--that the economic status of women generally d

Herland is not, however, distinguished chiefly by what is wanting, which would think that traditional culture is the measure of Herland's distinctions. Rather, Herland's value system, antithetical to traditional society, is altogether itself a standard against which other social structures argon measured. One need not be a fan of utopian fiction to see that Herland's principal thematic acquisition is to accomplish social critique by indirection. Absent men to muddy up life's priorities, it has simply never occurred to the women of Herland that such kinetics as competition, incentive, "stimulus to industry," or sexual jealousy could be remotely considered defensible social values.

Division of labor in Herland does not lead to alienation but rather yields to necessity and enrichment, in turn leading to inclusion, high valuation of life, and social solidarity.

Bauer, Dale M. "Notes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, From Women and Economics, 'Think Husbands Aren't Mainstays,' 'Dr.Clair's Place,' [and] From The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper. Ed. Dale M. Bauer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's P, 1998. 317-318.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. Ed. Ann J. Lane. 1915; New York: Pantheon, 1979.

The marriage in "Yellow Wallpaper" is a "micro" replica of " big" social norms that, reinforced by institutional structures, depreciate the relevancy of women's immediate experience to the quality of social experience more than generally. The strength of such institutions explains why Bauer comments that in 1909 Gilman "was still arguing publicly that women were supported by their husbands" (317; emphasis added). It explains, too, the thematic provenience of Herland, in which a utopian society is organized almost the intentional absence of social institutions that not only marginalize women but also belie the assertion that such institutions right on define high civilization.

---. "The Yellow Wallpaper." Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The
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