The following newspaper report covers a book presentation by the writer Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later, Gilman) at the First Universalist church in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1899. I stumbled upon this item looking for news about the Harvard economics department.
The topic certainly was not overstudied in economics departments of the time and I thought it worth adding this newspaper story to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror. Gilman’s early feminist utopian novel Herland (1915) fell into obscurity for most of the twentieth century. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard has a nice website “From Woman to Human, The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman“.
Here a link to a collection of her papers (some available in digital form).
One wonders if any Harvard students and faculty (or their wives) attended the talk and what they thought of her book.
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“WOMEN AND ECONOMICS.”
Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson, Author of the Volume of That Title,
Speaks to a Cambridge Audience.
Source: “The Woman’s Chronicle” issued as the third section of the Cambridge Chronicle, April 29, 1899, pp. 1, 4.
At the First Universalist church on Inman street, last Wednesday evening, Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson talked on “Women and Economics,” dwelling upon several points already brought out by her in her book on that subject, which has already gone through its first and a part of its second edition. Mrs. Stetson won the approval of her audience by her clear. logical reasoning, while her singularly natural delivery pleased all. She is the great-granddaughter of Lyman Beecher and niece of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She said in part:
The main cause of all trouble between men and women is the economical dependence of women. It is necessary for woman to exchange her products with the world of economics. The duties of a mother and a wife do not prevent her from doing something else now. Only one woman out of every ten keeps a servant, and so they work and work hard, and receive no pay. Why can they not exert their energies spent on what would be drudgery to most of them in doing what they are better fitted to do and would enjoy more?
Are the women who do nothing, or who spend their days in cleaning, better mothers on that account? Every one who wishes to enter a trade or profession studies it and is trained for it, while we women take upon ourselves the task of caring for the human species without a thought. Can we be doing this in the best way? Does our health justify us in supposing that we are bringing up our children right?
We need education in motherhood. Every woman cannot take all the care of her children because not every woman has the requisite faculty to care for them. It is a specialty and not every woman has the requisite training.
While every woman alone takes care of her own children she cannot do it properly because she has not the advantage of the development of motherhood. She cannot know what her children have in common with other children.
Every woman should have some trade, profession or means of earning her living, which she should become master of, and thereby lift our industry up and our children, who should be watched and cared for by experts who make it their life work, will grow up into strong manhood and womanhood, loving and respecting their mother more, than they would had she, an ignorant amateur, practised upon them.
In this way women would be independent and happier; there would be a new profession; the caring for children and our race would be mentally and physically more healthful, and therefore more harmonious.
At the close of the lecture Mrs. Stetson read a poem, “The Mother to the Child,” from her book, “In This Our World.”
SKETCH OF THE LECTURER.
“Newest of new women; breaker of all idols from childhood up,” says Helen Campbell, in her sympathetic article upon the personality of Charlotte Perkins Stetson.
Although the term “new woman” is seldom. if ever, rightly applied it has an essential fitness when used in speaking of Mrs. Stetson, for it might very naturally be expected that the great-grand-daughter of Lyman Beecher, the grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe and of Henry Ward Beecher would be a woman at least unusual and possibly extraordinary. Looked at from one point of view, therefore, Mrs. Stetson is a reformer by instinct and inheritance, the inevitable product of strong generations of men and women who fought or talked all their strenuous lives in defense of truth.
Charlotte Perkins Stetson was born in 1860 at Hartford, Ct. She is the daughter of Frederic Beecher Perkins, and was early a Socialist, not actively so, however, before 1888, when she made her first appearance in public before the Nationalist club in Pasadena, California. In 1890, “Similar Cases,” that remarkable poem through which she is perhaps most widely known, was published in the Nationalist.
It was in 1892 that her written works first began to tell. At that time the Trades and Labor union, of Alameda county, California, awarded her a gold medal for a brilliant essay called “The Labor Movement,” and in 1896 she went abroad, there speedily to be made a member of the Fabian society, an honor so self-evident in these latter days as to need no comment. It was also about this time that she was given the opportunity to talk Socialism from the tail-end of a Socialist van, making its way through one country and another, giving her a chance to study life at every turning of the ways.
Meanwhile, in 1893, she saw the first fruits of her more careful literary work, that is to say, her verse, gathered together and published in San Francisco, in a thin, paper-covered edition, which was intended mainly for private circulation. A second edition was printed in 1895, and in 1896 T. Fisher Unwin brought out the first English edition of her poems in London. A new and enlarged edition of these poems was finally published in 1898. by Small, Maynard and Company, of Boston.
The history of “In This Our World,” as Mrs. Stetson has called her collected verse, does much of itself to show that it is definitely a book that has found its own public. Mr. Howells, indeed, writing in Harper’s Weekly, has characterized it as the best civic satire which America has produced since the Bigelow Papers. And it is not too much to say that the essentials of the best satire are found in these vigorous verses, filled with deep earnestness, delightful humor and a scorn that stings. They are divided for purposes of sequence into three parts, “The World,” “Woman,” and “The March.” Into each of these Mrs. Stetson has put with vigor, nerve and fire, her philosophy of life, a philosophy that is splendidly efficient for men and women who are practically working in whatsoever ways they find to do towards what they are convinced is really the right.
As to “Women and Economics,” published by Small, Maynard and Company, in the summer of 1898, it is in form an essay, or, to quote exactly the secondary title of the book, a study of the economic relation between men and women, as a factor in social evolution.
Although “Women and Economics” has been in the hands of the public less than a year, it is a book which has already made a profound impression upon our most thoughtful men and women.
Mrs. Rebecca Lowe, of Atlanta, Ga., for instance, president of the General Federation of Women’s clubs of the United States, says of it in a personal letter to Mrs. Stetson, part of which we are permitted to quote:
“I want to tell you how heartily I thank you for presenting to the world a book so much needed for setting people to think about women and their economic position. “Women and Economics” contains the basis principle, and for the first time some one has probed deep enough to find the real source from which the evil springs that for so long has provoked the agitation of the woman question. To read and discuss this book would do much for every thinking woman.”
The books have also stirred up a vast amount of controversy. This, too, is natural, since the whole study is an argument, taking the position that women have for many centuries been economically dependent upon men and have, as a result, become more and more feminine and less and less normal human beings. This argument is sustained in a remarkably original and thoroughly vigorous manner from cover to cover. Even the enemies of the book concede that it is by no means a dull volume. It is, on the contrary, one of the most entertaining as well as one of the most logical works upon economics that has ever been published.
Harry Thurston Peck, writing in a recent Cosmopolitan of “Women and Economics,” says: “* * * * it is only fair to say that no one can easily overpraise the vigor, the clearness and the acuteness of her writing. She writes, indeed, like a man, and like a very logical and able man. She has humor, quick sympathy, a picturesque and vigorous style, together with a certain rhetorical pungency that, from a purely literary point of view, is wonderfully striking. * * * * Mrs. Stetson is a force that must at last be reckoned with.”
The author of “In This Our World,” and “Women and Economics” represents in her work and words one of the farthest points that has yet been reached by woman in her struggle to gain her true place in society. She is daily winning eager readers, audiences and converts to her cause in this country, and her proposed trip to England, which she is about to take, will doubtless serve to deepen to a remarkeable degree that serious consideration with which she is already regarded in that country.
Image Source: Photograph (ca. 1900) by Francis Benjamin Johnson of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.