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Chapter 5 - New Women, New Thoughts

Millennial Motherhood in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland Trilogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2020

Anne Stiles
Affiliation:
Saint Louis University, Missouri
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Summary

Chapter five examines the work of American writer, lecturer, and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. While not a children’s author per se, Gilman foregrounded motherhood and childcare in her polemical works and her fiction. She also included unexpected borrowings from New Thought in her novels and life writing. For instance, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915), which appeared serially in her self-published Forerunner Magazine (1909–1916), resonates with Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875). Gilman's all-female utopia, in which parthenogenesis has replaced sexual reproduction, resembles Eddy's imagined future in which “there will be no more marrying nor giving in marriage” and women and men will increasingly resemble one another in body and mind. The Herlanders’ worship of a loving “Mother Spirit,” their reverence for maternity, and their practice of communal child-rearing likewise mirror Eddy's androgynous “Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” and her emphasis on maternal feeling. Herland thus fulfills Eddy's millennial predictions as well as Gilman's feminist ideals.

Type
Chapter
Information
Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure'
Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle
, pp. 155 - 186
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • New Women, New Thoughts
  • Anne Stiles, Saint Louis University, Missouri
  • Book: Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure'
  • Online publication: 10 December 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914604.006
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  • New Women, New Thoughts
  • Anne Stiles, Saint Louis University, Missouri
  • Book: Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure'
  • Online publication: 10 December 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914604.006
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • New Women, New Thoughts
  • Anne Stiles, Saint Louis University, Missouri
  • Book: Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure'
  • Online publication: 10 December 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914604.006
Available formats
×