Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Motherly Utopia

This chapter examines Charlotte Perkins Gilman's concept of what she called the “World's Mother”—the selfless, nurturing woman-spirit who loves, protects, and teaches the entire human race. Gilman was known for her involvement in Nationalism, the political movement inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. But whereas Carpenter imagined that homogenic lovers could serve as the utopian vanguard, Gilman believed that emancipated women would play that role. According to Gilman, women's independence was a precondition of socialism and argued that once women were liberated from compulsory domesticity, they would be free to bring their unique perspective as mothers into the social sphere. During the early years of the twentieth century, Gilman wrote a series of utopian fictions, including Herland (1915). This chapter first provides a background on Gilman before discussing her utopianism, her gynaecocentric theory, her concept of the kitchenless home, and her views on motherhood, race, religion, and socialism.