Sex before Gender: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Evolutionary Paradigm of Utopia

Author(s): Bernice L. Hausman

Source: Feminist Studies , Autumn, 1998, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 488-510
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178576

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 SEX BEFORE GENDER:
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN AND THE
EVOLUTIONARY PARADIGM OF UTOPIA

BERNICE L. HAUSMAN

In a 1989 article published in Australian Feminist Studi

Anne Edwards suggests that feminists need to "find new w
of conceptualising sexual difference, that would avoid re
ing the logical and philosophical mistakes of previous mode
thought, specifically essentialism, biologism, determinis
any kind) and dualism." This suggestion comes toward the e
of Edwards's discussion of feminist theory's current diffic
in articulating the relationship between the categories "
and "gender." At the very end of the article, she presents
options for ameliorating this difficulty: repudiating the "a
trary demarcation between the social and the non-socia
[and thereby] treat[ing] sex and gender as a composite enti
"treat[ing] gender as the central concept"; "privileging s
the fundamental concept on the grounds that . .. it is im
tant to retain the idea that sexual difference is about bodies
and the embodied nature of human experience"; and "devis-
[ing] new terminology and frameworks for description and
analysis which seek to capture the multiple, diverse, changing
and often conflicting nature of the representations and experi-
ences through which each human subject is formed."'
Of these four options, the second-treating gender as the cen-
tral concept-is paramount in feminist research in the 1990s
and, in conjunction with the fourth option, has significantly
widened the scope of feminist inquiry to include intersections
of race, class, sexual difference, sexuality, physical ability, na-
tionality, and age. This latter tendency, however, seems to
threaten to disperse the specificity of feminism as a concentra-
tion on sexual difference. The third option, "privileging sex,"
Feminist Studies 24, no. 3 (fall 1998). @ 1998 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
489

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488

Volume 1. No. 1. NOVEMBER 1909

THE FORER BY

Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

CONTENTS
A Small God And A Large Goddess.What Dianthe Did. Serial. Chap. I.
Arrears. Verse.
Where The Heart is.
Three Thanksgivings. Our Androcentrio Culture, or The
Introducing The World, The Fleshb,
And The Devil. Man-made World. Chap. i.
Comment and Review.
How Doth The list. Verse. Personal Problems.

1.00 A YEAR THE CHARLTON COMPANY

67 WALL ST. NEW YORK .10 A COPY

The cover of the first issue of The Forerunner which was written and edited
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman from 1909 to 1916.

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 490 Bernice L. Hausman

has received little a

with important con
concerning the place
ences between the
cerning the origins
sense, "privileging
tion, which involve
entity" insofar as
the "non-social" is u
In this essay, I argu
gory of feminist an
its usage before "ge
of sexual difference
nary fields of femin
for what we now som
view and reconsider
they said and wrote
historically, becaus
cording to the categ
read outside the sex/gender distinction, and not always
through it, will help feminist scholars to articulate the mean-
ings of "sex" as an analytic category prior to the historical and
semantic split between "sex" and "gender." This is necessary
not only to more accurately place feminist discourses in their
historical contexts but also to rethink categorical difficulties
that arise in our own contemporary theoretical context.
To promote this argument, I will discuss Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's utopian novel, Herland (originally published serially
in 1915 in The Forerunner, a journal written and edited by Gil-
man herself, and finally published in book form in 1979), in re-
lation to her earlier evolutionary treatise entitled Women and
Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and
Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898). What I will
show in the discussion that follows is that Women and Eco-
nomics provides a valuable source for teasing out the meanings
of "sex" in Gilman's utopian novel and, therefore, that it is foun-
dational to the social program she promotes in that text. Fur-
ther, I will suggest that although Gilman's evolutionary femi-
nism does not provide contemporary feminism with a model to
emulate, it does offer an alternative view (within current de-

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 Bernice L. Hausman 491

bates) of the body as

Gilman was not th
dressed evolutionar
women and used Da
pouse changes in wo
example, a little ov
Women and Economi
Sexes throughout N
endeavored to prov
equivalent, that is, d
traits."3 Like Gilman
porated and resisted
Gilman, she reconce
concerning natural
of labor. For examp
were responsible for
terms of breastfeedi
the males, not the f
for the proper cookin
toinette Brown Blac
also participated in
she did so within the confines of what she called "Christian
physiology," her ideas are weighted down by a tendentious reli-
gious morality that Gilman vehemently opposed. Both An-
toinette Brown Blackwell and Elizabeth Blackwell presented
their revisionary theories of sex in more socially conservative
terms than Charlotte Perkins Gilman.5
Within the context of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centu-
ry evolutionary feminism, Antoinette Brown Blackwell's (and
others') views are significant and worthy of further study; how-
ever, this essay will concentrate almost exclusively on the work
of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, primarily because Gilman's over-
all theoretical contribution to feminism was so wide-ranging
and, perhaps most significantly, because Gilman's fiction is so
often taught in the modern university classroom in the United
States. In this context, Herland often comes to represent con-
temporary U.S. feminist views and goals.6 A first step in rehis-
toricizing Herland, especially insofar as it imagines a specifi-
cally feminist utopian sexual difference, is to link its represen-
tations and arguments to others produced by Gilman herself

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 492 Bernice L. Hausman

It is my hope that t
study of Gilman an
her period.7
My analysis offers both a corrective reading of Herland and
some suggestions for how such a reading can have an impact
on the current status of "sex" and "gender" in feminist theoriz-
ing. This reinterpretation of Gilman is necessary because con-
temporary Gilman scholars continue to interpret her work
within a sex/gender paradigm. For example, in a recent book,
Carol Farley Kessler writes: "Like social scientists today, Gil-
man carefully differentiated between gender-the social roles,
in which she found human gender similarity nearly limitless-
and sex, the biological functions, to which she found sex differ-
ence limited."8 Gilman, however, distinguished, within sex,
those aspects of what she called "sex-distinction" that could
and could not be changed, but she did not differentiate be-
tween "sex" and "gender" as we know those terms. Instead, she
accepted certain necessary distinctions appropriate to sexual
reproduction and dismissed others as the "excessive sex-dis-
tinctions" that had developed in conjunction with those neces-
sary sex-distinctions.9 What makes her work difficult for us to
accommodate today is precisely the fact that the distinctions
occur within the category of sex. She did not have a semantic
distinction to suggest that certain kinds of sexual difference
are "cultural," and thereby changeable, as opposed to those
that are "natural" and therefore immutable. What she had in-
stead was an evolutionary paradigm that suggested that all as-
pects of the human condition-including its biological constitu-
tion-were open to change. She dealt with distinctions within
one category, which led her to suggest that sex inequity was a
result of the "excessive sex-distinction" foisted on women. Thus,
she distinguished in terms of degree (that is, quantitatively)
within the one category, rather than between qualitative cate-
gory distinctions (the social versus the natural).
Consider, for example, the following, from Women and Eco-
nomics:
The evolution of organic life goes on in geometric progression: cells com-
bine, and form organs; organs combine, and form organisms; organisms
combine, and form organizations. Society is an organization. Society is
the fourth power of the cell. It is composed of individual animals of genus
homo, living in organic relation. The course of social evolution is the grad-

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 Bernice L. Hausman 493

ual establishment of org

ic relation rests on purel
of primordial cells the f
economic necessity. Tho
perished.10

In this passage, the idea of the organism as a basic building

block of society is not metaphoric. There is no easy nature/cul-
ture division here. The social and the biological are connected
in the progression from cell to organ to organism to organiza-
tion."
Gilman defined "sex" in relation to social Darwinism and eu-
genics.12 In order to understand what "sex" meant in this con-
text we need to examine the relationship between "nature" and
"culture" that emerged in her revision of scientific theories
that advocated the "natural" subjugation of women to men and
people of color to Caucasians. And this leads us directly to the
body as the material link between "nature" and "culture." The
problem of the body and how it transmits its "characters" to
the next generation was of tremendous importance to Victori-
an and early-twentieth-century social theorists, both in terms
of sexual difference and in terms of racial difference. Differ-
ences between bodies presented a problem of appropriate iden-
tification: which differences (for instance, racialized differ-
ences) indicated a variation within a species, and which indi-
cated the existence of different species altogether?
One way to answer these questions, in the context of evolu-
tionary theory, was to claim that the social is a body, implicat-
ed in nature just like the human body. Nineteenth-century evo-
lutionism encouraged an amalgamation of culturalist and sci-
entist arguments concerning "human nature" and social
change. In neo-Lamarckian thinking, for example, we can
identify a desire to see the physical results of culture on the
body, to see the body itself as the carrier and mark of cultural
instruction.'3 Charlotte Perkins Gilman produced, in both
Women and Economics and Herland, a political response to
Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionism that both incorporat-
ed and resisted evolutionary arguments concerning sexual dif-
ference. Significantly, however, this response espoused racist
ideas concerning racial difference and racial subordination.
Thus, as we reinterpret her representation of "sex" within the

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 494 Bernice L. Hausman

context of evolution
Gilman participated
racism as part of its

In her "breakthroug
tically examined th
nomic dependency,
the one who, "from
fects on the constitu
ual and in society" (
is the idea that the
which suggests no
hegemonic position
This biological para
Spencer in the nin
twentieth through
and others. The ide
were necessarily de
biology, was one res
on Western though
newed interest in L
ty of acquired chara
cial theory as a way
races and the sexes
Darwinism, a catch
evolutionary theory
came a significant f
cates for eugenics an
winists espoused su
er, because the idea
theory that the sam
tion of nature and
man's social Darwin
of Ward, rested on
entity, could, if they
nization of society."'
Gilman's reference
searcher of sex in human culture resonates with the narrative
structure ofHerland. In the novel, three men find evidence of a

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 Bernice L. Hausman 495

fabled "women's land

three men to infiltra
the days of chivalry
er; and Van, the rati
adventure. He says of
You have to back tha
I'm interested in them all" (p. 2, emphasis added). For
Gilman's purposes, Van is the perfect narrator-a "rational" so-
cial scientist, he cannot deny the civilized progress of Herland.
He represents the sexist beliefs of Darwin and Spencer that
Gilman challenged in Women and Economics, and being emi-
nently "rational," cannot deny that the astounding evolution of
the Herlanders disproves all "scientific" proofs of women's "in-
nately weaker sensibility."
Thus Van, the sociologist who bases his ideas on the sound
principles of science, is yet won over by the modest successes of
the land of women. His observations, explanations, and inter-
pretations make up the entire text of Herland; there is no in-
tervening narrative authority or voice. Thus, although Van is
clearly an interested narrator, his narration carries a stamp of
scientific validity necessary to prove the kinds of claims Gil-
man made in the novel. When his ideas are proved fallacious
by the stubbornly more scientific and rational ideas of the
women of Herland, his failure to substantiate his claims
demonstrates the true paucity of a science that is blinded itself
by "sex-distinction."17
In the book, the "women's land" is cut off from the rest of the
world, both geographically and culturally. The men are impris-
oned when they prove dangerous to the population of Herland
(which is the men's name for the country; we never learn the
women's name for it). They are kept captive in the most com-
fortable surroundings; fed well; taught the language, history,
and culture of the country; and finally allowed to live on their
own. Eventually, they marry three young Herlanders. Terry,
the "man's man" of the three, does not enjoy the scant atten-
tion to sexual intimacy favored by the women and attempts to
rape his wife. She resists and the elders agree that Terry must
be expelled from Herland.
As readers, we learn that Herland is an agricultural heaven
(with every aspect of the physical surroundings planned in

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 496 Bernice L. Hausman

order to produce fo
are advocates of ani
have bred the wail o
tirely and absolutely
nized around princ
dren-to the extent
human children at t
sive to Herland wo
most of the characteristics of women in the rest of the world-in
Gilman's language we would say that they are without "sex-
distinction." Their distinguishing characteristic is a pro-
nounced communal, not familial, maternalism.
Herlanders reproduce parthenogenetically (that is, asexual-
ly), and they are responsible for their own livelihoods. Thus,
Herlanders do not depend upon men economically nor do they
need them for procreation. In the Darwinian terms Gilman es-
tablished in Women and Economics, this means that in Her-
land natural selection continues unimpeded by sexual selec-
tion (because there is none of the latter). According to evolu-
tionary theory, sexual selection and natural selection each
work as a check on the other. As an example of this, toward the
beginning of Women and Economics Gilman tells the hypothet-
ical story of the peacock and peahen: if the former were to de-
velop excessive plumage in the interests of attracting the latter
as a mate, he would perish due to natural selection because
the weight of the feathers would be counterproductive to self-
preservation. On the other hand, if the peahen were to become
"so small and dull as to fail to keep herself and her young fed
and defended, then she would die; and there would be another
check to excessive sex-distinction" (p. 35). However,
in her position of economic dependence in the sex-relation, sex-distinction is
with [the human female] not only a means of attracting a mate, as with all
creatures, but a means of getting her livelihood, as it the case with no other
creature under heaven. Because of the economic dependence of the human
female on her mate, she is modified to sex to an excessive degree. . . . It is
not the normal sex-tendency, common to all creatures, but an abnormal
sex-tendency, produced and maintained by the abnormal economic relation
which makes one sex get its living from the other by the exercise of sex-
functions. (Pp. 38-39)

Women's economic dependence on men and its effect on the

"sex-relation" were not for Gilman completely "social" in-

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 Bernice L. Hausman 497

stances of subjectio
ment of a particular
Even Gilman's use of
"nature":
Economic independence is a relative condition at best. In the broadest sense,
all living things are economically dependent upon others,-the animals upon
the vegetables, and man upon both. In a narrower sense, all social life is
economically interdependent, man producing collectively what he could by
no possibility produce separately. (Women and Economics, pp. 10-11)

Here we can see how the idea of "economy" was, for Gilman, in-
clusive rather than exclusive: "economy" had to do with the
getting of food and shelter, regardless of species. A term that
we generally think of as inextricably linked to culture was, for
Gilman, about the "natural" world as well.
Gilman's story about how the "abnormal" economic relation
between women and men came about also demonstrates the
conceptual dependence of her work upon the gynocentric a
count of Lester Frank Ward and its positivistic view of evolu-
tionary change. She wrote:
Primitive man and his female were animals, like other animals. ... [S]he
was as nimble and ferocious as he, save for the added belligerence of the
males in their sex-competition. In this competition, he, like the other male
creatures, fought savagely with his hairy rivals; and she, like other female
creatures, complacently viewed their struggles, and mated with the victor.
(Women and Economics, p. 60)

In the primitive condition, in other words, women were like

other female animals-they chose their mates. Gilman con-
tinued: "There seems to have come a time when it occurred to
the dawning intelligence of this amiable savage that it was
cheaper and easier to fight a little female, and have it done
with, than to fight a big male every time. So he instituted the
custom of enslaving the female ... " (p. 60). Evolutionary shift,
in this paradigm, occurred with a conscious choice on the part
of male humans. Because Gilman saw the past in this manner,
she had hope for the future insofar as people could again make
a decision with evolutionary progress in mind. Thus, it is not
in "society" that Gilman saw a solution to problems produced
by "society" (this is a claim made by Cynthia Eagle Russett in
Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood) but
in an evolutionary decision made in the best interests of the
human race.'8 She wrote both Women and Economics and Her-

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 498 Bernice L. Hausman

land in order to convince her readers that humans could be

agents in the process of natural selection.
The culture of Herland improves with each generation, bo
"naturally" and by the direct influence of society. Herlande
change their religions and laws as their society and cult
change (p. 113). Their active and independent life has cau
their general physique to become stronger and, in the ey
the male protagonists, more "boylike." Indeed, the variet
Herlander physiology startles the men, because parthen
genetic birth should signify a narrowing of inherited traits:
[W]hen we asked them . . . how they accounted for so much diverg
without cross-fertilization, they attributed it partly to the careful edu
tion, which followed each slight tendency to differ, and partly to the la
mutation. This they had found in their work with plants, and fully pr
in their own case. (P. 77)

The "law of mutation" is a reference to Mendelian gene

which were rediscovered at the turn of the century and wh
dealt the decisive blow to Lamarckian ideas concerning
heritability of acquired characteristics. However, Gilman
ambivalent about the decline of Lamarckian thinking.
At one point, one of the Herlander teachers comments: "W
have always thought it a grave initial misfortune to have
half our little world. Perhaps that is one reason why we
so striven for conscious improvement." To this Terry rep
that "acquired traits are not transmissible ... Weissman
has proved that." This is a reference to the work of Aug
Weismann, who in the 1890s maintained that the genetic
terial in the "germ cells" solely determined the traits trans
ted from parent to offspring and that this material was no
tered by education or environment. Weismann's work was la
verified by the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics. The teach
continues:

If that is so [if acquired traits cannot be transmitted through genetic mater-

ial], then our improvement must be due either to mutation, or solely to edu-
cation, . . . We certainly have improved. It may be that all these higher
qualities were latent in the original mother [the original woman able to
give birth parthenogenetically, from whom all Herlanders are descended],
that careful education is bringing them out, and that our personal differ-
ences depend upon slight variations in the prenatal condition. (P. 78)
These useful "variations," however, occur only within a sin-
gle (white) race. Van is quite clear: "[T]here is no doubt in my

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Bernice L. Hausman 499

mind that these peop

contact with the be
'white,' but somewha
of their constant exp
to Herland, With He
plored much more e
American society, G
cessity to separate r
development.'9 In He
tion to maternal fitn
the suggestion of an
age of eugenics to ide
Gilman links eugen
tion for the improve
gument Zava, the tea
lematic for Gilman,
evolutionary genetic
progress and improv
vide the kind of tele
ed to assert was po
This is one reason w
resurgence in Amer
quired characteristi
tion made evolution
suggestion, based on
original mother had
tion" provided by H
ment: culture itself i
As Carl Degler desc
that "will and purpos
tionary change," an
than the randomness
win's theory of evolu
In Herland, Lamarc
improvement are bol
In a discussion with
Herlander women ha
to breed out, when
how this is possible w
any woman with "b

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 500 Bernice L. Hausman

birth, to "renounce m
this failed, they wou
they birthed. Altho
Somel relates calmly
ing is as specialized
(except for a few, w
their unfitness for
childcare to care for
Again, Lamarckian ideas bolster Gilman's eugenicism.
Women with "bad qualities" are asked to renounce mother-
hood, presumably so that these qualities are not passed on;
however, even if a child is born to such a woman, by taking the
task of rearing out of the mother's hands, the society believes
that it will be able to curtail the expression of these qualities
in the child and thus the transmission of these qualities to
later generations.
Women's interest in this process is defined by their special
relation to "the race." Gynocentric evolutionism suggested that
women were the "race type"-"her natural impulses were more
in accordance with the laws of growth than were those of the
male"; "woman was the natural, patient, tireless worker, the
mother. Males were essentially individualistic and competi-
tive."22 Gilman understood this distinction between women and
men of the dominant race according to the prevalent idea of
"male variability and female conservatism"-"She was the deep,
steady, mainstream of life, and he the active variant, helping to
widen and change that life, but rather as an adjunct than as
an essential" (Women and Economics, p. 130).23 Implicit in Gil-
man's argument is the idea that women are superior to men,
at least with regard to the human race as a whole. As Mariana
Valverde points out, however, for evolutionary feminists like
Gilman and Elizabeth Blackwell, "the paradigm of the human
'race' was the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ruling bloc."24
The men who come to Herland believe that the "sex-distinc-
tion" common in white Victorian society is universal. They be-
lieve in the very "feminine nature" that Gilman found so de-
structive, and they believe that they can make the women ex-
press their latent "feminine nature." Gilman tried to prove
that what the men think is a biologically ordained pattern of
behavior was, in fact, a convention specifically related to their

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 Bernice L. Hausman 501

society and the bioh

Thus, in a culture w
thousands of years,
women were not "m
cause there was no
depend upon men for
For the three men,
would mean to confo
scribed for white wo
Terry think of it as
man's narrative prov
women to accommodate themselves to men's needs in order to
obtain food and housing. In their hearts, the men want to be-
lieve that the Herland "girls" are marrying them for the form
of "sex-love" that the men are used to, but to the women of
Herland, love means something different: it is comradely,
warm, motherly in fact. Van writes that his wife refused to
give in and have sex "in season and out of season" as he would
like. She responds,
If I thought it was really right and necessary, I could perhaps bring myself
to it, for your sake, dear; but I do not want it-not at all. You would not have
a mere submission, would you? That is not the kind of high romantic love
you spoke of, surely? It is a pity, of course, that you should have to adjust
your highly specialized faculties to our unspecialized ones. (P. 129)25

The women of Herland, indeed, are unspecialized for sex-they

have no training in the "sex-tradition" (what is "manly" or
"womanly" [p. 92]), do not understand the "sex-motive" (which
the men think makes for bad dramatic productions [p. 99]),
and, simply, do not understand "sex" (p. 134).
The word "sex" never appears in Herland as a signifier for
sexual intercourse, which is always alluded to in cautiously cir-
cumspect terms. "Sex" refers most often to the idea of sexual
difference, with the added complexity that it also suggests that
one of the sexes is, in fact, "the sex." In an evolutionary para-
digm, women are usually perceived to be "the sex," because
women are, in Gilman's terms, "modified to sex" to a greater
degree than men: women's lives are circumscribed by the fact
of their sex, as the sexual division of labor defines women as a
class based on their sex and its perceived fuinctions. Yet men
are also, at times, considered "the sex," because sexual rela-

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 502 Bernice L. Hausman

tions are said to be

sent "sex" is indeed
The problem that th
deed to all the wom
women to be "the s
when they please. T
when he is expelled
thing about Sex"-a
meant the male sex
tempts to attach one
comes from Terry's
frustrated sexual de
tion to the recent in
the Herlanders don
which Van interpre
and beliefs of men. This demonstrates the extent to which Van
has become acculturated to the Herland norm, where "the word
woman called up all that big background [the world of activity],
so far as they had gone in social development; and the word
man meant to them only male-the sex" (p. 137). Terry, through-
out the entire text, has been interested in "only one thing" and
that has been a problem in a country where that "thing" is in-
conceivable in the eyes of women-and the women are strong
enough to repudiate both his claims and his advances.
Women (and men) in Herland can achieve a kind of person-
hood unavailable to either in the traditional "bi-sexual" world
where excessive "sex-distinction" has robbed both members of
the species of their humanity. The Herlanders are interested in
reintroducing sexual reproduction, because variation and
greater complexity represent to them (as to Gilman) progres-
sive development-at least within "Aryanness." Thus, in its rev-
erence for variation within the white race, Herland is as
Spencerian as they come. Unlike Spencer, however, the Her-
landers demonstrate that excessive sex-distinction is unneces-
sary for human evolution. Indeed, their country proves that ex-
cessive sex-distinction is one significant hindrance to the fur-
ther development of human civilization.
Yet, it is important to underscore here that variation and
complexity within whiteness are what is being promoted, not
variation and complexity that include racial mixing. In Her-

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 Bernice L. Hausman 503

land, sexual reprodu

characteristics; but,
tionary feminists, th
ate or atavistic "type
feminists, all people
European whites, wer
Reading Gilman's He
evolutionism helps u
difference creates a
as such. In the Darw
suggests genital het
tion, Gilman believed
ative purposes were
tion" in modern Wes
stood "sex" to be the
the way it was con
Gilman was not able
a force that kept w
her evolutionism hel
cused on "sex-distinctions" that are heterosexist and racist in
their initial conception. Within this paradigm, where "sex" sig-
nifies difference within procreative sexuality, homosexuality
could only be represented as part of the "morbid institution" of
"excessive sex-distinction" that Gilman so vehemently rejected,
because it represented sexual activity for its own sake.28
Gilman's racism, like her homophobia, was part of her evo-
lutionary perspective. Her understanding of race involved the
idea of differential development, and she opposed mixing racial
groups that she perceived to be at different stages of develop-
ment: in her view, this was the tragedy of the United States. In
the sequel to Herland, With Her in Ourland, Ellador argues
that slavery was the biggest mistake in American history-
"The patient's worst disease was that disgraceful out-of-date
attack of slavery, only escaped by a surgical operation, painful,
costly, and not by any means wholly successful"-not only be-
cause she believes racism to be disgraceful ("I think your prej-
udice against the black is silly, wicked, and-hypocritical") but
also because it brought a mass of people unready for democra-
cy into a democratic state.29
In some ways, Gilman's "remedy" for the untoward mixing

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 504 Bernice L. Hausman

of races and ethnic g

matches the model o
velopment must be s
"catch up." The wom
the world and theref
sense Gilman's revis
sexual differences sim
Why, then, does she
The answer is that
the dominant racial
that group because o
to be a man and to p
ety-essentially in or
nalistic gesture an a
women's inequality.
ratism as a political
Gilman would have c
women's already ma
en's creative indepe
Herland, after all, de
the male-dominated model of Gilman's time.
A similar power dynamic is at work in Gilman's ideas con-
cerning race. She advocated the separation of races as a mem-
ber of the dominant race, and thus her "prescription" for the
ills of American society is not the promotion of racial equality
through independence and voluntary separatism. Rather, it is
an instance of the dominant group promoting, through pater-
nalism, its own dominance as a model for the "development" of
other groups. She not only failed to see that her own whiteness
inflected what she seemed to think were parallel remedies for
enforced inequality of both women and subordinated races, but
she also never offered the critique of imperialism that her
analysis in With Her in Ourland so obviously suggests. She did
not argue, except in her critique of slavery, that the "more de-
veloped races" actively oppressed other groups. Concerned
with making sure that those admitted to the United States
were "ready" for the demands of democracy, she advocated as-
similation to an implicitly racialized norm of citizenship. In-
deed, Gilman's ideas about the unfitness of subordinate ethnic
and racial groups for democratic society presage current reac-

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 Bernice L. Hausman 505

tionary concerns ab
groups.30
What Gilman does show us is how social organizations de-
pend upon expectations about biology and its purchase on
human behavior. In Herland, the social organization of the
sexes, what we would now call the "sex/gender system," de-
pends upon, is indeed founded upon, the social organization of
reproduction. And, before the men arrive, reproduction in Her-
land happens without "sex." Without "sex," Herland's inhabi-
tants lose sexual specificity, "sex-distinction"; they become
"people." When the men meet the people of Herland, they, not
the people, become "sexed." The people, the women, remain un-
sexed, precisely because the economy of their country, as well
as the economy of their personhood, can get along fine without
"sex."
Social relations, in Gilman's feminist revision of evolution-
ary theory, cannot be separated from sexual embodiment. In-
deed, social relations proceed from sexual embodiment-but in
Gilman's view, sexual embodiment does not concern desire but
the ordered progression of life through generations. Sexual em-
bodiment, in other words, represents for Gilman the reproduc-
tive portion of the life of every individual, but it does not define
the individual in her or his totality. When it does-when either
women or men become "the sex"-those subjects feel con-
strained by their definition as "sex" itself.
It is a testament to our own immersion in a culture that em-
phasizes (ad nauseum) individual desire that we cannot see
such a vision as anything other than loss-a loss of desire (that
would signify for us a loss of self), a loss of the passion that
makes life worthwhile and interesting. But in this interpreta-
tion we are already siding with the men who infiltrate Her-
land, insofar as they find Herlander dramas boring and the
meaning of marriage diminished when it does not include ro-
mantic "sex-love." "Desire" as we understand it-as an aspect of
personhood that is constitutive and universal-is understood by
Gilman to be a concept fabricated and perpetuated by men to
maintain the "excessive sex-distinction" that subordinates
women to men.
The Herland world takes biological reproduction into ac-
count in its organization of social duties, work, and domestici-

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 506 Bernice L. Hausman

ty. In this aspect, G

feminists, for whom
reproduction was ke
translates into a ra
ism-"mothering" be
lationship that def
that issues of repr
Western societies a
those very realms. I
saw that women's liberation from what we would now consider
"gender expectations" was inextricably linked to their role in bi-
ological reproduction: how much control they exerted in sexual
matters, how society organized childcare, how the social world
accommodated maternity and its practices. At the core of her
analysis is the female body as a product of both biological and
social evolution. This is why parthenogenesis is crucial to the
scheme of Herland, even if it is its most fantastical element.
Parthenogenesis is a metaphor for women's control of repro-
duction. That it is a biological process demonstrates Gilman's
desire to make the biological body central to the social arrange-
ments of which it is a part-instead of treating it as a substance
to be altered so as to accommodate societal norms, which was
the way she interpreted her culture's expectations of white
women. Contemporary feminists should take from Gilman this
perception of the biological female body as central to women's
experience yet remain aware that there are no "colorless" bod-
ies and that without an analysis of racialization, "the female
body" will be constructed as white.32
Certainly, Gilman's perspective on nature/culture seems odd
from the vantage point of feminist theory in the 1990s. In our
analytic context, distinguishing between categories like "na-
ture" and "society" seems all-important in determining priori-
ties for political struggle and conceptual redefinition. Yet the
feminist resurgence in analyzing and theorizing the body-evi-
dent in the recent publication of Susan Bordo's Unbearable
Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body; Moira
Gatens's Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality;
Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
"Sex"; Elizabeth Grosz's Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal
Feminism; and Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered

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 Bernice L. Hausman 507

Body: Reading Cybo

that problems atten
to its metaphysics or
trying to suggest ab
production and infan
suggest is that the se
in the 1970s and 198
difficulties in theori
real and socially infl
I offer this reading
theoretical situation
tualization of the ma
evolutionary paradigm
retical world in whic
not exist as an analy
tegrating a vision of
for, and, most signif
ence" is not a new pr

NOTES

I would like to thank the readers for Feminist Studies for their helpful suggestio
for revision. As always, Nancy Cervetti was a sounding board for my ideas and o
fered me significant critical feedback. My thanks to all those who helped me to r
fine the essay; responsibility for its flaws resides with me alone.

1. Anne Edwards, "The Sex/Gender Distinction: Has It Outlived Its Usefulness?"

Australian Feminist Studies 10 (summer 1989): 7, 9.
2. "Gender" was introduced as a term to signify social aspects of sex identity (as o
posed to the biological aspects designated by "sex") in the context of treatment pr
tocols for intersexual patients in the 1950s. In the late 1960s and throughout th
1970s and 1980s, feminists exploited this distinction between "sex" and "gender"
produce a profound commentary on the social construction of sex inequality. Se
Bernice L. Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea
Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 72-109, for a discussion of t
introduction and elaboration of "gender" within medicine in the 1950s and 1960s.
3. Marie Tedesco, "A Feminist Challenge to Darwinism: Antoinette L.B. Blackwell
on the Relations of the Sexes in Nature and Society," in Feminist Visions: Toward
Transformation of the Liberal Arts Curriculum, ed. Diane L. Fowlkes and Charlot
S. McClure (University: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 53.
4. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, The Sexes throughout Nature (New York: G.P. Pu
nam, 1875; rpt., Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1976), 113-14.
5. See Elizabeth Blackwell, Essays in Medical Sociology, vols. 1 and 2, Medicin
and Society in America, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (New York: Arno Press and t
New York Times, 1972). See also Kate Krug, "Women Ovulate, Men Spermate:

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 508 Bernice L. Hausman

Elizabeth Blackwell as a Fe
7 (July 1996): 51-72. For a
abeth Blackwell, see Mariana Valverde, "'When the Mother of the Race Is Free':
Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism," in Gender Conflicts,
ed. Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1992), 3-26.
6. See Carol Stabile, Feminism and the Technological Fix (Manchester, U.K.: Man-
chester University Press, 1994), 27-36.
7. Krug's work on Elizabeth Blackwell provides an interesting comparison to
Gilman, although Krug herself does not mention the latter; Valverde's essay on
First Wave feminism does mention Gilman but only in passing.
8. Carol Farley Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress toward Utopia
with Selected Writings (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 78.
9. As another example of what I would call the current misreading of Gilman,
Frances Bartkowski writes: "In Women and Economics Gilman uses analogies to the
animal world to describe male and female characteristics. ... While Gilman does a
great deal to prove that such concepts of sex distinctions are socially transmitted
she also accepts certain distinctions as biologically and psychically immutable." The
problem here is more subtle than that presented by Kessler. Bartkowski does not
explicitly use the terminology of sex/gender distinction to articulate her point, bu
the sex/gender paradigm is nevertheless the lens through which she interpret
Gilman's ideas. See Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln: University o
Nebraska Press, 1989), 27.
10. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Re
lation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, ed. Carl Degler
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 101-2. All other references to this book will be
cited parenthetically in the text.
11. Lois Magner claims:
The ancient analogy of the "social organism" was used both by Spencer and Gilman, but thei
views of its composition and proper mode of behavior could hardly be more dissimilar. Within
Spencer's system the individual units of the social organism owed nothing to each other or t
the whole. Gilman saw the social organism as the form of life within which, and only within
which, human beings could be fully human.
Magner notes that Gilman "even claimed that the social organism did not exist
merely as a useful analogy or illustration, but as a literal biological fact" (emphasis
added). See Lois Magner, "Darwin and the Woman Question," in Critical Essays on
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Joanne Karpinski (New York: G.K. Hall, 1992), 121-
22.
12. There are extraordinarily few treatments of Gilman's evolutionism in the criti
cal literature. There are two essays by Lois Magner, both of which are largely de-
scriptive. See Lois Magner, "Women and the Scientific Idiom: Textual Episodes from
Wollstonecraft, Fuller, Gilman, and Firestone," Signs 4 (autumn 1978): 61-80, and
her "Darwinism and the Woman Question," 115-28. Ann J. Lane provides an ex-
tended discussion of Women and Economics in To "Herland" and Beyond: The Life
and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon, 1990). For a reade
seeking an introduction to Gilman's ideas, Lane's synopsis is an excellent source
However, because Lane attempts to present to the contemporary reader the reason
why Gilman's ideas are valuable for current feminist analysis, she tends to make
them understandable within the contemporary gender paradigm of feminist theory.
The most comprehensive discussion of Gilman's relation to evolutionary theory an
social Darwinism appears in Maureen L. Egan, "Evolutionary Theory in the Socia
Philosophy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," Hypatia 4 (spring 1989): 102-19. Egan
treats a wide range of Gilman's work, placing it in the intellectual contexts of phi

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 Bernice L. Hausman 509

losophy, sociology, and evo

tally useful source for any
does not consider Gilman's fiction.
13. See Ludmilla Jordanova, Lamarck (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
14. See Valverde.
15. See Susan Merrill Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Re-
productive Technology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 56
62, for a discussion of liberal eugenicist views. See also Bert Bender, The Descent
Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), esp. 1-30, for a discussion o
the impact of Darwinism on American intellectual circles. See also Egan.
16. Ann J. Lane, Introduction to Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York
Pantheon, 1979), ix-x. Subsequent references to the novel will be provided paren-
thetically in the text.
17. Whether Gilman actually identifies with Van, her sociologist narrator, is mor
difficult to determine. The text of Herland provides her with ample opportunity
demonstrate his shortcomings; however, he is a more likable character than Jeff
(who succumbs to Herland too easily) or Terry (who must be expelled). Van as a "s
ciologist" represents the class of right-thinking but misguided male sociologists that
Gilman hopes to convince of her views. That he is such a sympathetic character su
gests some form of identification on the part of the author.
18. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Woman-
hood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 151-54.
19. See especially Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland, The Forerunne
7 (June 1916): 152-57; this text is now available as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Wit
Her in Ourland: Sequel to "Herland," ed. Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997).
20. For critiques of Gilman's racism and a commentary on feminist complicity wit
Gilman's beliefs, see Stabile, 33-35; Bartkowski, 41; and Susan Lanser, "Feminist
Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color in America," Feminis
Studies 15 (fall 1989): 415-41.
21. Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwin
ism in American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 23. See also
Bender. Degler also suggests that one effect of the demise of Lamarckian ideas in
reformist thinking was the rise of eugenics: "[T]he abandonment of the belief in a
quired characters was a stimulus for the eugenics movement" (24).
22. Magner, "Darwinism and the Woman Question," 123.
23. The concept of male variability and female conservatism was based on the ide
that men differed widely and women tended toward a mean. For example, men ex
hibited both more genius and more imbecility and women were more prone towar
average mental ability. Variability was linked to "katabolic" or destructive energ
while conservatism was linked to both construction and stasis (Russett, 89-103
Thus, Gilman wrote:
Since the female had not the tendency to vary which distinguished the male, it was essent
that the expansive forces of masculine energy be combined with the preservative and construc
tive forces of feminine energy. The expansive and variable male energy, struggling under i
new necessity for constructive labor, has caused that labor to vary and progress more than
would have done in feminine hands alone. (Women and Economics, 132)
24. Valverde, 5.
25. Elizabeth Blackwell's views are distinctly different from Gilman's with regar
to this issue. Blackwell argued that sex in humans was different from sex among
"the brutes," because humans have a "sentiment of mental sex." The force of
Gilman's argument is to liken human sex to animal sex, in order to propose that the

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 510 Bernice L. Hausman

former has become unnatu

esp. vol. 1, chap. 1, "The Dis
26. See Krug, 63-64, for a d
tive effects of racial mixing.
27. For a discussion of Gil
discussion of Gilman in the
feminism, see Nancy Cott,
University Press, 1987), 38-
K. Graehme Hall argues t
purely platonic, because for
gesting that the lack of sexu
tional heterosexuality. See
the Resistless Tide' in Herla
Work, ed. Sheryl L. Meyerin
28. In Patriarchal Precedents, Rosalind Coward writes that "discussions of sexual
relations," held in the context of nineteenth-century investigations of the evolution
of the historical relations between the sexes, maintained "absolutely fixed ideas
about sex and sexual identity. Sex was heterosexual, reproductive activity and even
those theories which argued for primitive promiscuity at the beginnings of human
society, never questioned the different sexual entities of women and men." See Ros-
alind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 254. For a resistant reading of evolutionary theo-
ry's heterosexism, see Martha McCaughey, "Perverting Evolutionary Narratives of
Heterosexual Masculinity," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, no. 2-3
(1996): 261-87.
29. Gilman, With Her in Ourland, 156, 155.
30. In her analysis of Gilman's racial views, Carol Farley Kessler states: "However
acute Gilman's thinking was on women's issues, her views on race contrast striking-
ly and reveal ethnocentrism. On this issue, she was unable to think beyond her era,"
and she concurs that "Gilman's social Darwinist views blinded her to her own
racism." See Kessler, 47-48. Maureen Egan writes: "In the implicit racism wh
pervades her cultural comparisons and her assessment of what she, along with
contemporaries, calls 'savage' periods and peoples, she echoes the prejudices of
culture and class. On the other hand, there is much in her social philosophy wh
is valid today." See Egan, 113.
31. Valverde, 4.
32. This issue becomes especially interesting given that "race" is currently slou
ing off its status as a biological category. In examining "sex" as a category that
volves thinking about "race," we might see that each term has a unique (althou
entangled) historical relation to biological theories and maps of the body.
33. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the B
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bo
Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996); Judith Butler, Bo
That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); E
beth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Ind
University Press, 1994); and Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered B
Reading Cyborg Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

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