Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Question 1

Background and Book

Answer 1

• Gilman set up an attack on those who suggested that Darwin’s theories could be used to justify male domination of society
• Book = ‘ Women and Economics’ (1897)

Question 2

HN

Answer 2

• Biological differences between men and women are irrelevant, women can compete equally with men
• E.G. Darwinist theory, ‘survival of the fittest’, suggested it was inevitable that men were the dominant sex
• No longer the case acc to Gilman, because the economic activity changed so much
• No reason why women could not play an equal part alongside men in economics

Question 3

The state?

Answer 3

No distinctive view

Question 4

Society

Answer 4

• Society has always assigned inferior roles to women
• Campaigned for the destruction of the traditional nuclear family and its replacemnt by forms of communal living
• Women’s equality lays in equality of opportunity

Question 5

Economy

Answer 5

• Domestic servitude of women allowed men to dominate the outside economic world
• ‘The labour of women enables them to produce more wealth than they otherswise could’