“‘Civilized Industry” and Joint-Matriarchy in the Short Stories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A highly influential feminist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her social treatise The Home: Its Work and Influence to outline her ideas surrounding women’s duties within the household and analyze their connection to gender relations both within the home and in greater society. Her short stories “Turned”, “Making a Change”, and “Mrs. Beazley’s Deeds” further utilize the setting of the home to foreground discussion of feminine oppression during her time, especially pertaining to women’s positions as wives, mothers, and workers in the public sphere. These stories feature a secondary feminine influence on the home in which the narrative is set, respectively taking the form of the woman protagonist’s housemaid, mother-in-law, and tenant. Each of these figures is rejected by the protagonist as a threat to her traditionally singular role as the matriarch of her household, but she is eventually persuaded to set aside the oppressive singularity of her responsibilities in favor of a joint-matriarchy that functions outside of, and at times instead of, the wife-husband dynamic. I argue that this theme of feminine solidarity is used by Gilman to rhetorically advocate for the application of “civilized industry”– described in The Home as a collaborative operation serving the collective interest of everyone in a given society– to the domestic sphere. Through the practice of joint-matriarchy, the protagonists of Gilman’s short stories are empowered to seize control of their homes and families as well as their right to work outside the home, reconciling the gap between the domestic and public spheres that Gilman identifies in her treatise. By applying the concept of civilized industry to the households depicted in her stories, then, Gilman promotes the idea that such domestic relationships between women are progressive not only toward women’s rights, but society overall.
Kimberly Plaksin is an MA Candidate at Montclair State University.
Forms of Justice 