She contends that women's entry into the public arena and the reforms of the family would be a win-win situation for both women and men as the public sphere would no longer be deprived of women's particular abilities, and men would be able to enlarge the possibilities to experience and express the emotional sustenance of family life. The thorough and stimulating introduction by Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson provides substantial information about Gilman's life, personality, and background.

She stresses the connection between work and home and between public and private life anticipates the 1960s debate about wages for housework calls for extensive childcare facilities and parental leave policies and argues for new housing arrangements with communal kitchens and hired cooks.

Revived here with new introduction, Gilman's pivotal work remains a benchmark feminist text that anticipates many of the issues and thinkers of 1960s and resonates deeply with today's continuing debate about gender difference and inequality. Gilman's ideas represent an integration of socialist thought and Darwinian theory and provide a welcome disruption of the nearly all-male canon of American economic and social thought. Yet by the mid-1960s she was nearly forgotten, and Women and Economics was long out of print. Her ideas were widely circulated and discussed she was in great demand on the lecture circuit, and her intellectual circle included some of the most prominent thinkers of the age. It is hoped also that the theory advanced will prove sufficiently suggestive to give rise to such further study and discussion as shall prove its error or establish its truth.When Charlotte Perkins Gilman's first nonfiction book, Women and Economics, was published exactly a century ago, in 1898, she was immediately hailed as the leading intellectual in the women's movement. To reach in especial the thinking women of to-day, and urge upon them a new sense, not only of their social responsibility as individuals, but of their measureless racial importance as makers of men. To point out how far we have already gone in the path of improvement, and how irresistibly the social forces of to-day are compelling us further, even without our knowledge and against our violent opposition, an advance which may be greatly quickened by our recognition and assistance. To show how some of the worst evils under which we suffer, evils long supposed to be inherent and ineradicable in our natures, are but the result of certain arbitrary conditions of our own adoption, and how, by removing those conditions, we may remove the evil resultant. This book is written to offer a simple and natural explanation of one of the most common and most perplexing problems of human life, a problem which presents itself to almost every individual for practical solution, and which demands the most serious attention of the moralist, the physician, and the sociologist.

Charlotte gilman women and economics