She concentrates on measures of rationality and efficiency that could be instituted in her own time, largely with greater social cooperation-equal education and treatment for girls and boys, day-care centers for working women, and other issues still relevant a century later. Moving the Mountain delivers Gilman's program for reforming society.

The second book in the trilogy is her landmark classic Herland. Taking English as her model, Gilman.Moving the Mountain is the first book in Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman's well known trilogy. As human civilization progressed, language would follow, recording new concepts and discarding old prejudices. Gilman saw in language, as in many other forms of social behavior, the collective self-expression of an evolving species. Seemingly unconnected statements on language take on added significance, however, when considered against the rich background of her writing as a whole. In fact, however, as Dale Spender has repeatedly demonstrated, there is absolutely no reason to assume that the current women's movement has 'invented' all or even most of the topics we discuss today - including language.(1)Ī survey of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's writings between 18 yields over one hundred relevant citations, bits and pieces of a mosaic she never finally assembled.

Feminist linguistics, meanwhile, have largely confined their attention to the period after 1970. In the second place, most modern scholars of first -wave feminism have been historians or political scientists with little professional interest in language as a topic in its own right.

In the first place, during most of Gilman's lifetime, philology and early work in anthropology had not yet given rise to linguistics as a unified discipline. What has never been adequately recognized, however, is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's contribution to a feminist analysis of language. According to the history Carl Degler, 'It is hardly an exaggeration to speak of her as the major intellectual leader of the struggle for women's rights, in the broadest sense, during the first two decades of the twentieth century' (1956: 22). A Woman-Made Language: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and HerlandĬharlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is remembered today as a Progressive philosopher, socialist, and radical feminist, a descendant of the prominent New England family that produced Henry Ward Beecher, Catherine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman