Of Late-Stage Capitalism and Gender Roles

Thinking about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and freelancing

I’ve tried to work at office jobs. When I was younger, I thought that a big, important, salaried job in a fancy building, was the goal after living through a financially unstable childhood. But of course, when I got to that stage in my life, capitalism wasn’t offering much of that stability, and when I did have it, fleetingly, instead of feeling safe and secure, I felt stifled. Like a caged animal.

I went freelance in 2014, in part because I needed to escape that trapped feeling, in part because I moved across the country to follow my then-boyfriend, and in part because full-time salaried important jobs in the journalism industry were shrinking exponentially. I felt drawn, for some reason, to making writing my work. I knew I could do what I had been doing, working on the margins of the industry, producing websites or newsletters or researching articles or all of the other important work that goes into journalism for a more stable paycheck, maybe even some benefits, and still find ways to write on the side, as I had been, but I somehow couldn’t stand the thought any longer. I wanted to prove something. My work was calling. And freelancing seemed to be my way in.

At first, I did well. I lived with my boyfriend, yes, but we split the bills and I bought my own things. Then we got married. We had a baby. My financial life shifted. It had to. I didn’t have paid leave. And we could technically get by for some time, without my making money. And I was working at home, taking care of a baby. Freelancing felt both like a way to keep our family and work life afloat, and like an admission that working a more stable job as a mother would be harder, frankly, maybe too hard. It’s always made me feel a bit like a failure, to admit that this dynamic, the financially dependent wife. Even if I have come to see it as also a way to rebel against the capitalist trappings of valuing some work over others.

Over the years spent digging into feminist theory and how women’s bodies have been treated as incapable, I came across Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And I fell in love. 

“But in the ever-growing human impulse to create, the power and will to make, to do, to express one’s new spirit in new forms — here she has been utterly debarred. She might work as she had worked from the beginning — at the primitive labors of the household; but in the inevitable expansion of even those industries to professional levels we have striven to hold her back. To work with her own hands for nothing, in direct body-service to her own family — this has been permitted — yes, compelled. But to be and do anything further from this she has been forbidden.” — Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, 1898.

In 1882, at age 22, Charlotte met the young artist Walter Stetson. Though he proposed early on, she did not want to get married at all, and told him so. But he kept coming back after her. The problem was that if a woman married there were certain expectations. “[Charlotte] insisted that she would not become a proficient cook or house cleaner. Instead she would support herself,” wrote Judith A. Allen in The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 

She held Stetson off for two whole years, going back and forth as to what he would expect of her, as a wife. Their talks were not the usual courting banter of the time. 

Charlotte was far more interested in making her own way in the world than cooking a dinner for her husband. She didn’t have a lot of choice, though, her family wasn’t wealthy enough to send her to college, and it seemed, after much negotiation that Stetson would let her do the work she felt called to do.

They married in May 1884, but the negotiations did not seem to have stuck to either party’s satisfaction.  Once she married, her journals were full of days where she was feeling depressed, often after her husband forbid her from reading, or going to the gym, for weeks on end.

Still, Charlotte attempted to continue her burgeoning work, writing articles about dress reform and fundraising for the women’s gymnasium, but she got pregnant almost immediately. The physical illness that came along with her pregnancy left Charlotte unable to focus much of any time on her work or going to the gymnasium. She wrote in her journals of hope that the fog would lift once the baby was born and she could go back to more of a normal life. Instead, the opposite occurred. 

Once the baby came, Charlotte was overwhelmed by grief, tears she could not stop, and a general feeling of dread. Motherhood and the wifely duties expected of her did not coexist with the work she wanted to be doing, and as this became more and more clear, her emotions spiraled still deeper into a depression. She complained to her husband about her loss of strength and identity; about her emotional state that she couldn’t seem to control. 

Stetson, for his part, found her obsession with changing the world, as opposed to caring for their new family, disgraceful. He had hoped that becoming a mother would end his wife’s quest for independence and instead stir up her innate need for domesticity and caretaking. He attributed her inability to cope to “some uterine irritation.” Because of course he did.

Seven months after her baby, Kate, was born, mentally as unwell as she had ever been and unsure if she would ever feel happy again, Charlotte weaned her baby and boarded a train to Utah and then California. She was away from her husband and child for five months — and this actually helped her mental state. She felt rejuvenated, herself, happy, even for the first time since she married. 

 But as soon as she returned home, she found her depression waiting for her, like a bag she forgot to unpack. She poured herself into her work, perhaps in an attempt to find some of the happiness she found in the independence she gained away from home. Plus, while her husband’s art was barely selling, and their debt deepening, her work was actually finding a home. After attending her first woman’s suffrage convention, she began a self-led course of reading on women’s rights. Her writing on dress reform and her poems were being published. But Stetson disagreed with this setup, often leaving her alone with the baby and generally not approving of the life she was trying to build for herself. 

One day, she wrote in her journal that she was feeling depressed again after taking a two-week break from her women’s rights reading and writing, “to oblige him.” 

That spring, Charlotte was part of a heated push for woman’s suffrage in Rhode Island. The state House agreed to vote on the matter and gave the Rhode Island Woman’s Suffrage Association a few weeks to campaign for their rights, holding meetings all over the state, and publishing their own newspaper The Amendment, for which Charlotte began to write. 

But the vote did not pass. Not even close: 6,889 men voted in favor while 21,957 men voted against the right for women in the state to vote. 

Charlotte, who felt deeply called to the work of women’s enfranchisement, suffered another mental setback. Her husband blamed her work. Judith Allen writes that Stetson “was convinced that she was exhausted from her efforts at mental and physical ‘self-culture’ that she carried to perilous extremes.” In other words: she was too active. Too much time at the gym. Too much thinking about the broader world and trying to change it.

At this point, Charlotte was sent to a doctor, famous at the time, for treating these kind of women, women who had forgotten their place. His method? The Rest Cure. Being shut in a dark room, confined to bed, force-fed fatty foods, and not engaging with anyone or anything for weeks.

Charlotte wrote a short story, a horror story, really,  based on her time undergoing the Rest Cure. “The Yellow Wallpaper” became a literary classic, a tale of the horrendous psychological effects of a woman’s husband and doctor taking control of her every move, locking her in a room she couldn’t move from, with only the wallpaper to keep her company. 

After her month-long rest cure, Charlotte reported that the doctor prescribed her a more acceptable womanly life: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time … Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.”

Upon her return home from the rest cure, Charlotte found herself more miserable than ever, and more disconnected from reality. “[I] came perilously near to losing my mind,” she wrote in her autobiography. “The mental agony grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving my head from side to side —  to get out from under the pain. Not physical pain, not the least ‘headache’ even, just mental torment, and so heavy in its nightmare gloom that it seemed real enough to dodge.”

Five months later, Charlotte left again. On another train to California, this time with baby Kate, a friend, and a nanny in tow, and $10 in her pocket. She told Stetson she wanted a divorce. 

She reported in her diary that her friends were nervous for her. 

“What will you do when you get there?” Asked anxious friends.

“I shall earn my own living.”

“How do you know you can?”

“I shall have to when I get there.”

Two decades later, Charlotte Perkins would expand on this same theme in her first book-length work, Women and Economics, published in 1898. Charlotte, inspired by her own view that marriage was a kind of prostitution, required to please your husband while he financially supported you and your children, without the option of making your own money, argued that the root of the feminist argument (though she called herself a “humanist) was a financial one.

“The working power of the mother has always been a prominent factor in human life. She is the worker par excellence, but her work is not such as to affect her economic status. Her living, all that she gets — food, clothing, ornaments, amusements, luxuries — these bear no relation to her power to produce wealth, to her services in the house, or to her motherhood. These things bear relation only to the man she marries, the man she depends on — to how much he has and how much he is willing to give her.” — Women and Economics, 1898.

She contends, later, that yes, perhaps housework and domestic labor should be paid. But also that the labor of housework and cooking and child rearing should be done by the people who feel called to that work, so others can have that freedom to do the work they are called to do. But this is so nearly impossible, given the tangled web of sex and race and class relations that have shaped our economic system, our work system. W.E.B. DuBois praised Charlotte’s analysis of the unfair social contract between women, money, work, and marriage, for being useful in explaining how Black women in America had become “cheap labor.” 

There’s much more to say about Perkins Gilman, though her name has faded from most textbooks, she was one of the most prolific, successful feminist writers and speakers of the early 1900s. She did make her own way. But not without economic setback, and not without marrying again (though she did not parent full-time and did not have more children and did refuse to cook or do housework for her second husband).

I think of her every time I feel trapped in my own sense of freedom gained by marriage to a person with a salaried, stable job, one that allows me to “make my own way,” but also keeps me, in some ways, tied to the domestic labor, or at least the image of traditional marriage and gender roles that come along with that. 

In work like hers, I see that breaking the gendered barriers we’ve broken, all while trying to keep the container of capitalism built on these strict gender family roles, perhaps means we haven’t come so far at all. “Male” labor is still seen as more profitable. Even as freelancers, men make 48% more than women freelancers per hour, on average. And yet, more women than men are turning toward this “gig economy.” For the flexibility. Because women’s roles in families are still often seen as the one that needs more flexibility, to do all of the other unpaid labor that needs doing.

Is it revolutionary then for women to take on this kind of work? Freeing? Or is it just more of the same?

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