Writing Feminist Genealogy

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Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism Author(s): Alys Eve Weinbaum Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer, 2001), pp. 271-302Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178758Accessed: 29-01-2016 19:44 UTC

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WRITING FEMINIST GENEALOGY: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, RACIAL

NATIONALISM, AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MATERNALIST FEMINISM

ALYS EVE WEINBAUM

In one of the stranger passages in her autobiography, the famous turn-of-the-century feminist writer, reformer, and activist, Char- lotte Perkins Gilman, humorously registers her concerns about wayward reproduction while in the process confessing half-seri- ously that she never feels completely confident in regarding herself as a true American because of her symbolically inauspicious birthday. Noting that her arrival into the world on July 3, 1860, was untimely, she laments, "If only I'd made it to the glorious fourth! This may be called the first misplay in a long game that is full of them."' Here, as in much of her work, Gilman informs readers that the ideal national is hard to (re)produce, for the perfect American citizen must be free of the various forms of "misplay" to which reproduction is prey in current form.

The idea that something was terribly wrong with the national reproductive process is, I suggest, the issue that most compelled Gilman. The diagnosis of this situation and the proposal of an array of solutions was her life's work. Curiously, neither those feminists credited with the discovery/recovery of Gilman's writings in the 1970s, nor more pressingly, the vast majority of those who have recently written on Gilman, have noted the centrality of racialized reproductive thinking to her feminism, or her express concern with women's role in creating a "pure" national genealogy. Indeed, most critics continue to celebrate Gilman as a feminist foremother, who, despite her flaws, should be situated at the origin of the genealogy of feminism which they wish to sketch. In assessing the relationship between the dominant trends within Gilman scholarship and Gilman's own writings, this article lo- cates the conceptual continuities between Gilman's work and that Feminist Studies 27, no. 2 (summer 2001). @ 2001 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

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272 Alys Eve Weinbaum

of many of her critics. It excavates Gilman's racism and nativism, while simultaneously tracking the persistent celebration of her feminism by her readers. In so doing, it pays close attention to the relationship between issues of racial formation, racism, nationalism, and imperialism, and the politics of contemporary feminist knowledge production.

Within this investigation, genealogy emerges as a pivotal concept; it is the central object of analysis and the principal method of scholarly inquiry. It is a central object because in Gilman's substantial corpus, genealogy emerges as her lifelong obsession; her belief in women's reproductive role in crafting the proper (white) national genealogy was an enduring component of her feminism. Most of her political and philosophical formulations closely asso- ciate genealogical thinking with reproductive thinking. In Gil- man's fiction, utopian reproductive scenarios and alternative vi- sions of maternity are offered as blueprints for social change. Women's work is not solely in the home, Gilman argued, but also in building a better society and ultimately reproducing a racially "pure" nation. And thus of Gilman's work I ask: How did Gilman contend with genealogy as an account of ancestry, as a history of reproductive relationships? How did she treat issues of pedigree, descent, and the reproduction of populations? And how did her ideas about reproduction inflect her nativism and her concerns about nation building?

If it is the rhetoricity of Gilman's texts that lead me to situate genealogy as my proper object, it is an impasse within feminist scholarship on Gilman that compels me to choose genealogy as my methodology. In the opening lines of his philosophical treatise, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche avers that genealogy can be used as a critical philosophical tool. Genealogy, conven- tionally defined as a quest for origins in terms of descent from ancestors, as the elaboration of a pedigree, can be transformed into an entirely different kind of knowledge project. Addressing his fel- low philosophers, Nietzsche articulates the problem of epistemo- logical reorientation that the adoption of a genealogical methodology entails: "We are unknown to ourselves ... and with good reason," he asserts, for since "we have never sought ourselves-how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves."2 For knowledge seekers to gain self-knowledge, instead of looking for meaning in the past as if searching for long-lost progenitors, it is neces-


Alys Eve Weinbaum 273

sary to seek new objects of knowledge by posing questions that have been heretofore unasked. These questions are definitively not questions about the truth of origination or questions that pre- suppose a "pure" genealogy waiting to be unearthed; rather they are about the construction of origins and the values that are at- tributed to such constructions; or, put differently, they are about "the value of origin and the origin of value."3

In approaching the body of feminist scholarship on Gilman written in the past two decades, I appropriate a Nietzschean stance to ask of this scholarship several questions: In what ways have feminist investigations into Gilman's work mimicked the problems endemic to her feminism? In what ways have those feminists who have focused on reproducing an esteemed lineage for feminism re- created the past in their own image? Is the drive to produce such a feminist genealogy that is so often evident in Gilman scholarship structurally similar to Gilman's own drive to create a perfected national genealogy? And, most importantly, how might feminist investigations into the history of feminism become more critical, or genealogical in a Nietzschean sense? How might a self-re- flexive investigation into Gilman's feminism invigorate contemporary antiracist feminism by making it attentive to the racism and nationalism that are constitutive of the type of feminism Gilman proposed, on the one hand, and of the feminism that seeks to uncritically reclaim Gilman, on the other?

In answering these questions this article builds on the ground- breaking work of critics Gail Bederman, Louise Newman, Susan Lanser, and several others who have bucked the trend and elo- quently argued that race animates Gilman's thinking, and that Gilman, like a number of First Wave feminists, was involved in shoring up an evolutionary discourse about white civilized womanhood.4 It also augments this work by elaborating the metacriti- cal claim that Gilman and her critics are preoccupied with issues of pedigree, descent, "purity," and kinship-all genealogical notions that ground Gilman's brand of feminism and that of the majority of her critics. Subsisting in an uneasy relationship with the portrait that many have preferred to paint of Gilman and themselves, Gilman's ideals will continue to trouble contemporary feminism's dominant self-conception-that it is possible for feminism to be antiracist-so long as scholars fail to employ a critical genealogical methodology in constructing the history of femi-



nism. It is this methodology that this article seeks to model. For when genealogy is used as a form of historical inquiry devoid of nostalgia it becomes possible to read Gilman's racism and nativism symptomatically rather than moralistically, and to recog- nize that feminist quests for a legitimate feminist "tradition" are often insidiously preoccupied with ideals of genealogical "purity" structurally similar to Gilman's own-and this, despite the current focus on the dynamics of racism and imperialism within other strands of feminist scholarship and theory.

GILMAN'S GENEALOGY On first leafing through the various biographies and bibliogra- phies that record Gilman's accomplishments it is not difficult to sympathize with the celebration of this formidable woman as a feminist foremother. In the prime of her life Gilman lectured wide- ly; wrote fiction, poetry, social analysis, and political polemic; single-handedly produced her own journal, The Forerunner (1909-16); published eight novels, 171 short stories, nine book-length nonfiction manuscripts, and was the author of well over one thousand essays.5 If, however, Gilman wrote best-sellers for the better part of her life, by its end every one of her numerous works was out of print and she was all but forgotten. Not satisfied with leaving her posthumous fame in other hands, in an attempt to emerge from what has in retrospect proved a fleeting moment of obscurity, Gil- man restarted her autobiography. Aware of a spreading cancer, and of the fact that her first autobiographical musings had serious shortcomings, Gilman tried to persuade a biographer to do the job of writing her story for her. When her request was refused, Gilman was forced back on herself. Although she reworked the manu- script, finished the proofreading, and selected the photographs and cover, she did not live to see The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gil- man in print. As she heroically professes in a note appended to the book's last page, "when all usefulness is over, when one is as- sured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. ... I have preferred chloroform to cancer."6

Despite her persistence in recording her life right up to her own death, Gilman's meticulously crafted portrait reflects her ambiva- lence about writing her story. Lack of enthusiasm for a project



that involved recollection and introspection (as opposed to her more favored genres: polemic about the present, or vision for the future) partially explains the shortcomings of the final manu- script.7 This was not the sort of book Gilman liked to write; it was not useful in the immediate way that a political manifesto or prescription for a better world can be. And yet, in a forced effort at least to make her story exemplary, Gilman succeeded in producing a strangely self-conscious and lackluster self-portrait. As Gilman's most important biographers concur, the book's "greatest disap- pointment is that it does not have the author's heart in it"; "it has an unfinished quality" and is full of "self-deceptions" and "pur- poseful misreadings.'"8

Though it is difficult to disagree with the scholarly consensus on the book's dearth of literary brilliance and historical accuracy, I am compelled by it precisely because critics have preferred to locate the text's faults rather than to interpret them. The uncomfort- able, self-conscious, and often self-serving passages can be read against the grain in order to reveal ideas about nation and race caught within the web of Gilman's autobiographical maneuvers. As in the birthday passage with which I began, in the opening pages of her autobiography Gilman announces the heart of her conceptual edifice, dwelling on the reproduction of highly perfected human beings, and reiterating her belief that racial and national belonging ought to intersect in the reproduction of citizens. Although she may not have been born on "the glorious fourth," Gilman takes herself as a case in point and insists that her pedigree is nonetheless instructive.

Although her father had wryly warned that "there are a great many persons between you and the throne and I should not ad- vise you to look forward to it," at fifteen Gilman defiantly began an investigation into her forebears. In a chapter entitled "Back- ground," she traces in abundant detail her "extremely remote connection to English royalty." In searches through American Families of Royal Descent, in Providence, Rhode Island's public library, she claims to have pursued her lineage through "a bunch of New Eng- landers" to their relatives in Essex, and then to the more significant ancestor, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, son of Ed- ward III and Phillippa of Hainault, who were, in turn, descended from "that universal progenitor, William the Conqueror. " When in Europe, wherever Gilman casts her gaze she discovers her connec-



tion to aristocracy, if not to royalty, never encountering a name to which she does not find it fitting to lay claim. When Gilman cross- es the Atlantic and shifts her focus to her American ancestors her approach changes markedly. On these newer shores her forebears are identified as persons of "piety and learning," but she cannot be bothered to find out the names of these relatives, "glutted" as she already is "with [her] list of remote glories." In America, Gilman noticeably limits her claim of filiation to the previous two generations, to "the immediate line [that she is] really proud of ... the Beecher[s]," a family of "world servers" that includes the the- ologian Lyman Beecher, his minister sons, and Gilman's great- aunts, the author/abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, the reformer Catherine Beecher, and the less famous but no less civic-minded, Isabella Beecher Hooker."o What is to be made of Gilman's trans- Atlantic heritage and of the distinct approaches taken to Old and New World relations? What is to be made of Gilman's uneven genealogical sketch offered as "Background" to a life story the un- folding of which she defers until a later chapter aptly, if ironically, entitled "Beginnings"?

For Gilman genealogical background was as important as life experience. As a reformer deeply committed to social change she was caught up in period ideas of "social evolution" and, like other Age of Reform intellectuals, often conflated these concerns with those about evolution proper, biological and Darwinian." Al- though there is no doubt that readers are meant to humor the willful young Charlotte when she testifies to her delight in discover- ing her connection to William the Conqueror, it is as important to take her at her word. In recollecting her youthful antics, Gilman ensures recognition of noble roots. In furthering her link to royalty and empire, she situates herself as an inheritor of a legacy of imperial conquest, assuring skeptics that she is of old stock-one of those exceptional individuals who can lay direct claim to old world breeding. No new arrival, but a great-grandniece of the rev- olution, Gilman is not to be confused with a new immigrant from Asia or Southern or Eastern Europe. And thus, following other nativists, she refers to her "Englishness" with paradoxical effect; she renders her old world genealogy that of a "true" American. Her autobiography is useful not only because of the good breeding exhibited in the life lived but also by virtue of the self-proclaimed good breeding that serves as guarantor of pedigree.12



"RACE SUICIDE" AND FEMINIST MATERNALISM Recognition of ancestry is not all that Gilman's genealogical narra- tion demands. William the Conqueror was of course also known as "William the Bastard," the son of a nobleman and his consort Ar- lette (variously known as Herleva or Arlotta), a low-born daughter of a tanner from whose name the word "harlot" derives.'3 It is thus not surprising that Gilman's sense of pride in her esteemed lineage coexists with an acute anxiety about the accuracy of any genealogical claim, such that her assertion of prodigious origins mixes with pronounced fear about her "purity" of stock. Far from deceiving herself about the coexistence of contradictory impulses, Gilman foregrounds the conundrum by turning it into an object lesson: Unfortunately, as one learns to lay out one's ancestors in concentric circles, doubling the number with each ring after the simple "Father and Mother" in the first, [the] glittering lines leading to far off dignitaries shrink to mere isolat- ed threads, and are overwhelmed by crowding multitudes of ordinary people-or worse.... When we reach the Kings, Edward being in the seventeenth circle, there are 131,072 ancestors-and only one King!14

Recognizing that recovery of "pure" origins is an inherently flawed project, one in which definitive connections are detoured by the confusion imposed by "crowding multitudes of ordinary people," Gilman acknowledges that for every king she discovers, she might have turned up "worse." But to whom exactly does Gilman allude?

From 1890 to 1930-during the years Gilman was active as a writer, journalist, and women's rights advocate-the United States entered a period of unprecedented expansion of its immigrant, foreign-born population, a situation that incurred widespread concern about the birthrate of "white" Anglo-Saxons and an accompa- nying intensification of anti-immigrant animus. Starting in the 1880s, debates over immigration, deportation of foreigners, implementation of restrictive immigration legislation, and demographic changes in the population shaped the national scene as it respond- ed to outbursts of intense anti-immigrant violence, and the exten- sive transformation of labor markets and urban centers.'" In 1891, just after Gilman began writing, Francis Amasa Walker, an outspo- ken restrictionist, compiled the first comprehensive statistical case documenting what came to be known as "race suicide." What Walker observed was the beginnings of a discrepancy between the birthrates among newly arrived immigrants and "old stock Ameri- cans," which led him to conclude that there was a direct correla-



tion between immigration from abroad and the falling birthrate among the native born.16 In Poverty, published nearly fifteen years later, Robert Hunter expressed a more extreme and increasingly popular conclusion: one kind of people, hastily lumped together with the catch-all adjective "worse," were replacing the "better" kind of people-who, in a paradoxical twist in the term's meaning came to refer to themselves as "native Americans." By 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt condemned the trend toward smaller native families as a sign of national decadence and moral decay, the discourse of "race suicide" had reached its apogee.17

Significantly, the term, although popularized by Walker, was coined by E. A. Ross, a prominent sociologist with whom Gilman conducted a long-standing correspondence and on whom she re- lied to supply her with readings that would keep her abreast of debates within the social sciences.'8 In Ross's influential essay, "The Causes of Race Superiority," addressed to the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he warns "true [Anglo- Saxon] Americans" to preserve the "superior racial" heritage be- queathed them. As he explains, The superiority of a race cannot be preserved without pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races. In Spanish America the easy going and unfastidious Spaniard peopled the continent with half-breeds and met the natives half way in respect to religious and political institutions. ... In North America, on the other hand, the white men have rarely mingled their blood with that of the Indian or toned down their civilization to meet his ca- pacities ... the net result is that North America from the Behring Sea [sic] to the Rio Grande is dedicated to the highest type of civilization; while for cen- turies the rest of our hemisphere will drag the ball and chain of hybridism. The situation still bode well. Anglo-Saxons had not yet degener- ated; Indian extermination had been a success and thus inter- breeding of "natives" and Indians negligible. Silence on the issue of African Americans suggests that in this article black/white and black/red mixing are either unspeakable and/or so successfully repressed that they do not trouble Ross. And yet, for all his rationalizations, Ross's ideally "pure" national genealogy is haunted by the specter of reproductive mayhem. He plays on fears of "Yellow Peril" as he builds a case for impending doom: "Asiatics flock to this country and, enjoying equal opportunities under our laws, learn our methods and compete actively with Americans. ... [B]ut if their standard of life is only half as high..,. the Asiatic will rear two children while his competitor feels able to rear but



one." Reproductive competition can have but one result; it will cause Anglo-Saxons to "wither away before the heavy influx of a prolific race from the Orient."19

Gilman's ideas about genealogy must be situated within the context of these larger debates among the nativists and restrictionists with whom she was in dialogue. Although her writings on immigration were not as popular as Ross's, or those written by other well-known figures-for example, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World-Supremacy (1920)-she elaborated closely related anxieties and prejudices. In a 1923 piece entitled "Is Ameri- ca Too Hospitable?" Gilman begins by stating that "there is a question [that is] sneeringly asked by the stranger within our gates: 'What is an American?"' In crafting her answer to this query, first posed by the Frenchman, J. Hector St. John de Cr&vecoeur, Gilman reveals her narrow restrictionist vision.20 "The American who knows he is one but has never thought of defining himself... is rather perplexed by the question [what is an American? For to this per- son] a simple answer is suggested: 'Americans are the kind of people who make a nation which every other nation wants to get into.' " Gilman's hostility escalates as she continues: Our swarming immigrants do not wish for a wilderness, nor for [savage] ene- mies. They like an established nation, with free education, free hospitals, free nursing, and more remunerative employment than they can find at home.... The amazing thing is the cheerful willingness with which the American people are giving up their country to other people, so rapidly that they are already re- duced to scant half of the population. No one is to blame but ourselves. The noble spirit of our founders, and their complete ignorance of sociology began the trouble. Consequently they announced, with more than royal magnificence, that this country was "an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations."

Initially insisting that "real Americans" need not countenance the self-evident ontological question, Gilman proceeds to contradict herself. The founding fathers-the most American of Americans- were unable to envisage a strategy for keeping Americans Ameri- can because they were unable to see that not all people were assimilable. Implicitly placing herself in a line of direct descent from the founding fathers, Gilman claims that Americans have no one to blame for the immigrant influx save themselves, for it is "we" who have been shortsighted in the sacrifice of "the good of the country to private profit," a sacrifice which has required the scour- ing of Europe for cheap labor and "the resultant flood of low- grade humanity."21



If it at first appears that Gilman is primarily troubled by cheap labor and the greed of private enterprise, the genealogical issues associated with her version of nationalism ultimately surface: We [Americans] used fondly to take for granted that the incoming millions loved the country as we did.... Some of them do. Enormous number do not. It is quite true that we ourselves are a mixed race-as are all races today-and that we were once immigrants. All Americans have come from somewhere else. But all persons who come from somewhere else are not therefore Americans. The American blend is from a few closely connected races.22 With predictable precision, Gilman identifies those who comprise the particular blend that engenders the "true American" and natu- ralizes it. Taking her cues from Ross, she avers: "the Eurasian mixture is generally considered unfortunate by most observers"; among "European races some seem to mate with better results than others ... [for] where there is a complete and long-standing mongrelization ... the result is not an improved stock." Express- ing her views on Asians and southern and eastern European immigrants who appear to pose the greatest threat to America, she states: "The American People, as a racial stock, are mainly of Eng- lish descent, mingled with the closely allied Teutonic and Scandi- navian strains." All other mixtures are patently disastrous.23

In hierarchizing different kinds of mixing, Gilman's essay at- tacks the idea of the American "melting pot." This "misplaced metaphor" as she calls it, stands for the indiscriminate blending of races. Far from agreeing with Horace Kallen's or Israel Zangwill's benevolent views, Gilman argues that the melting pot is a "cru- cible ... [that] has to be carefully made of special material and carefully filled with weighted measured proportions of such ores as will combine to produce known results." If one is too shortsighted-by implication, as are pro-immigrant reformers and founding fathers alike-and puts "into a melting pot promiscuous shovelfuls of anything that comes in handy, you do not get out of it anything of value, and you may break the pot."24 Translating her thought into sexually charged and scientifically authoritative language, Gilman pinpoints the specter of reproductive chaos: "since genus Homo is one species, it is physically possible for all races to interbreed, but not therefore desirable. ... We are perfectly familiar in this country with the various blends of black and white and the wisest of both races prefer pure stock."25

In a second essay, "Immigration, Importation, and Our Fathers," also concerned with new arrivals from southern and eastern Eu-



rope, Gilman proposes "national training schools of citizenship [that] all immigrants must pass through" in order to become self- supporting. In this unabashed plan for internal colonization and eventual Americanization, the population control features are again glaring. The unworthy are to be physically separated from "native stock" Americans until such time as they are transformed into "true Americans" who can safely intermingle with the larger population: When a nation changes by reason of the natural growth of its people, that is one thing; when it changes by the grafting upon it of an artificial growth of other people that is another thing. ... No nation has ever laid itself open to as great and rapid admixture of alien blood as has this nation. ... A "too easy" nation may be exploited like a too easy individual. .... The evil of our "watered stock," our artifi- cially distended citizenship, lies mostly at our own door.26

The existence of "others" within the nation's borders tempts the "promiscuous" citizens of America into the sexual unions that soil the national fabric. No matter which undesirable group she pon- ders, for Gilman, nation building can only be pursued through careful containment of the population and control of the reproductive misalliances that threaten to "water down" the "pure" national genealogy.27

HERLAND AND RACIAL NATIONALISM Scholars concerned with Gilman's racism and nativism, such as Gail Bederman and Louise Newman, have mainly treated her nonfiction. They have turned to the texts I have discussed above and to other similar writings to expose bigotry and racial animus. By contrast, scholars concerned with claiming Gilman as a foremother have focused on her fiction, particularly her 1915 utopian novel, Herland.28 This far-larger group of feminist critics has tended to see Gilman's creative work as free of the difficulties that beset her nonfiction, and thus a bifurcation in the scholarship emerges: those who treat fiction remain inattentive to or dismissive of Gilman's racism, while those who focus on it (generally social historians) are critical in their assessment of documents regarded as aberrational by the dominant group of literary critics. In her introduction to The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, Ann J. Lane makes the following argument justifying her editorial choices: "Gilman voiced opinions that are racist, chauvinistic, and anti-Semitic. The decision to ex-



clude selections ... that would illustrate these ideas flowed not from a decision to hide that side of her thought but from the belief that her valuable ideas [those exhibited in her fiction] better deserve remembering and repeating."29 In salvaging Gilman's fiction, Lane selectively excises problems in a manner that persists unapologetically. In a 1997 edition of the sequel to Herland, the ed- itors Mary Jo Deegan and Michael Hill ask rhetorically, "Shall we vilify With Her in Ourland because it contains a few (and it really is only a few) ethnocentric lapses? I think not. ... Gilman's social critiques ... are original and powerful. They remain cogent and surprisingly contemporary.""30 Deegan and Hill, like Lane nearly twenty years earlier, choose to marginalize those aspects of Gilman's thought they find distasteful and difficult to assimilate into their existing critical framework. In so doing, they preserve Gilman's privileged place within the feminism they practice.

Of course what gets neglected when Gilman's "good" fiction texts are hived off from her "bad" polemics or when the racism that structures her fiction is dismissed as merely a "lapse" is critical assessment of the connections between Gilman's fiction and nonfiction-nothing less than a well-rounded account of the conceptual continuities that cut across and are thus constitutive of Gilman's philosophical edifice. As I argue in the treatment of Her- land that follows, the novel's nativism and racism stand out precisely when the text is historicized through juxtaposition with the nonfiction that I have discussed in the previous section. For if Gil- man's fiction is read through the lens of her nonfiction it becomes evident that both forms of writing are driven by fears of racial mixing that neatly coincide with the discourse of "race suicide."

Like other nativists, Gilman the novelist grounds her nationalism in a reproductive politics in which women are centrally re- sponsible for maintaining a "pure" national genealogy. Unlike American mothers, Herlandian mothers produce perfect citizens modeled on themselves. In stark contrast to the crowding multitudes who pollute the United States as they populate it, Herlan- ders are carefully rendered: all citizens are female, all births timely and genetically refined, and all reproduction parthenogenic, and thus free of reproductive "misplay." In this female world, feminism becomes consonant with racial nationalism insofar as it orches- trates a perfected asexual eugenics free of the mishaps and un- knowns that accompany heterosexuality. As Herlanders explain,



their principal social achievement is the perfection of reproduction in all its myriad forms: the "mak[ing] of the best kind of people," as well as the expansion of motherhood into an ethic that saturates their religion, agriculture, government, education, science, and language-not to mention their collective consciousness of themselves as a people.31

The account of Herlandian mother culture is provided by the sociologist Van Dyke Jennings, a member of a team of three men who have set out on a mission to discover a society of anticipated female "savages." Wending their way downriver by boat, flying over the stony precipice that separates Herland from surrounding forest, the explorers eventually arrive at their destination. Almost as soon as they set down, however, they are apprehended and their hopes dashed. Far from being prized as "valuable American Citizens," virile men sought after by (hetero) sex-starved women, the men are viewed as pesky intruders. In the captivity narrative that unfolds they gradually acquire the Herlandian language; ac- cumulate knowledge of customs, government, and industry; and discover, through careful comparison, just how superior to their own land is this nation of mothers.

Within Gilman's fictional logic, Herland's unique gender demographic emerges over 2,000 years, through a process in which Her- landers transform their formerly polygamous, slaveholding, and heterosexual society into a modern nation of mothers severed from contact with what are referred to as the 'bisexual races" of the globe. As Van explains, the Herlandian nation is the outcome of a succession of "historic misfortunes." First, the original population, decimated by war, was driven inland; a volcanic eruption filled in the pass connecting Herland to the rest of the world; all males were killed defending themselves from "savage" invaders; and finally, the survivors of these onslaughts were seized in a slave revolt in which the remaining women and girls became prey to their "racially inferior" conquerors. Evincing the gusto of latter- day Herlanders, these "infuriated virgins" came together to resist their fate as sexual booty. Successfully killing off their '"brutal conquerors," they went on to build an exclusively female world saved from extinction by a divine intervention that rendered first one woman, and then all succeeding generations, spontaneously reproductive. Ultimately, what comes to distinguish Herland from every other nation is the singular fact that all Herlanders are de-



scended from the same mother, a situation that is the result of their collective bravery, their refusal to be conquered by men of the slave caste-quite bluntly their refusal to engage in interracial reproduction. As Gilman repeats, these "willful virgins" are "New Women," "One family, all descended from one mother, who alone founded a new race . .. of ultra-women, inheriting only from women." In the event that there is any doubt about the "race" of Herlanders, she notes that they are "Aryan," truly "white" even if they appear "somewhat darker than our Northern races because of their constant exposure to sun and air."32 Crafted in the image of her proposed Americanization colonies-Herland too keeps reproductive "misplay" in check.

Throughout the novel, perfected reproduction is described in nationalist terms and Herlandian maternalism translated directly into nationalism. As Van avers, in Herland there is no "struggle for existence ... [resulting in an] everlasting writhing mass of un- derbred people trying to get ahead of one another ... [a] hopeless substratum of paupers and degenerates"; rather, Herlanders con- vene in council and exercise mother-will, carefully selecting those citizens most fit to reproduce. Herlanders are "Conscious Makers of People," because with them "Mother-love ... [is] not a brute passion, mere 'instinct,' a wholly personal feeling ... [but is instead] a religion ... that include[s] a limitless feeling of sisterhood, that wide unity of service" that is, as Van concludes in a flurry of enthusiasm, "National, Racial, [and] Human" all at once.33 The "pure" national genealogy and the unpolluted pedigree of each citizen render genetic filiation the dominant ideology in Herland. Herlanders are of "one family" descended from "one mother," and thus the nationalist glue that binds them is their actual kinship. Whereas an imagined kinship precariously binds other nationals, in Herland citizens are comothers and sisters. Although each Her- lander has a first name, she has no family name: her individual and national kin groups are coextensive and coterminous.

The shared maternal origin of Herlanders has the additional merit of making all nationals into perfectly abstractable citizen- subjects. As one patriot puts it, "each one of us has our exact line of descent all the way back to our dear First mother." Every pedigree is "pure," traceable to the same point of origin, as well as to the universally shared history that emanates from it. In Herland the Enlightenment ideal of "universal brotherhood" has been re-



placed with actual "universal sisterhood." And although the male intruders find this genealogical purity "hard to credit," they eventually convert to the Herlandian value system- which is, after all, a perfected version of their own. Comparing mothers in the Unit- ed States and Herland, Van attests, They loved their country because it was their nursery, playground, and workshop-theirs and their children's. ... From those first breathlessly guarded, half- adored race mothers, all up the ascending line, they had this dominant thought of building up a great race through the children. All the surrendering devotion our women have put into their private families, these women put into their country and race. . . . The mother instinct, with us so painfully intense, so thwarted by conditions, so concentrated in personal devotion to a few ... all this feeling with them flowed out in a strong wide current, unbroken through the generations, deepening and widening through the years, including every child in all the land.4

WRITING FEMINIST GENEALOGY With few exceptions, over the past twenty years readers of Herland have celebrated this utopia as subversive of the most deeply en- trenched patriarchal views on women and thus as a prototype for contemporary feminism. Through the novel's portrait of women as intelligent, scientific, educable, physically able, and politically savvy, it rejects existing gender logic and models an alternative woman-centered community that challenges the status quo.35 As Laura E. Donaldson puts it, Gilman performs "a radical inversion of the traditional male stance: in [her] ironic utopia, the masters become the mastered, the powerful become the helpless, the unbend- ing oaks become the clinging vines."36 In a comparative study of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Herland, Elizabeth Keyser argues that Gilman adds a gender component to Swiftian social critique, satirically revealing male culture as uncivilized. In crafting her utopia, Gilman "seems to be offering an explanation [of the problem] as well as a solution for it"; she offers a 'blueprint" for re- versing gendered power structures, as well as a game plan for sus- taining a feminist riposte to patriarchy.37 Similarly E. Ann Kaplan suggests that Gilman "project[s] mythic female representations that alert women readers to other possibilities-that stretch our imaginations and make us see the world we live in (and ourselves) differently."38 These critics are joined by a slew of others who read Herland as inspiring everything from early feminist film (especially



melodrama), Second Wave radical feminist theory (Mary Daly, Shulamith Firestone), feminist poetry (Adrienne Rich), alternative feminist prose and philosophy (Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva), ecofeminism, and feminist science fiction.39

Gilman's popularity with and centrality to feminists in the 1980s and 1990s is of course partly a function of early Second Wave publishing choices. After "The Yellow Wallpaper" was reprinted in 1969, Women and Economics in 1968, and Herland a decade later- that is after being "rediscovered"-Gilman became a standard author in many women's studies and U.S. literature courses and today invariably appears in anthologies used in college-level classes. There is certainly nothing wrong with canonizing Gilman's work (a project this article participates in through its focus on her), but what concerns me are the enduring problems that have been gen- erated as an adjunct to the recovery of Gilman's corpus. For many scholars, despite Gilman's particular brand of racial nationalism and eugenic maternalism, it remains justifiable to look back to Gilman's writings, particularly to Herland, to find within it a desirable antecedent of contemporary feminism.

Although the persistent problems with the feminist approach to Herland may be found in most articles and essays on the novel, I have chosen to focus on treatments of it that are paradigmatic of the larger problems in the criticism. In criticism that focuses on Herland as a blueprint and origin for contemporary feminism, the historicity of Gilman's text is erased, and she is installed as a wor- thy heroine awaiting discovery by her sisters. On methodological and structural levels, the result of viewing Gilman's text as a mirror that reflects back a familiar form of feminism is the com- pounded problem of uncritical retention of the genealogical concerns that characterize Gilman's work, on the one hand, and failure to analyze the racial politics of the feminism that finds its own reflection in Gilman's work, on the other.

My point in discussing this criticism is not to condemn particular scholars (several of whom have been the objects of repeated attack) but, rather, to sketch the contours of a scholarly impasse. I turn first to the problem of uncritical genealogical argumentation, taking as my example Val Gough's article, "Lesbians and Virgins: The New Motherhood in Herland." According to Gough, Gilman created her utopia in order to negotiate two parallel impulses, her private lesbian fantasies of female nurturance, and her public belief in the



potential transformation of heterosexual social structures.... Herland is thus both a fictional fantasy of utopian lesbian motherhood, and a stunning critique of the hetero-patriarchal social structures used in the service of her other utopian ideal, the "fully human" heterosexual subject.

Although engagement with Gilman's views on sexuality is press- ing, Gough's ideas about "utopian lesbian motherhood" and "fully human heterosexual" subjectivity are not germane to Gilman's historical moment." As Gough herself specifies, the "'fully human' heterosexual subject" she has in mind is Marilyn Frye's "willful virgin"-she who can "fuck without losing [her] virginity, because virginity is not organized in relation to penile penetration, but in relation to women's larger sexual freedom." In turn, the "private lesbian fantasies" Gough discusses are equated with Sonya An- dermahr's and Adrienne Rich's notions of "Woman Culture"; Her- landers, she writes, are "lesbians as conceived by the utopian separatist lesbianism of the late 1970s, which stressed the collectivity of lesbian identity and perceived women's needs as nurturance and interrelatedness, articulated in terms of the desire for the pre- oedipal mother."41 The difficulty with Gough's interpretation of Gilman is that it is grounded in a retrospective projection that le- gitimates the erasure of Gilman's genealogical concerns and more specifically her celebration of racial nationalism.

Gough's reasoning is in no way unique. In fact, the difficulties found in her analysis are further exacerbated in criticism in which the colonial metaphor at work in Herland is read as the lens through which to interpret Gilman's commentary on patriarchy. Again, Gough's formulations are instructive: "[B]y depict- ing the aggressive penetration of the separatist space of Herland by three male 'explorers,' Gilman dramatizes the way in which female space is always under threat from masculinist colonization."42 The nearly invariable transformation of colonization into a metaphor for patriarchy and the subsequent erasure of race from the colonial drama constitutes a second major problem in the scholarship on Herland.

This is especially true in the numerous interpretations of Gil- man's description of first contact between Herlanders and the male intruders. I quote at length from the passage in question to reveal what is at stake in its critical reception. When the explorers spot three Herlanders in a large tree and pursue them, they are quickly outmaneuvered. Van narrates the scene as follows: We saw short hair, hatless, loose, and shining; a suit of some light firm stuff,



the closest of tunics and knee breeches, met by trim gaiters. As bright and smooth as parrots and as unaware of danger, they swung there before us, wholly at ease, staring as we stared, till first one, and then all of them burst into peals of delighted laughter .... then there was a torrent of soft talk tossed back and forth, no savage sing-song, but clear musical fluent speech. Names are exchanged, and Van turns his focus to the most masculine of his companions. The womanizer, Terry, urges his friends to not just "sit [t]here and learn the language" but to employ "the bait" with which they have come prepared to catch their prey. After producing from his pocket a box of purple velvet out of which he draws "a necklace of big varicolored stones that would have been worth a million if real," the ensuing scene unfolds: [Terry] reached far out along the bough, but not quite to his full stretch ... [one of the Herlanders] was visibly moved ... softly and slowly, she drew nearer.... Her eyes were splendid, wide, fearless, as free from suspicion as a child's .... Her interest was more that of an intent boy playing a fascinating game than of a girl lured by an ornament. ... Terry's smile was irreproachable ... it was like a creature about to spring. [It was clear what was about to happen]-the dropped necklace, the sudden clutching hand, the girl's sharp cry as he seized her and drew her in. But it didn't happen. She made a timid reach with her right hand for the gay swinging thing-he held it a little nearer-then, swift as light, she seized it from him with her left, and dropped on the instant to the bough below.43 In the first part of the passage, the women sport short hair, tunics, knee breeches, and gaiters and are arrayed in bright colors that give them the appearance of tropical birds. In this defeminized, animalized, and exoticized state, Herlanders are implicitly associated with period stereotypes of so-called savages. At the same time, however, Gilman distinguishes them from their inferiors by noting that their talk was "musical and fluent," no "savage sing- song." To make the point resoundingly, Gilman puts Herlanders to the litmus test of "savagery" a second time. When the men re- peat their effort to buy off the "natives" with cheap ornaments (on this occasion, they proffer gaudy scarves to Herlandian elders), their gifts are graciously accepted by the "Colonels." The irony of this scene is that along with the glittering beads, the new offer- ings are placed in the Herlandian museum. Although they had planned on displaying the shred of Herlandian fabric that they had found and used to locate Herland in an appropriate museum in the United States, through a clever reversal, the material objects of the men's world are deemed uncivilized. The trinkets they offer



to the Herlanders are placed in the Herlandian museum, as it is these artifacts of the "savage," '"bisexual" world that deserve study under the Herlandian microscope."

In the dominant reading of the first-contact scene, Gilman sub- verts the expectations of male explorers and unwitting readers alike by representing Herlanders as an exceedingly "advanced" people. According to Keyser, for example, "the supposedly superior sex becomes the inferior or disadvantaged." The three men have mistaken notions about the country they are entering and in- appropriate strategies for dealing with the natives who "are too intelligent and disinterested to be bribed by baubles." Following suit, Christopher Wilson opens his essay with an analysis of the passage just cited and concludes: "such a scene [ripples] with satire on the Eden myth ... female agility counterpoints and de- feats the knowledge, temptations, and 'advances' of masculine ex- ploit. ... As they avoid possession, the women stay enigmatic, just out of reach.... [The] men 'advance' into Herland but make failed advances at the women; the men's 'enterprise'... [is] hard- ly natural; their 'venture' for profits and spoils is, as the prelude to the ad-venture, frustrated."45

Critics imply that Gilman challenges the colonial enterprise by challenging patriarchy; however, they do not struggle with the racial dynamics of this colonial encounter. Nor do they attempt to connect the themes of conquest treated in the novel to the history of U.S. imperialism, including the Spanish American War; the wresting of Spanish borderlands from Mexico; the annexation of Texas, Oregon, and California, not to mention U.S. interventions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawai'i-all of which Gil- man witnessed during her lifetime. The consequence is that "first contact" exists in the scholarship as if it were unscripted by the legacy of U.S. imperialism, as if both colonialism and imperialism were nothing more than metaphors for patriarchy, metaphors whose specific histories are elided by failing to distinguish the project of feminine liberation from that of masculine colonial and imperial conquest.

Although Sandra Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's work has per- haps become in recent years a too-easy target for moralizing pun- dits out to expose feminist racism, in order to extend my last point I turn to two companion pieces by the influential pair because they have together exerted a disproportionate impact on the shape of feminist literary criticism, not only in the 1970s but in



the last two decades as well.46 In "Rider Haggard's Heart of Dark- ness," Gilbert argues that She, Haggard's popular children's ad- venture novel about a powerful African female demigod who at- tempts to thwart the colonial aspirations of a group of male explorers, is best understood as a negotiation of the "power of the female sex" that obsessed male writers in the metropoles of Eng- land and France at the height of colonial expansion.47 Invoking Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Gilbert weaves a comparison between the protagonist's movements in She and those of Mar- lowe and crew as they travel inward toward a destructive inner sanctum, on their journey into a heart of darkness that is not only "savage," but female. And yet, even as Gilbert foregrounds the metaphoric adequation of femininity and "savagery," she reads both novels as texts about patriarchy, failing to give colonialism sustained attention.

Gubar's argument builds on Gilbert's and places it in a U.S. frame. Working from Gilbert's suggestion that Gilman must have read She before crafting Herland as a utopian rewriting of Hag- gard's dystopian vision of femininity, Gubar explains: "She's power and popularity transform the colonized continent into the heart of female darkness that Charlotte Perkins Gilman would rename and reclaim in a utopian feminist revision of Haggard's romance." She continues, "by coming to terms with Haggard's She ... Gilman confronted the misogyny implicit in the imperialist romance."'8 As in Gilbert's piece, misogyny appears to intersect with both colonialism and imperialism, but again the convergence is unexamined. The upshot: colonialism and imperialism are conflated, transformed into additional names for patriarchy, and analysis of the imperialist, colonialist, and racial logics of Gilman's portrait of utopia sacrificed to so-called feminist analysis.49

In closing, Gubar's essay provides a concise instance of the problem. Herland reveals "the dispossession that valorized colonization as a metaphor of female socialization," she avers, "leading suffragists to proclaim punningly 'No votes for women-no Home Rule.'"s50 The suffragettes' pronouncement supposedly reveals their understanding of the dynamics of colonization: if women are not granted suffrage there will be no peace for the masters of the house, for women in the position of the colonized will revolt. However, a more persistently critical interpretation of the same statement suggests the obverse: if women are granted



suffrage, it is just fine for colonialism to continue unchecked. It is this second interpretation that is supported by Gilman's own refer- ence to suffrage in Herland. When the male intruders attempt to es- cape and are confronted by the Herlandian "Colonels," Gilman's detail is precise: they "found [themselves] much in the position of the suffragettes trying to get to the parliament buildings through a triple cordon of London police."51 In Herland, women's and men's positions have been reversed; it is men who find themselves in the rebellious position of the suffragettes, and Herlanders in that of colonial authorities. In this feminist utopia, the mission of keeping insurgents down is women's. Read in this way, Gubar's feminist reasoning resonates with Gilman's. So long as women have power, discussions of colonial and imperialist repression are irrelevant.52

In sidestepping a thoroughgoing critique of colonialism as a racial as well as gendered dynamic, feminist critics of Herland become what I will call "parthenogenic genealogists," women with faith in the "purity" of feminism's origins because they are inattentive to the historical imbrication of feminism, colonialism, and imperialism. And thus, I agree with Wilson when he remarks that in the first-contact scene Gilman "foreshadows the by-play of the book as a whole"53 but for reasons other than those he gives. True, the scene of first contact casts Herlanders as civilized and superior through a process of satiric reversal, but this '"by-play" depends on an unacknowledged third move, the counteridentification of "savage" inferiority with masculinity. In Gilman's novel as in its criticism, female superiority has a high cost-the subsumption of race within gender, and the feminization of civilization in the name of white womanhood. Foreclosing the possibility that gender and race might intersect and yet not align, Gilman scholars follow Gil- man in engaging in a process of legitimation by reversal in which the repeated victory of feminine culture over male culture is se- cured through a prior coup, that of white women over sub- ordinated masculine "savages." The upshot is that the "discovery" of Gilman's "lost feminist utopian novel"-as Herland is subtitled on the cover of the most popular edition-mimics the imperialist mission of "discovery" engaged in by the men who penetrate Herland.

Although there is of course a long history of the use of racism, colonialism, and imperialism as metaphors for patriarchy within trans-Atlantic feminism, as well as an emergent critique of the problems with this sort of metaphorization, in the current mo-



ment the uncritical trend within Gilman scholarship is in fact increasing rather than abating.54 In the current moment, we are witnessing a Gilman publishing boom-unprecedented since Gil- man's rediscovery in the 1970s-in which the parthenogenetically "pure" genealogy of feminism sketched by Gilman's first critics continues to be reproduced rather than contested. In order to dem- onstrate that the problems of feminist criticism I elaborate are not outdated problems of 1970s' and 1980s' feminism, and that it is these uncritical readings that continue to inform the narrative about the feminist "tradition" recounted by those seeking to elaborate a genealogy for feminism that produces continuity between feminism's First and Second Waves, in the remainder of this article I treat the most recent scholarship and ask of it several familiar questions: When and how is it desirable to establish continuity between Gilman's feminism and our own? How have Gilman's racism and nativism been obscured in the newest criticism? How does obfuscation of the racial dynamics of Gilman's texts shape contemporary feminist knowledge production? And finally, what are the costs to feminism of choosing to read Gilman as a positive role model?

In the last decade, Gilman's signal text, Women and Economics, has been reissued for the first time in over three decades, a number of prominent collections and casebooks have been produced, several critical anthologies have been created in rapid succession, fifteen dissertations treating Gilman have been completed, and six of Gilman's novels republished.55 What is at once instructive and disturbing is that these scholarly projects either continue to omit discussion of Gilman's racism and nativism, or merely pay lip service to endemic problems. On the first page of their introduction to the newest edition of Women and Economics, for example, Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson argue that this ur-text is timeless and its "revival" timely because it introduces "fresh and continuing insight to a generation of feminists ... poised-as they were when the book was written-on the cusp of a new century."56 Although Kimmel and Aronson observe in passing that Gilman occasionally exhibits "ambivalent racism," a footnote to Gail Beder- man's work on Gilman's participation in the discourse of civilized white womanhood dismisses it as "excessively politically correct," revealing a deep-seated investment in the project of recovery and "tradition" building, and strong resistance to the conceptual trans-



formations that might ideally result from a reassessment of the underpinnings of Gilman's writings."57

Although not all the new scholarship refuses to unmask Gil- man, most minimize her vexed legacy by suggesting that she was an unwitting member of a nationalist and often racist main- stream. The denial of Gilman's historical agency takes two forms: reiteration that Gilman's "positive contributions" far outweigh her negative "lapses" and psychologization of these lapses and subsequent refusal to read them systemically. In their 1999 anthology showcasing the newest criticism, Jill Rudd and Val Gough call for "more critical treatments which allow us to acknowledge elements of [Gilman's] writings which are now regarded as unacceptable," particularly her racism.58 Out of the thirteen essays in their volume, however, only one is principally concerned with what the author, Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, calls Gilman's "evolutionary perspective on race, ethnicity, and class."

In part, Ganobcsik-Williams's essay fails to impact on the overall trajectory of the volume because it is overshadowed by numerous contributions written by scholars whose assessment of Gilman has changed little over the years (Ann J. Lane, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Catherine Golden, and Denise D. Knight, among others). Lane's essay, for instance, leads off the collection with a familiar sentiment: she hopes to offer "general observations" regarding Gil- man's legacy so that contemporary feminists might augment it. She notes: "we cannot build on a heritage that has been denied us and in some cases been obliterated." As far as Lane is concerned, there are few obstacles to her task of recovery that cannot be over- come. Gilman was "racist and anti-Semitic in her private letters and journal entries," she acknowledges, but such "bad" writings can be easily segregated from Gilman's exemplary ones by "white feminist scholars [who] have listened and learned.""59 Gilman's racism is apparently a private affair, separate from her public rep- utation, and feminist antiracism an objective already achieved.

Gilbert's and Gubar's contribution to the anthology, which acknowledges Gilman's obsession with improvement of "the race," is certainly bolder and more nuanced in its approach to Gilman's legacy than their previous work, but it too stops short of systemic analysis. The "race" that Gilman wishes to better is never clearly identified as Anglo-Saxon or white, and when reasons for Gil- man's obsession with maternity are provided, they are psycholog-



ical. Gilman had a terror of motherhood and continually attempted to rework maternal and reproductive themes in coming to terms with that which she sought to make abject. As Gilbert and Gubar ask rhetorically, "Was the utopianist of Herland seduced and betrayed into uncharacteristic grandiosity ... by deceptive myths of maternal power precisely because abjection of motherhood to the species filled her with such dread she could not bear to contemplate the materiality of its meaning?"60 The implied answer is that Gilman's maternalism and racism are discrete psychological side effects of a generalized reproductive anxiety disor- der, rather than constitutively imbricated terms within her particular brand of feminism.

Being outnumbered goes a long way toward explaining the glancing impact of Ganobcsik-Williams's intervention in Rudd and Gough's volume; however, even that explanation is not quite adequate. Although Ganobcsik-Williams views Gilman's work as racist and nativist, and loudly argues that a "fuller understanding" of Gilman's place within intellectual history is "blocked" if these issues are not addressed, her attempt at historical contextu- alization of Gilman's most problematic ideas is not so different in its effect from the other readings presented. As she explains, "a major motivation for [Gilman's] judgments of nonwhites and immigrants, as well as of the poor, stemmed from her total commitment to the idea of human progress through social evolution." Gil- man's racism and nationalism are a function of her commitment to human progress and are thus again cast as negative side effects of the more noble project of social uplift. Ganobcsik-Williams continues, "Gilman built a theoretical rationale about nationhood ... based upon principles of social evolution, in order to justify and explain her fear and mistrust of foreigners settling in the United States."61 Once again, Gilman's nationalism and nativism are post- hoc rationalizations of another set of concerns that are cast as psychological, compensatory, and somewhat irrational.

Of all the Gilman volumes published in the last few years, for my purposes the most important is With Her in Ourland, which contains the first reprint of the third novel within the trilogy of which Herland is a part, as well as a substantial scholarly introduction. Because Herland was until recently the only one of Gil- man's science fiction novels to be republished, most readers have assumed that the novel stands alone. This is not the case. Herland



is directly linked to With Her in Ourland in terms of plot, shared genealogical concerns, and the nationalist politics it develops.62 In this second fiction, a Herlander, Ellador, returns to the United States with Herland's narrator, Van, as a researcher, emissary, and advisor. During her stay she formulates her diagnosis of Ameri- ca's ills and issues a prescription. Much of what she concludes has already been rehearsed for readers of Herland; what distinguishes the central message of With Her in Ourland is that it is not only the social and biological reproductive processes that need to be con- trolled but also the nation itself, anthropomorphized as a bloated and mentally deranged female infant. As Van specifies, when El- lador contemplated America it was as if "a mother had learned that her baby was an idiot." Unsurprisingly, other nations are also figured as degenerate children, while Herland is viewed as the only "healthy child" amongst the lot. Ellador gives her impres- sions of the world after touring it in the midst of the First World War. "Anything more like the behavior of a lot of poor, little, un- derbred children it would be hard to find. Quarrelsome, selfish, each bragging that he can 'lick' the others-oh you poor dears! How you do need your mother! and she's coming at last."63 Cast- ing Herland as a sort of mother superior who can manage the United States and its squabbling siblings around the globe, With Her in Ourland testifies to the imperialist aspirations of Gilman's maternalist feminism and racial nationalism. Indeed, juxtaposition of Herland and With Her in Ourland makes it strikingly appar- ent that Herlanders conceive of themselves as a separate and superior race, members of a mother-race ready and willing to create peace in a world populated by "savages."64

Although it may seem obvious from the description I have just offered that With Her in Ourland is concerned with justifying and legitimating the Herlandian conquest, supervision, and control of the globe, the two scholars who introduce the novel do not acknowledge the political agenda that dynamizes the text. In their introduction, Mary Jo Deegan and Michael Hill make a familiar case for viewing Gilman as a foremother of feminist sociology without considering the inspiration she found in her friend E.A. Ross's work on "race suicide," let alone her own nativist writings. As Deegan and Hill see it, Gilman's second science fiction novel applies "the positive lessons of Herland to the lived realities of Ourland," and thus Gilman's two-part saga marks the "culmina-



tion of [her] life work." Tellingly, it is only as an aside that Gil- man's "ethnocentric lapses" and "occasional bigotry" are men- tioned, and this only after she has been sufficiently elevated. Al- though I am sympathetic to Deegan and Hill's warning that "ig- noring Gilman's utopia because of her blemishes invites failure to examine her at all," I have attempted to show that anything less than a fully critical approach to Gilman's work leaves contemporary feminists in a bind, unable to successfully negotiate the relationship between "tradition" building and antiracism, canoniza- tion and critique of canon formation.65

What is missing from most Gilman scholarship is thus two- fold-an account of how Gilman's ideas about race and nation are the foundation on which her feminism is built and an assessment of how Gilman's racism and nativism might transform contemporary feminist self-conception, that is, the genealogy of feminism that is constituted each and every time Gilman is uncritically in- voked as a feminist foremother. In contrast to scholarship that un- wittingly sanctions the genealogical ideals embedded in Gilman's work by leaving them unexamined, a more effective genealogy of feminism must instead uncover the troubled grounding of Gil- man's most cherished formulations. At its best such a project would avoid moral judgment of Gilman as a "good" or "bad" feminist and would instead read her work symptomatically. In this spirit, this article is neither a call to purge Gilman from the annals of feminism nor to decanonize her texts; such would represent a drive for genealogical "purity" similar to that which this article seeks to critique. Rather, I am suggesting that as feminists we keep Gilman in full view-analyzing and incorporating a critical understanding of the most difficult aspects of her work within our own. For only when we are able to apprehend something more than our own reflection in the mirror of the past, will it become possible to look back at Gilman to different effect. As Michel Foucault instructs readers of Nietzsche's formulations about genealogy with which I began this article, "knowledge, even under the banner of history, does not depend on 'rediscovery,' and it em- phatically excludes the 'rediscovery of ourselves.' "66 From a critical, antiracist vantage point, it is possible to "listen and learn" as Gilman inaugurates a feminist politics in which we need not par- take. For at the same time as Gilman's feminist maternalism and racial nationalism depend on genealogical ideals, her corpus can



be situated as a lever for prying open the problems of writing feminist genealogy, and of narrating the history of the wave of feminism of which we are a part. Although it may have been difficult for Gilman, writing at the turn of the century, to think about genealogy without binding it to biological notions of descent, racial "purity," and pedigree, in redefining and reclaiming the concept of genealogy it becomes possible to read Gilman differently, to read her as we in turn can only hope to be read by others.

NOTES For their engagement with earlier versions of this article, I thank Carolyn Allen, Madeleine Yue Dong, Ranjana Khanna, Uta Poiger, Susan Gillman, Jeanne Heuving, Ellen Rooney, Nikhil Pal Singh, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Lynn Thomas, Priscilla Wald, the Society of Scholars at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, and anonymous readers at Feminist Studies.

1. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography, introduction by Ann J. Lane (1935; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 8. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hol- lingdale (1887; New York: Vintage, 1967), 15. 3. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1983), 2. 4. Of the nearly 100 texts on Gilman written in the past decade, at the time this article was accepted for publication, only seven offered sustained analyses of Gilman's race politics. See Susan S. Lanser, "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Poli- tics of Color in America," Feminist Studies 15 (fall 1989): 415-41; Mariana Valverde, "'When the Mother of the Race Is Free': Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality in First Wave Feminism," in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History, ed. Franca Iacovetta and MarianaValverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 3-26; Gail Bederman, "'Not to Sex-But to Race!' Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Civilized Anglo-Saxon Woman- hood, and the Return of the Primitive Rapist," in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 121-69; Bernice L. Hausman, "Sex before Gender: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Evolutionary Paradigm of Utopia," Feminist Studies 24 (fall 1998): 489-510; Louise Newman, "Eliminating Sex Distinction from Civilization: The Feminist Theories of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary Roberts Smith Coolidge," in White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 132-57; Tracy Fessenden, "Race, Religions, and the New Woman in Ameri- ca: The Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," Furman Studies 37 (June 1995): 15-28; and Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, "The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Evolution- ary Perspective on Race, Ethnicity, and Class," in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Re- former, ed. Jill Rudd and Val Gough (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 16-44. 5. Gilman was generally regarded as a trans-Atlantic celebrity; her works were translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, and Japanese and were used as textbooks in a number of college classrooms. For the critical reception of Gilman's work by her contemporaries, see Joanne Karpinski, ed., Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: G.K. Hall, 1992). 6. Gilman, cited in Ann J. Lane's introduction to Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopia (New



York: Pantheon, 1979), ix. 7. Gilman's autobiography only sold 808 copies, and although it was reviewed, it was not critically assessed. It did not reappear in print until thirty years later. 8. Quotations from Ann J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 353. Also see Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 6-8; and Larry Ceplair, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Non-Fiction Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 5. 9. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1, 2. 10. Ibid., 3. 11. Critics disagree over whether Gilman was, strictly speaking, a reader of Darwin. Be- derman and Newman suggest she was influenced by American popularizers of Darwin, especially Lester Frank Ward. Hausman argues that she blended Darwin with Spencer. Valverde suggests that she explicitly reworked Darwin. 12. Gilman's distinction between new and old immigrants coincides with the ideology of restrictionism. Restrictionists advocated limited immigration of particular national groups to the United States. As John Higham explains, "the major theoretical effort of restrictionists in the twentieth century consisted precisely in ... the transformation of relative cultural differences into an absolute line of cleavage, which would redeem the Northwestern Europeans from the charges once leveled at them and explain the present danger of immigration in terms of the change in its sources." See Send These to Me: Immi- grants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975; rev. ed., 1984), 44. 13. As one seventeenth-century source explains, "Robert, brother to Richard III was never married; but being charmed with the graceful mien of a young woman named Arlotta (whence 'tis said cam the word harlot) a skinner's daughter,.. . he took her for his mistress and by her had this William." See The British Biographical Archive, 1601-1929, ed. Paul Sieveking (London: K.G. Saur), microfiche 1170; and The Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 293-301. 14. Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 (my emphasis). 15. The first restrictive immigration legislation enacted by Congress (1875) banned prostitutes and convicts from entering the country. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the first legislation proscribing the entrance of a nationally defined group, was followed by additional restrictions based on national origin. In 1924, for example, the Johnson- Reed Act set rigid quotas based on statistics gathered from the 1890 census. A commis- sion created by the act concluded that there were 94.8 million whites in the population; and that of these, 41.3 million were of "colonial stock" and 53.5 million of "post-colonial" stock. The "Western Hemisphere" was excluded from all immigration acts enacted prior to 1965, when the United States began to actively curtail immigration from Mexico, Cen- tral and South America, and Canada. The entrance of the United States into war in 1917 coincided with a surge in nativist and restrictionist fervor. The Ku Klux Klan, which claimed over four million members at its height, was the largest nativist organization of the period. See Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers, Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration and Assimilation (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975); Ronald Takaki, ed., From a Different Shore: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Stephen Steinburg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981); Oscar Handlin, ed., Immigration as a Factor in American History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959); and John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New York: Athenaeum, 1967). 16. "Foreign immigration into this country," Walker wrote, amounts "not to a re-en- forcement of our population, but to a replacement of native by foreign stock. ... What- ever view may be taken of the past, no one surely can be enough of an optimist to con-



template without dread the fast rising flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores." See Francis Amasa Walker, "Immigration and Degradation," Forum 11 (August 1891): 642-43. Walker based his analysis on that of E.A. Ross; both argued that natives were unwilling to bring children into the world to compete with immigrants; as a result native laborers were emasculated in both the factory and the bedroom. 17. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman, 1976), 136-58. 18. E.A. Ross was the nephew of Lester Frank Ward, the prominent sociologist. Gilman met Ross through Ward and maintained contact with both men throughout her life. Ross included Gilman in a chapter of his autobiography entitled, "Celebrities I Have Known"; and Gilman wrote in her autobiography (187) that Ward was "quite the greatest man I have ever known ... his Gynaecocentric Theory, first set forth in a Forum article in 1888, is the greatest single contribution to the world's thought since Evolution." Gilman refers to "Our Better Halves," Forum 6 (November 1888): 266-75. 19. E.A. Ross, "The Causes of Race Superiority," Annals of the American Academy of Politi- cal and Social Science 18 (July 1901): 85, 87, 88. The discourse of racial degeneration, of which "race suicide" is a part, reserves a special place for East Asians. Degeneration is not simply a synonym for biological inferiority but specifically indicates that Chinese and Japanese are from ancient civilizations long past their prime and thus overly evolved or decadent. Gilman follows Ross in viewing Chinese as especially degenerate. As Lanser convincingly argues, the color yellow in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a symbol for Gilman's anxiety about "yellow peril." See Valverde, 14; and Lanser, 425-27. 20. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782; London: Penguin, 1986), Hector St. John de Creivecoeur answers his own query as follows: America is a place where "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men"; an American is a "new man" containing that "strange mixture of blood that you will find in no other country" (69-70). 21. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Is America Too Hospitable?" Forum 70 (October 1923): 1983-89, rpt., Ceplair, 288-94. Quotation is from Ceplair, 289, 290. 22. Ibid., 290. 23. Ibid., 293. Gilman specifies that European "mongrelization" is especially pronounced among peoples from the Levant, and she singles out Poles as one of the least assimilable of all groups. Elsewhere, she focuses on the "mongrel" Irish or invokes Jews as a race eager to mix adversely with other races. 24. Ibid., 291 (my emphasis). Werner Sollors discusses Horace Kallen's and Israel Zang- will's pluralism and outlines the development of the trope of the "melting pot," in Be- yond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 66-101. 25. Gilman, "Is America Too Hospitable?" 291. 26. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Immigration, Importation, and Our Fathers," Forerunner 5 (May 1914): 117-19, all quotations are on 118 (my emphasis). 27. In a prequel to the essay on colonization of new immigrants, Gilman lays out a similar scheme for the colonization of freewomen and freemen at the end of Reconstruction. See "A Suggestion on the Negro Problem," The American Journal of Sociology 14 (July 1908): 78-85. 28. The other fiction that receives enormous critical attention is "The Yellow Wallpa- per." Lanser's work on this story stands as the single exception to the general point made above. 29. Quotation is from Ann J. Lane's introduction to The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (New York: Random House, 1980), xxx. Lane expresses similar views in the introduction to her 1990 biography of Gilman: Gilman's "racist, anti-Semitic, and ethnocentric ideas . . . must reside primarily in the psychological realm, because the racist and nativist views that she held did not fit with the vision she espoused of radical social and political transformation" (Lane, To Herland and Beyond, 255).



30. Mary Jo Deegan and Michael Hill, eds., With Her in Ourland: Sequel to "Herland" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 6. This novel was first serialized in Forerunner (1916). 31. Gilman, Herland, 59. 32. Ibid., 49-61, 57, 54. 33. Ibid., 69. 34. Ibid., 75, 58, 94-95. 35. Herland adheres to established criteria for feminist utopian literature in that it con- trasts the present with an idealized society, sees patriarchy "as a major cause of present social ills," and casts women as "the sole arbiters of their reproductive function" (Sally Miller Gearhart, quoted in Libby Falk Jones, "Gilman, Bradley, Piercy, and the Evolving Rhetoric of Feminist Utopia," in Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, ed. Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990], 116). 36. Laura E. Donaldson, "The Eve of De-Struction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Feminist Re-Creation of Paradise," Women's Studies 16 (1989): 379. 37. Elizabeth Keyser, "Looking Backward: From Herland to Gulliver's Travels," Studies in American Fiction 11 (spring 1983): 44. 38. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 131. 39. See among others, Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln: University of Ne- braska Press, 1989); Dorothy Berkson, "'So We All Became Mothers': Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the New World of Feminist Culture," in Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, 100-15; Val Gough, "Lesbians and Virgins: The New Motherhood in Herland," in Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Syracuse: Syracuse Uuniversity Press, 1995), 195-215; Amanda Graham, "Herland: Definitive Ecofeminist Fiction?" in A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Char- lotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 115-28; Lou-Ann Matossian, "A Woman-Made Language: Charlotte Perkins Gil- man and Herland," Women and Language 10 (spring 1987): 16-20; and Donaldson, 373-87. According to many science fiction scholars, Gilman anticipates feminist sci-fi greats such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Suzy McKee Charnas, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Sally Gearhart, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, and Octavia Butler. See Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: Wom- en's Press, 1988), 53. 40. Gough includes a paragraph (197) noting the racism and classism that "character- ized the kind of unified lesbian identity conceptualized by the largely white, middle- class lesbian feminism of the late 1970s"; she does not reflect on this observation in the context of Gilman's own work. 41. Gough, "Lesbians and Virgins," 196, 208, 197. 42. Ibid., 206. 43. Gilman, Herland, 15, 16-17. 44. The act of anthropologization resonated for turn-of-the-century feminists. As Beder- man demonstrates (33-40), the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition was a battleground for opposing sides debating the relative degree of civilization achieved by women and men. Rather than being situated inside the "civilized" section of the fair entitled the "White City," the Woman's Building was placed across from the exit to the "uncivilized" section of the fair, the "Midway," where native peoples and exotic artifacts were shown. Apparently aware of the struggle that had ensued over the placement of the Woman's Building, Gilman crafts Herland as equal to the "White City" of technology, science, and civilization and has one of the male intruders remark upon entry into Herland that it is "like an Exposition ... too pretty to be true" (Herland, 19). 45. Keyser, 32-34. Christopher Wilson, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Steady Burghers: The Terrain of Herland," Women's Studies 12 (1986): 271, 283.



46. Sandra Gilbert, "Rider Haggard's Heart of Darkness" (124-38); and Susan Gubar, "She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy" (138-58), in Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983). 47. She is an example of the monstrous vision of femininity that Gilbert and Gubar examine in their famous study of the representation of women in Victorian fiction, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagi-nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 48. Gubar, 140. 49. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak analyzes this configuration in Gilbert's and Gubar's work on Jane Eyre, in "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 262-80. My reading is indebted to hers. 50. Gubar, 149. 51. Gilman, Herland, 23. 52. Gilman discusses the suffragists' struggle to make Nevada into a "white" state, a state that on "the impressive map issued by the women suffragists ... show[s] the color of our states in regard to this advance." In the suffragists' color-coded imaginary, black states are those that have resisted the cause and are thus atavistic. This cartography can be interpreted through the lens of feminist imperialism developed above. See Gilman's "Working to Make Black into White," Forerunner 5 (February 1914): 33-34. 53. Wilson, 271. 54. The following are among the works on the racism, imperialism, and colonialism endemic to feminism that inform my argument: Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Mother- hood," History Workshop 5 (spring 1978): 9-65; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1981); Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Anne McClintock, Im- perial Leather: Race and Gender in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1992); and Newman. Amy Kaplan's work on the relationship of "the cult of domesticity" to nationalism and imperialism is especially relevant to any analysis of the contradictory relationships among these terms that is worked out in Herland. See Amy Kaplan, "Manifest Domesticity," American Literature 70 (September 1998): 581-606. 55. Fifteen dissertations on Gilman have been written in the last ten years, nine of these in the last five. There are two new scholarly editions of Women and Economics: Amy Aronson and Michael Kimmel, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Sheryl Meyering, ed. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998). Recent anthologies, critical studies, and casebooks include Jill Rudd and Val Gough, eds., A Very Different Story (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (1999); Sheryl Meyering, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989); Carol Farley Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress toward Utopia with Selected Writings (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Cather- ine Golden, ed., The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper" (New York: Feminist Press, 1992); and Karpinski. Gilman's novels, Mag-Marjorie, Won Over, Benigna Machiavelli, Unpunished, With Her in Ourland, and Moving the Mountain, have all been republished in the last few years. Her diaries, love letters, poetry, and nonfiction have also been collected and anthologized for the first time. See Denise D. Knight, ed., The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Charlottesville: University Press of Vir- ginia, 1998), The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, vols. 1 and 2 (Charlottesville: Univer- sity Press of Virginia, 1994), and The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996); Mary Hill, ed., Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897-1900 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995); and Ceplair. The list of journal articles is equally substantial.



56. Kimmel and Aronson, viii. Here Kimmel and Aronson situate themselves as histori- an Carl Degler's inheritors, as his earlier edition of Women and Economics also sought to present budding feminists with a foremother. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, ed. Carl Degler (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 57. Kimmel and Aronson, lxix. 58. Rudd and Gough, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, xii. 59. Lane, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Rights of Women: Her Legacy for the 1990s," 4, 5, 6. 60. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Fecundate! Discriminate!: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity," in Rudd and Gough, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, 215. 61. Ganobcsik-Williams, 16, 17, 22. 62. The Herland trilogy contains a third novel, Moving the Mountain, serialized in Fore- runner (1911), and reprinted in Minna Doskow, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Novels (Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999). This first installment is a utopian tale that expands on Edward Bellamy's national socialist classic, Looking Backward (1889) by recasting the United States in a feminist mold. As in Looking Back- ward, the narrator, a Rip Van Winkle figure, emerges after thirty years to find himself in an entirely transformed society. Although this new nation is neither parthenogenic nor exclusively female it has finally "bred out" all undesirable individuals and cultural habits through the implementation of an accelerated evolutionary process that is at once biological and sociological. In Gilman's newfound America there is no need for immigration restriction because these plans have been rendered obsolete through other exer- cises in eugenic perfection. As the novel's heroine explains, Americans "have [finally] discovered as many ways of utilizing human waste as [they have found] . . . for the waste products of coal." Those that are reformable are reformed as in the Americaniza- tion colonies that Gilman had earlier proposed. Alleged idiots, diseased degenerates, criminals, and perverts are killed off or subjected to compulsory sterilization, and syphilitic men are similarly prohibited from reproducing. As the novel's refrain reminds readers, American women have finally learned "to make a new kind of people" (Char- lotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Novels, 79, 223). 63. Gilman, With Her in Ourland, 109, 143. 64. This novel's argument is prefigured in "The New Mothers of a New World," which advocates a union of mothers as a check to the advance of "the man-made world." Far from being a plan for a coalition of the exploited women of the globe, however, this is a strategy for white women's reproduction of the globe's citizenry. As Gilman explains on behalf of the New Mothers: We are tired of men's wars. We are tired of men's quarrels. We are tired of men's competition. We are tired of men's crimes and vices and the disease they bring upon us.... The pressure of population shall cease. We will marry only clean men, fit to be fathers.... We will breed a better stock on earth by proper selection-that is a mother's duty! ... We will work together, the women of the race, for a higher human type. .... We will be the New Mothers of a New World. Clearly not all women are included in Gilman's "We"; rather, it is white women who will reproduce a "purified" stock, imperialistically imposing "pure" genealogy on the globe. See Gilman's "The New Mothers of a New World," Forerunner 4 (June 1913): 149. 65. Deegan and Hill, 5, 9, 6, 30, 14, 46. 66. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 88.


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