Famous for her short fiction—most notably “The Yellow Wallpaper”—Charlotte Perkins Gilman also produced a vast body of nonfiction in tandem with her work as a Progressive-era feminist reformer. Rooted in groundbreaking research on Gilman’s extensive correspondence, publications, and speeches, this keenly argued intellectual biography reconstructs her controversial output and the heady context in which she produced it.

            Judith Allen provides the first comprehensive assessment of Gilman’s complicated feminism by exploring the renowned writer’s theories of sexuality and evolutionary analyses of androcentric—or male-dominated—culture. These ideas, Allen shows, informed Gilman’s many contributions to the suffrage movement, the fight to abolish regulated prostitution, and efforts to legalize birth control. Restoring a previously overlooked public intellectual to her preeminent place in Progressive-era politics and the history of feminism at home and abroad, Allen’s landmark study provides the fullest account available of Gilman’s consequential life and profoundly influential work.

“Judith Allen has written the biography that Charlotte Perkins Gilman has long deserved. The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman restores its subject to her rightful place in the pantheon of Progressive reformers. Allen is a superb researcher and a shrewd judge of evidence and character. By setting Gilman in her time and place, Allen allows us to go beyond present-day exposure of the weaknesses that Gilman shared with many of her contemporaries to assess the strengths that she brought to her analysis of the sex and gender system. This fine work enables us to appreciate the reach of Gilman’s ambition, the power of her determination, and the full force of her achievement.”