Volume 27, Number 6 · April 17, 1980
Pioneer
By Millicent Bell
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896
by Mary A. Hill
Temple University Press, 362 pp., $14.95
'We shall hardly outgrow her in long, long lives to come. In time to come they will be saying: 'How She Knew!' ' wrote Zona Gale when Charlotte Perkins Gilman died in 1935. But, in fact, Gilman rapidly began to be forgotten—this redoubtable circuit-rider of radical feminism, indefatigable lecturer and prolific journalist, author of poetry, novels, and half a dozen theoretical works on the condition of women, above all the much-reprinted Women and Economics. This, her first important book, published in 1898, set the tone of all her later messages—that the problem of women was at the very heart of our social structure, the key to mankind's deviance from true humaneness.
Review, 4540 words
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