Gilman also adapted her ideas for the suburbs: a group of kitchenless single family houses all connected by walkways to a shared “eating house” that was kind of like a community center and collective meeting space. The feminist apartment hotel was a new type of building for urban settings, specifically oriented around the needs of working women. (Boarding houses were very common at the time, but stigmatized and bore tremendous amounts of criticism for their poor conditions.) In 1903, Architectural Record called apartment hotels “the most dangerous enemy American domesticity has yet had to encounter.” The idea rankled the design establishment, which lambasted Gilman’s ideas as socially irresponsible and immoral. Composed of kitchenless private units, the apartment hotels had shared, centralized cooking and dining facilities, roof gardens, and professional nurses and teachers taking care of the residents’ children in a nursery or kindergarten within the building. To enable her new world order, Gilman proposed the “feminist apartment hotel,” a type of semi-communal boarding house attuned to the needs of working mothers. Only then could the human race advance, as historian Dolores Hayden writes in The Grand Domestic Revolution, the definitive book on Gilman’s attempts to reshape architecture for her social purposes. Gilman advocated for professionalizing domestic work so women were free to leave their homes, to earn their own money, and to fully participate in society. © 2017 Musaicum Books (Ebook): 9788027232130Gilman believed that society confined women to the home and to childcare, hindering their strength and intelligence and actually holding back human evolution. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. It is considered by many to be her single greatest work, and as with much of Gilman's writing, the book touched a few dominant themes: the transformation of marriage, the family, and the home, with her central argument: 'the economic independence and specialization of women as essential to the improvement of marriage, motherhood, domestic industry, and racial improvement.Ĭharlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. 'Women and Economics' subtitled as 'A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution' is a book written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published in 1898.

Charlotte gilman women and economics