SOURCE: “Herstory in Hisland, History in Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Reconstruction of Gender and Language,” in Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's Writing, 1850-1930, University Press of Mississippi, 1999, pp. 111-40.

In the following essay, Cutter discusses the feminist meaning of language in Gilman's fiction.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is best know for her semiautobiographical text, “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), but she completed numerous other projects. For example, from 1909 to 1916 she published a magazine called the Forerunner. For each monthly issue, Gilman wrote a short story, a chapter of a serial novel, a chapter of a prose work, and miscellaneous essays, editorials, songs, and poems. In the first volume, she even authored the advertisements. Her humorously risqué endorsement of one product—Moore's Fountain Pen—can be used as a general illustration of the changing concerns of early-twentieth-century women writers. Gilman's advertisement describes a woman who wants to write but...