Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Judith A. Allen

Critical Essay by Judith A. Allen

SOURCE: “Reconfiguring Vice: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Prostitution, and Frontier Sexual Contracts,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, University of Iowa Press, 1999, pp. 173-99.

In the following essay, Allen explores Gilman's response to the widespread prostitution in her time.

Gilman abhorred prostitution:

Man … has insisted on maintaining another class of women, … subservient to his desires; a barren, mischievous unnatural relation, wholly aside from parental purposes, and absolutely injurious to society. … Many, under the old mistaken notion of what used to be called “the social necessity” of prostitution, will protest the idea of its extinction. … An intelligent and powerful womanhood will put an end to this indulgence of one sex at the expense of the other and to the injury of both. … One major cause of the decay of nations is “the social evil”—a thing wholly due to androcentric culture.

(Man-Made World, 246-259)

Like many feminists...
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