SOURCE: “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Shadow of Racism,” in American Literary Realism, Vol. 32, No. 2 winter 2000, pp. 159-69.

In the following essay, Knight traces instances of Gilman's racist and nativist opinions in her writing.

During the summer of 1932, Charlotte Perkins Gilman took part in a pageant in Hartford, Connecticut, in which she played the role of her great aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe. “[I was] delighted to do it,” she wrote to daughter Katharine. “It was dead easy for me. I just arranged my hair with a chignon … [wore a] loose bandeaux down over my ears, and ‘acted natural.’”¹ The pageant director was duly impressed; in a thank you note to Gilman, she remarked: “I cannot get over the feeling that I have presented a pageant in which Mrs. Stowe has taken a part. She has really been here in our midst and it seems almost as though we...