SOURCE: Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “‘Fecundate! Discriminate!’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Theologizing of Maternity.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, pp. 200-16. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Gilbert and Gubar discuss “The Yellow Wallpaper” in terms of feminist discourse on issues of maternity and childrearing.

“Not all the long, loud struggle for ‘women's rights,’ not the varied voices of the ‘feminist movement,’ and, most particularly, not the behavior of ‘emancipated women,’ have given us any clear idea of the power and purpose of the mother sex.” So, somewhat surprisingly, mused Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the theological treatise His Religion and Hers (1923) that she produced late in her career as one of her generation's foremost speakers for just the feminist movement from which she appeared to be distancing herself here. Why would an emancipated...