A study of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian novels which argues that her understanding of the fundamental link between personal relationships - of women as lovers, wives, and mothers - and her broader political aims of transforming society, remains a radical starting point for feminists.

The utopias envisioned by Edward Bellamy and other novelists late in the nineteenth century were generally blueprints of government. As satellites of men, women were expected to share in the general improvement of society. The resurgence of the feminist movement since the late 1960s has produced a very different kind of utopian literature. Frances Bartkowski explores a body of work that is striking and vital because it reflects the hopes, fears, and desires of women who have glimpsed the possibilities of a bright new world freed from stifling patriarchal structures. Feminist Utopias is a comparative study of the utopian fiction of nine women writers in the United States, France, and Canada. Except for Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), the prototype for feminist literary utopias, all of the works were published between 1969 and 1986. Bartkowski discusses Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines, Christine Rochefort's Archaos, ou le jardin étincelant, E. M. Broner's A Weave of Women, Louky Bersianik's The Eugelionne, and two dystopian novels, Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale.

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. It was first published in monthly installments as a serial in 1915 in The Forerunner, a magazine edited and written by Gilman between 1909 and 1916, with its sequel, With Her in Ourland beginning immediately thereafter in the January 1916 issue. The book is often considered to be the middle volume in her utopian trilogy; preceded by Moving the Mountain (1911), and followed by, With Her in Ourland (1916). It was not published in book form until 1979.

She has just given birth to their child. He labels her postpartum depression as »hysteria.« He rents the attic in an old country house. Here, she is to rest alone – forbidden to leave her room. Instead of improving, she starts hallucinating, imagining herself crawling with other women behind the room's yellow wallpaper. And secretly, she records her experiences. The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892] is the short but intense, Gothic horror story, written as a diary, about a woman in an attic – imprisoned in her gender; by the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist novella was long overlooked in American literary history. Nowadays, it is counted among the classics. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935), born in Hartford, Connecticut, was an American feminist theorist, sociologist, novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. Her writings are precursors to many later feminist theories. With her radical life attitude, Perkins Gilman has been an inspiration for many generations of feminists in the USA. Her most famous work is the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892], written when she suffered from postpartum psychosis.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s provocative utopian novel Herland, first published in 1915, tells its story through the observations of three male explorers who discover a land inhabited solely by women; the women reproduce through parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). Initially skeptical, the explorers come to realize that Herland has evolved into an ideal, cooperative, matriarchal society—fertile, peaceful, and clean—by selectively reproducing the women’s best attributes. As the explorers study Herland culture, they also rethink their own. This edition reproduces the text originally published in The Forerunner in 1915, including several passages omitted from other editions. Stories, poetry, and nonfiction writing by Gilman on topics such as birth control, capital punishment, and eugenics provide a rich context for the novel. Materials originally published alongside Herland in 1915, many of which have never before been republished, are also included, as is an excerpt from the sequel, With Her in Ourland.

The focus of this essay collection is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopianism.

THE CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN READER is an anthology of fiction by one of America's most important feminist writers. Probably best known as the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which a woman is driven mad by chauvinist psychiatry, Gilman wrote numerous other short stories and novels reflecting her radical socialist and feminist view of turn-of-the-century America. Collected here by noted Gilman scholar Ann J. Lane are eighteen stories and fragments, including a selection from Herland, Gilman's feminist Utopia. The resulting anthology provides a provocative blueprint to Gilman's intellectual and creative production.

A powerful collection of early feminist stories from the activist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman created a world that could be viewed from the feminist gaze. She focused on how women were not just stay-at-home mothers they were expected to be but also people who had dreams, who were able to travel and work just as men did, and whose goals included a society where women were just as important as men. In the early 1900s this was striking and revolutionary. The stories in this collection are: 'A Coincidence'; 'According To Solomon', 'An Offender', 'A Middle-Sized Artist', 'Martha's Mother', 'Her Housekeeper', 'When I Was A Witch', 'Making a Living', 'A Coincidence, The Cottagette', 'The Boys and the Butter', 'My Astonishing Dodo', and 'A Word In Season'.

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