Spinster (40 page)

In September 1898 Charlotte returned to New York from a lecture tour in England with only one dollar in her secret pocket—nothing more.

At this point, thirty-eight years old, she'd been living on her own for a decade, and she was in the middle of a five-year period of such intense travel that she didn't even have a permanent residence. She took great pride in her nomadic status, believing it made her “better able to judge dispassionately and to take a more long-range view of human affairs than is natural to more stationary people.” Whenever she had to list her address on a form or in a visitors' book she wrote,
At Large
. In an essay, she declared “A Woman-at-Large” to be a new category of occupation “most essential to the workings of advanced civilization”—yet one that received no payment or recognition.

Earlier that year she'd published
Women and Economics
, to overwhelming acclaim. It was translated into seven languages, compared to John Stuart Mill's
The Subjection of Women
. Drawing on sociology and history, the book argues that women's secondary status, and economic dependence on men, are culturally enforced, not—as prevailing wisdom went—the result of biological inferiority.

Motherhood, she wrote, is “the common duty and the common glory of womanhood,” but confining women to this role alone stunts women's creative and personal growth; they need professional lives, as well. Shared kitchens in city apartment buildings would help women balance family and work, and provide social support for those who chose to stay at home. Eventually these
changes would result in “better motherhood and fatherhood, better babyhood and childhood, better food, better homes, better society.”

By now she'd fallen in love again, this time with her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman. For two more years she continued to live and travel alone, until marrying and setting up house with him in 1900. Here was a woman with the rare capacity to be so true to her own compass that she could break the rules she made for herself without compromising her ideals.

The twelve years Charlotte spent on her own between marriages pushed her to realize her own intellectual and creative potential. It was by forgoing the demands made on a wife and mother that she was able to cultivate herself—and, once she was ready, fall in love again, this time prepared to rise to the demands of coupledom. (And she never stopped being a mother; though she and her second husband never had children, her daughter from her first marriage often lived with them, and the two women remained close.)

In 1904 she explained her changing attitude toward marriage in an essay called “The Refusal to Marry.” When she was young, she writes, she'd idealized the women who, “fully convinced of the need for economic independence, trained in specialized labor and loving it, and keenly aware of the difficulties of married life, both mentionable and unmentionable, have cut the knot by simply refusing to marry.” Now, happily married, she's decided that duty to the world actually necessitates “a fully developed, normal personal life”—i.e., sexual intimacy.

Of the many differences between her era and our own, one is particularly crucial: sex. Charlotte came of age at a time when it was believed women didn't like to have sex, and even if they did, the only place to do it was within a marriage. For her to experience her own definition of “a fully developed, normal personal life”—that is, a loving, sexual relationship with a man, one conducted
openly, recognized by her peers and society—she really did have to get married.

Today, of course, women don't need to be married to have sex, or to buy a house, or to pass down an inheritance. Marriage is a constantly evolving idea and practice that will, likely, continue to change. But in the meantime, it remains our culture's definition of the highest form of interpersonal commitment, and because of that we'll keep on doing it for as long as we fall in love.

It's important to remember, however, that the widespread practice of marrying for love—not responsibility to family and community—is only about two hundred years old. Women have been pursuing professional careers for half that time, but in significant numbers only over the past forty years. In many ways, the decision of whether and whom and when to marry is more complex than ever. Yet we make our personal calculations, such as they are, according to ideas about what makes a good marriage so outdated that even Charlotte was questioning them a century ago.

Charlotte's second marriage was very happy. George supported her in everything she did, which included not only over a dozen more books but also a monthly journal,
The Forerunner
, which she maintained from 1909 to 1916, writing the entirety of nearly every issue (enough to fill twenty-eight long books, she once claimed).

It was here that she published perhaps my favorite of her works, her satirical utopian novel
Herland
, exactly one hundred years ago, in 1915.

The story goes like this: Long ago and far away, a country lost all its men to war and natural disaster—when, on the brink of extinction, a miracle occurred. One of the few remaining women bore a daughter, through parthenogenesis (virgin birth),
then four more. Each of her five daughters in turn bore five daughters. And so on.

Two thousand years later, when three American men on a scientific expedition—Terry, a male-chauvinist playboy; Jeff, a sentimental doctor; the feminist-minded narrator, Vandyck, a sociologist—stumble across this fabled land, roughly the size of Holland, it has a population of three million women.

Much wisecracking ensues. The book's comedy turns on the trio's assumptions about women being upended, and the jokes hold up, somewhat sadly; one would hope that, a century on, gender stereotypes would sound a little more old-fashioned. For instance, Terry believes there are two kinds of women, “Desirable and Undesirable…. The last [sic] was a large class, but negligible—he had never thought about them at all.”

Unfortunately for him, in Herland the women couldn't care less what he thinks. Athletic, strong, fearless, rational, unadorned, they are everything he believes a woman isn't. They keep their hair short and wear a simple, loose uniform of several light tunics, one of them covered in pockets (not a feature of women's clothing in the early 1900s), layered over a modified union suit; when it's time for her daily exercise, a woman simply peels off the tunics.

The country is beautiful and the society itself a complex yet harmonious sisterhood: communal, peaceful, and free of filth, criminals, kings, and aristocrats, even bad ideas. “When we get a thing like that into our minds, it's like—oh, like red pepper in your eyes,” one woman explains. Education is the highest art, and motherhood sacred. Most laws are revised every twenty years. The food is simple and healthful (no red meat) and the means of production completely self-sustaining. All the trees bear edible fruit.

The architecture features high ceilings and lofty windows, and though Herland is a cooperative nation, its citizens have a strong sense of personal privacy, and “not the faintest idea of that ‘
solitude a deux
' we are so fond of,” Vandyck reports. Instead, they
have what he calls the “two rooms and a bath” theory down pat; every child has her own bedroom, “and one of the marks of coming of age was the addition of an outer room in which to receive friends…. It seemed to be recognized that we should breathe easier if able to free our minds in real seclusion.” The houses are kitchen-less, naturally.

Most fascinating to me, however, is how, after several centuries of bearing five children apiece, the women resolved the threat of overpopulation. Though they prioritized mothering over all activities, they decided that not everyone had to give birth. By learning to isolate the onset of pregnancy—“a period of utter exaltation—the whole being uplifted and filled with a concentrated desire for that child”—those who wanted to could defer it by engaging in physical and mental activity, and “solace her longing” by caring for existing babies. As one woman, Somel, tells Vandyck, “We soon grew to see that mother-love has more than one channel of expression.”

Vandyck is appalled. “We have much that is bitter and hard in our life at home…but this seems to me piteous beyond words—a whole nation of starving mothers!”

Somel smiles and says, “We each go without a certain range of personal joy, but remember—we each have a million children to love and serve—
our
children.”

She is far wiser than we who've forgotten that our country's celebrated “unalienable rights” are life, liberty, and the
pursuit
of happiness. Every life, even in America, goes without a certain range of personal joy of some variety or another.