The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15.2 (2001) 74-85

Can a "Man-Hating" Feminist Also Be a Pragmatist?:
On Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlene Haddock Seigfried
Purdue University </>

In 1915 Jessie Taft, in what was perhaps the first philosophy dissertation in the United States written on the women's movement, compared Charlotte Perkins Gilman unfavorably to a prominent Swedish feminist (see Seigfried 1993b). "Ellen Key," she said (Taft 1915, 21), "with a broad philosophic attitude, a lack of dogmatism and sex-antagonism which gives her a decided advantage over the more hostile Mrs. Gilman, insists on the final worth and importance of sex in its highly developed forms and on the necessity of maintaining sex distinction." Taft was a student in the philosophy department founded by John Dewey at the University of Chicago, but he had already left it for Columbia University before Taft's arrival. ¹ She wrote her dissertation under the direction of the pragmatists George Herbert Mead and James H. Tufts. In an exchange of letters with Scudder Klyce, Dewey (1920) also disparaged Gilman by remarking on Klyce's "quite natural disgust with part of Mrs. Gilman's work." But since both Taft and Dewey agreed to the basic feminist claim that women were systematically discriminated against and that these injustices should be effectively overcome, and they publicly supported the efforts of contemporary feminists to do so, their sense that Gilman went too far in her analyses of the so-called "woman problem" is worth exploring further.

In this essay I will examine both the objections to and agreements with Gilman's theories by Taft and Dewey in order to better understand the theoretical limits and contributions of earlier versions of pragmatist feminism and to highlight Gilman's role as a catalyst in their formulations of feminist issues. In developing the philosophical issues framing [End Page 74] these earlier debates, I also hope to undermine the perception sometimes voiced that feminists in the United States--in contrast to their European counterparts--somehow just muddled along in their efforts to deal with sexual discrimination and were insufficiently aware of the theoretical issues involved. Most important, rediscovering and developing Gilman's relation to pragmatist philosophy is an essential step in recapturing a concrete link with a tradition of women theorists that has been invisible for too long. Awakening from such culturally induced amnesia can only enhance recent efforts to reinvent a relevant version of pragmatist feminism (Seigfried 1993a, 1996; Sullivan 2001).

Gilman's theories come into sharper focus by seeing how they compare with pragmatism, a philosophical position that she did not directly study, but of which she was aware. She not only interacted with prominent pragmatists, in and out of philosophy departments, but she also influenced them. Her position on the fringes of academic life no doubt contributed to the originality of her radical questioning of received opinion about women and to her stubbornness in pursuing her insights against repeated opposition. Instead of disqualifying her from serious consideration as a thinker, her courageous public engagements helped make her a person to be reckoned with by the growing numbers of women who were just beginning to attend college in any significant numbers. Her unintended marginality created the conditions that allowed her to develop her feminist theories without having to compromise with the dominant, and conservative, academic forces, just as Jane Addams's deliberate refusal to let the Hull House Settlement be subsumed under the bureaucracy of the University of Chicago preserved its independence. The downside of Gilman's lack of access to higher education, either as a student or as a colleague, was that her theoretical contributions effectively remained outside the mainstream of philosophical thought, despite her acknowledged position as the leading theorist of the first wave of feminism (Spender 1983, 516; Donovan 1985, 42, 57). Not only did her own work not benefit from the give-and-take of discussions at professional meetings and journals, but academic philosophers engaged only in limited responses to what she said or supposedly believed, without...