Turned

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
From Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Novels, Stories & Poems

Interesting Links

“Finding Women in the Archives: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Forerunner” (Lauren Schaffer, New-York Historical Society)

“The Maternal, Feminist Utopias of Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (Michael Robertson, LitHub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Unnatural Mother,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “An Unfinished Story,” O. Henry
• “Miss McEnders,” Kate Chopin
• “How I Went Out to Service,” Louisa May Alcott

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Detail from The Lost Path, 1863, oil on canvas by British artist Frederick Walker (1840–1875). WikiGallery.

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During the first decade of the twentieth century, the “white slavery” panic swept the United States, with lurid tales in the press of rural and immigrant women moving into cities and being pressured or lured into prostitution by unscrupulous men. The uproar led to the adoption in 1910 of the Mann Act, the law prohibiting the transportation across state lines of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The following year, McClure’s Magazine published in installments Jane Addams’s new book, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, a treatise on prostitution and trafficking. Among other measures, Addams urged the adoption of a safety net, including higher starting wages and better housing, that would allow the many young women migrating to the cities to survive without deprivation.

The fourth chapter of the work, which appeared in the February issue, includes a passage describing the plight of numerous household servants:

A surprising number of suicides occur among girls who have been in domestic service, when they discover that they have been betrayed by their lovers. Perhaps nothing is more astonishing than the attitude of the mistress when the situation of such a forlorn girl is discovered, and it would be interesting to know how far this attitude has influenced these girls either to suicide or to their reckless choice of a disreputable life, which statistics show so many of their number have elected. The mistress almost invariably promptly dismisses such a girl, assuring her that she is disgraced forever and too polluted to remain for another hour in a good home. . . . Such a woman seldom follows the ruined girl through the dreary weeks after her dismissal; her difficulty in finding any sort of work, the ostracism of her former friends added to her own self-accusation, the poverty and loneliness, the final ten days in the hospital, and the great temptation which comes after that, to give away her child.

Literary scholars Janet Beer and Katherine Joslin have suggested that many of Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s ideas were “either shared or inspired by the work of Jane Addams; there are numerous points at which Addams raises the social problem and then, through enactment of the problem in her fiction, Gilman offers a solution.” As it happens, the previous September—just weeks before before Addams’s treatise was beginning its run in McClure’s—Gilman published a short story, “Turned,” that could well have taken its premise from the above passage. The major difference between the two works is the way Gilman’s story takes an unexpected “turn” in a new direction, toward a new “solution.”

Because only a handful of letters from their decades of friendship survives, however, we have no way of knowing if Addams and Gilman ever discussed the matter in the months before they wrote their respective works. The two women met in 1894, and Gilman stayed with Addams in Hull House for several months in 1896; subsequently they ran into each other at conventions and lectures. In addition, both women wrote several pieces about the challenges facing servants and the households that employ them. Gilman published “A New Basis for the Servant Question” in 1894 and Addams published “The Servant Problem” in 1903. The topic is discussed in their various books, and the London Daily News even interviewed Gilman on “the servant difficulty” in 1904. In this instance, then, each writer might well have come to this topic at the same time on her own, spurred by the headlines in the newspapers around the passage of the Mann Act.

“Turned” was a front-page story in The Forerunner, the magazine that Gilman singlehandedly wrote, edited and published for seven years. Although she is better known for her earlier gothic stories “The Yellow Wall Paper” and “The Giant Wistaria,” both written in the 1890s, Gilman’s writing two decades later was more influenced by the novels and stories of the literary realists, the works of Charles Darwin and American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, and the utopian visions of the likes of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward. As she proclaimed in the first issue of her new magazine, her writings were intended “to stimulate thought; to arouse hope, courage, and impatience; to offer practical suggestions and solutions, to voice the strong assurance of better living. . . . It is a magazine for humanity, and humanity is social. It holds that Socialism, the economic theory, is part of our gradual socialization, and that the duty of conscious humanity is to promote Socialization.” As biographer Cynthia J. Davis notes, however, Gilman distrusted Marxism. When she attended the International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress in England in 1896, Gilman declined to sign the membership card because of the Marxist views printed on it, and she acknowledged that others regarded her as “merely a kid-glove Socialist.”

Her literary evolution also stopped short of following the path taken by such naturalist writers as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London. “Gilman rejected the doctrine of determinism embraced by canonical literary naturalists,” writes Gary Scharnhorst in his study of her writing career. “Her didactic purpose led Gilman to adopt a fortunate literary strategy, a type of reform naturalism, which enabled her to transcend the contradiction of design and purpose inherent in conventional naturalism.” She disparaged much of the work by the naturalists as the “Jack Kipling school” and “Masculine Literature.”

“Her legacy is a complicated one,” reflects Lauren Schaffer at the New-York Historical Society, “filled with an unconquerable struggle to correct the balance between men and women in the world within her lifetime, yet deeply influenced by racist beliefs, particularly in her later years. . . . Many of her ideas about evolution and social motherhood stemmed from her xenophobia and racism, which were prevalent in her private writings and became more obvious as she aged.” Her prejudices become more noticeable in later issues of The Forerunner. Yet her stories and early essays continue to intrigue scholars and readers: While her male contemporaries at the turn of the last century used their fiction to extol or lament the world as it was, she too, in her own way, portrayed the existing social order—and then she imagined how it could change for the better.

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