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Herland and Zond: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Social Efficiency Educators

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Progressivism's Aesthetic Education

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Abstract

The social efficiency movement in education elevates technocracy over democracy, treating the individual as a cog in the social machine—and that is just what Charlotte Perkins Gilman likes about it. Scarred by too much lonely introspection and self-reliance in her youth, she develops a complex educational philosophy, building off of social efficiency premises, that would help people become more themselves by thinking about themselves, as individuals, less. In addition to classics like “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and Herland, this chapter includes readings of lesser-known Gilman texts such as the autobiographical bildungsroman Benigna Machiavelli and the psychological treatise Our Brains and What Ails Them. Educational theorists discussed include David Snedden and Franklin Bobbitt.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Katherine Fusco, “Systems, Not Men: Producing People in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland,” Studies in the Novel 41, no. 4 (2009): 423, 420, 425, 430.

  2. 2.

    Kristin Carter-Sanborn, “Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti-Violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Arizona Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2000): 19, 20; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

  3. 3.

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Social Ethics: Sociology and the Future of Society, ed. Michael R. Hill and Mary Jo Deegan (Westport, CT: Praeger, [1914] 2004).

  4. 4.

    Cynthia J. Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), xvi; Charlotte Perkins Gilman , Herland, The Yellow Wall-paper, and Selected Writings, ed. Denise D. Knight (New York: Penguin, 1999), 182; Joanne B. Karpinski, ed., Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: G.K. Hall, 1992), 58, 45.

  5. 5.

    Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10.

  6. 6.

    See Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Knopf, 1961), 96ff.

  7. 7.

    Edward A. Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, [1901] 2002), 3–5, 244, 420.

  8. 8.

    Walter Drost, David Snedden and Education for Social Efficiency (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1967), 47; Samuel T. Dutton, Social Phases of Education in the School and the Home (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 3, 8, 12.

  9. 9.

    John Franklin Bobbitt, The Curriculum (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 61–62, 79.

  10. 10.

    Drost , David Snedden, 4, 41, 43; David F. Labaree, “How Dewey lost: The Victory of David Snedden and Social Efficiency in the Reform of American Education,” in Daniel Tröhler, Thomas Schlag, and Fritz Osterwalder, eds., Pragmatism and Modernities (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010), 167.

  11. 11.

    Drost , David Snedden, 41.

  12. 12.

    David Snedden, “The Socially Efficient Community,” Journal of Educational Sociology 2, no. 8 (1929), 464; David Snedden, “What of Liberal Education?,” The Atlantic 190 (1912), 114.

  13. 13.

    Snedden , “Liberal Education,” 116.

  14. 14.

    Bobbitt , The Curriculum, 42; Drost , David Snedden, 168–169.

  15. 15.

    Bobbitt , The Curriculum, 142–143.

  16. 16.

    Gilman , Social Ethics, 94; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Herland Trilogy: Moving the Mountain, Herland, with Her in Ourland. ([S.l.]: Wilder Publications, Limi, [1911, 1915, 1916] 2011), 55.

  17. 17.

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, [1935] 2013), 38–42.

  18. 18.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 98.

  19. 19.

    Gilman , Social Ethics, 29, 32.

  20. 20.

    Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 56.

  21. 21.

    Like Thorndike and the social efficiency educators, Gilman rejects the view of the mind as composed of a group of faculties, within each of which “transfer of training” is possible. While they posit no faculties, however, she posits one superfaculty that governs the entire mind, and holds that transfer of training is possible across all mental activities whatsoever.

  22. 22.

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Concerning Children (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1900), 47–48, 54.

  23. 23.

    Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, xvi.

  24. 24.

    Denise Knight, ed., The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 231.

  25. 25.

    Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 178.

  26. 26.

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Our Brains and What Ails Them,” in Forerunner 3 (1912), 25.

  27. 27.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 82.

  28. 28.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 147; Gilman, Social Ethics, 86.

  29. 29.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 172.

  30. 30.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 195; Gilman, Concerning Children, 17.

  31. 31.

    “Our Brains,” 276.

  32. 32.

    Gilman, Concerning Children, 145.

  33. 33.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 44, 52.

  34. 34.

    Gilman, Concerning Children, 144.

  35. 35.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 157.

  36. 36.

    Snedden , “Socially Efficient Community,” 464, 465, 468.

  37. 37.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 199, 133, 215.

  38. 38.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 44, 52; Gilman, Social Ethics, 114.

  39. 39.

    For the social efficiency educators’ embrace of kindergarten methods, see David Snedden, “The New Basis of Method,” in Problems of Educational Readjustment (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913).

  40. 40.

    Gilman, Living, 98.

  41. 41.

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, [1898] 1998), 102; Karpinski , Critical Essays, 59.

  42. 42.

    Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 94–95, 254.

  43. 43.

    Gilman, “Our Brains,” 330, 333.

  44. 44.

    Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 53; Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 12, x; Marianne Hirsch, Elizabeth Abel, and Elizabeth Langland, eds., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983); Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 133.

  45. 45.

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Benigna Machiavelli (Santa Barbara, CA: Bandanna Books, [1914] 1993), 47, 57, 59, 167.

  46. 46.

    Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism , Colonialism , and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 154; Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 137.

  47. 47.

    Gilman, Benigna Machiavelli, 41, 59.

  48. 48.

    Gilman, Social Ethics, 123; Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 98, 200.

  49. 49.

    Gilman, Benigna Machiavelli, 153, 162–163.

  50. 50.

    Gilman, Women and Economics, 4, 37; Gilman, Social Ethics, 58; Gilman, “Our Brains,” 217.

  51. 51.

    Gilman, Women and Economics, 72.

  52. 52.

    Gilman’s biologized notion of class bleeds into her reprehensible racial ideas. “In the South,” she writes, “it was common to set a little black child to take care of an older white one: the pickaninny matures much more rapidly.”

  53. 53.

    Gilman, Concerning Children, 277, 293–294.

  54. 54.

    Ross , Social Control, 256–264.

  55. 55.

    Bobbitt , The Curriculum, 230–239.

  56. 56.

    Snedden , David, Problems of Educational Readjustment. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 184.

  57. 57.

    Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, A Report of the National Education Association’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (Washington, DC: National Education Association, 1918).

  58. 58.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 201.

  59. 59.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 340.

  60. 60.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 340; Gilman, “Our Brains,” 49–51, 138.

  61. 61.

    In fact, the lens-grinding imagery of “The Artist ” also figures, in Our Brains and What Ails Them, for specialization and the service ethos: “If, for instance, a man’s service to the world is grinding lenses, an operation in itself not developing to the brain, he should on the one hand have an extended culture, and on the other he should be recognized, not as one grinding lenses for a living, but as one by whose aid we study the stars.”

  62. 62.

    Gilman, “Our Brains,” 134.

  63. 63.

    Gilman, “Our Brains,” 137–138.

  64. 64.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 201, 84.

  65. 65.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 84, 5.

  66. 66.

    Jane Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotions in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 120, 145.

  67. 67.

    Knight, ed., Abridged Diaries, 234.

  68. 68.

    Gilman, “Our Brains,” 134.

  69. 69.

    Gilman, Herland Trilogy, 302, 92, 91.

  70. 70.

    Gilman, Selected Writings, 198.

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    Jesse Raber

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Raber, J. (2018). Herland and Zond: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Social Efficiency Educators. In: Progressivism's Aesthetic Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90044-5_4

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