earticle

영어

This paper examines the significance of domestic labor in defining woman’s status and the possibility of reorganizing domestic labor into a specialized and professionalized form of labor as a means to free women from domestic obligations and to elevate woman’s status portrayed in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s What Diantha Did (1910). Gilman presents a success story in which Diantha Bell starts with working as a domestic and turns out to be a successful business woman by professionalizing domestic labor into several divisions. Earlier, in Woman and Economics(1898), Gilman analyzed the economic relationship between men and women, and asserted that the economic dependence of women on men was the key to understanding the subordination of women. Challenging the ideas of Aunt Catherine Beecher outright, Gilman argued that the family and the home, defined and idealized as an economic unit of the society for long, were in effect the locus of women’s oppression. Her radical thoughts show an affinity with those of materialist feminism which insists on examining the material conditions under which social arrangements of gender hierarchy develop, and those of Charles Fourier whose utopianism envisioned an equal relationship between men and women as a cornerstone of his socialist utopian society. Gilman’s feminist utopian ideas are successfully materialized in Diantha's story, prefiguring the later publication of Herland (1915). However, Gilman’s vision is faulted in several ways. Diantha’s success does not wholly overcome social restrictions imposed on woman’s role in the family. Gilman does not give us a total denial of domestic labor as woman’s work. Also, Gilman’s vision does not take the factors of race and class into full account. None the less, Gilman criticizes formidable cultural prescriptions of domesticity and domestic labor, giving us a thought-provoking articulation of the need for radical changes.