Charlotte Perkins Gilman speaks on motherhood at Geneva Political Equality Club. 1-Dec-02, 1902. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/rbcmiller001662/.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a frequently taught text in introductory literature and American literature courses. This speech is given ten years after the publication of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and could be taught in conjunction with that text. Firstly, the speech makes many of the ideas of “The Yellow Wallpaper” explicit. It challenges the idea that a mother’s domain should be restricted to the household. What is most interesting about the speech, though, is how Gilman makes that particular argument: She argues that mothers should be “social mothers” and that it is a mother’s “duty to her children” that should motivate her to “take an interest in the things of the world.” This speech also includes Gilman’s thoughts on the importance of childhood—namely, that it is the mother’s duty to take care of her children by ensuring a “prolonged” childhood. Her use of eugenicist rhetoric (“racial suicide”) in making this argument highlights her investment in white womanhood and white children, which is important for readers of “The Yellow Wallpaper” to recognize and bring to their analysis of the text.
On December 1, 1902, Charlotte Perkins Gilman delivered a lecture on “The Mother’s World” to the Geneva Political Equality club. This source consists of three separate newspaper clippings centered on the event: “Noted Woman Lecturer,” “The World of the Mother,” & “The Mother’s World.” The first source appears from before Gilman’s speech, and the second and the third clippings recount Gilman’s speech, emphasizing different aspects of it. For example, the third clipping gives a lot of space to club president Anne F. Miller’s introduction of Gilman, and much less space to Gilman’s speech itself. Gilman’s speech seems to have focused on mothers’ responsibility to be “social mothers” who engage with the wider world in order to “better the conditions in which their child must live.” The speech also includes Gilman’s thoughts about childhood, education—the “mother that the state provides”—and suffrage.
Teachers should provide students with a background in nineteenth century ideas about gender, namely the Cult of True Womanhood/Cult of Domesticity and the concept of the New Woman. It would be helpful, too, to provide students with background information about “the rest cure” (and its counterpart for men, “the West cure”). For example, include information about how neurasthenia—the illness that Gilman (as well as Teddy Roosevelt) was diagnosed with—was an illness of privilege that signified white people’s intellectual superiority to Black people and immigrants. Students should know that the Cult of Domesticity was directed toward white, middle-upper class American women. It dictated separate “spheres” for men and women, telling women that the domestic space of the home was theirs to regulate and manage. This ideology also asked women to conform to gendered ideals of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. These ideas—that a woman’s highest calling was to be a devoted wife and mother, and that the welfare of society depended upon women and men serving in different spheres—continued into the twentieth century. Provide students with a brief background on Charlotte Perkins Gilman before reading this text.
- What responsibility do mothers have, according to Gilman? How does that relate to how you think about motherhood?
- What parts of Gilman’s speech do these different accounts emphasize? What stands out to you? Why?
- Ideologies like the Cult of Domesticity restricted women to the private sphere of the home and taught that women should embrace their roles as wives and mothers. What aspects of this ideology does Gilman challenge? What aspects of this ideology does she not challenge?
- Gilman links protecting and prolonging childhood to “modern civilization.” What anxieties motivate this concern?
Common Core State Standards
RI.9-10.1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
- Students will cite strong and thorough textual evidence in order to analyze Gilman’s beliefs about motherhood. For example, students could determine that Gilman challenges the restriction of women to the domestic space by encouraging women to be “social mothers.”
RI.9-10.4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language of a court opinion differs from that of a newspaper).
- Gilman uses many particular phrases that students can analyze—“social mothers,” education as the “mother that the state provides,” “purify civic conditions.” Students can determine how these phrases are used by Gilman to produce meaning.
RI.11-12.1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.
- Students will cite strong and thorough textual evidence in order to analyze Gilman’s beliefs about motherhood. For example, students could determine that Gilman challenges the restriction of women to the domestic space by encouraging women to be “social mothers.” Because this text includes both summary and direct report of Gilman’s speech, students can also determine what is still uncertain about Gilman’s speech, and use that to produce questions for further inquiry.
RI.11-12.1: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term or terms over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10).
- Gilman uses many phrases in particular that students can analyze—“social mothers,” education as the “mother that the state provides,” “purify civic conditions.” Students can determine how these phrases are used by Gilman to produce meaning. In particular, students can analyze how Gilman uses and refines the term “motherhood” and/or “childhood” over the course of the text.
- Teach this alongside Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
- Possible sources for lesson plans include ReadWriteThink’s lesson on “Professional Writing in Action!” that uses “The Yellow Wallpaper,” as well as NEH Edsitement’s lesson plan on Writing Women & “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The National Library of Medicine has a lesson plan on the short story and “the rest cure.”
- Introducing students first to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” focusing on how the short story serves as criticism for women’s strict confinement to the home as well as the diagnosis, application, and treatment of conditions like “neurasthenia.” The National Humanities Center’s resources on teaching the Cult of Domesticity include some excellent excerpts—in particular, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ask students to consider how Jacobs recalls and challenges the language of the Cult of Domesticity. Then, focus on Gilman’s 1902 speech, and ask students to discuss how Gilman’s discussion of motherhood changes their analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
- Gilman uses eugenicist language (“racial suicide”) as she encourages white middle- and upper-class mothers to protect their children. Gilman’s concern for motherhood is restricted to white women and white children. This may be a potential challenge for parents and guardians who want to prohibit any discussion of structural racism in their children’s classrooms.
Links to resources for approaching those topics
- FacingHistory has a link to how to discuss the eugenics movement and its legacy in the classroom.
- Like the Perkins newspaper clipping, this LOC source from New York (three clippings in length) outlines the same sentiments about the role of women in society at a time when women were underrepresented and undervalued.
- An announcement about an Equality Club in 1902 was most assuredly ahead of its time socially and politically. This card also references suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a man will give her a tribute, which shows early support by some men for the Suffrage Movement.
- The NHC has a great teaching resource about the Cult of Domesticity (with excerpts from other primary documents to teach alongside this source).
- The Paris Review, “The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”
- Roosevelt’s 1905 speech to the Mothers’ Congress, like Gilman’s speech, encourages middle- and upper-class white women to understand their work as wives and mothers as instrumental in preserving the nation (for Roosevelt and Gilman, an implicitly white nation). This is more of a complementary source, but the excerpt from Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl would also be excellent to teach in place of or alongside this text, because of Jacobs’s demonstration of how the ideals of the Cult of Domesticity are inaccessible to enslaved women.