SOURCE: “Consider Her Ways: The Cultural Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Pragmatopian Stories, 1908-1913,” in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, edited by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten, Syracuse University Press, 1994, pp. 126-36.

In the following essay, Kessler examines the ways several of Gilman's lesser-known short stories contribute to her overall canon of literature designed to effect social change.

The utopian fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman takes on as its “cultural work” the demonstration that women are not confined to one traditional mode of being—wife/motherhood—but can fill as varied social roles as can male counterparts.¹ Jane Tompkins in her introduction to Sensational Designs (1985) suggests that we can speak of the “cultural work” of texts as an “attempt to redefine the social order” (xi). Further, Tompkins argues that we should study novels and stories “because they offer powerful examples of the...