Two Charlotte Perkins Gilman Essays New to Scholarship

I transcribe below two newly-recovered essays by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.Charlotte Perkins Gilman's friendship with New Mexico novelist Eugene Manlove Rhodes (1869–1934) has long been lost in a biographical blindspot. But the two of them were obviously well-acquainted. The hero of Rhodes’ novel Bransford in Arcadia; or, The Little Eohippus (1914) repeatedly recites from Gilman's poem “Similar Cases; or, The Little Eohippus” (1890). Rhodes wrote the editor Ferris Greenslet in March 1933 that he remembered “a certain New York critic who assured a friend of mine (Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson) sic that it has never read a Western and, please God, it never would.”1 Not surprisingly, then, Gilman asked the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature in August 1924—a letter published in only the second issue of the magazine—why Rhodes had been so neglected.“A Neglected Author,” Saturday Review of Literature, 9 August 1924, 38; rpt. in W. H. Hutchinson, A Bar Cross Man: The Life and Personal Writings of Eugene Manlove Rhodes (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 210–11:Can you tell me why the work of Eugene Manlove Rhodes is not better known? In case you are not as familiar with it as could be wished let me describe:First, as to literature, this man's writings have a variety of charms; in sensitive vivid description; in clear characterization; in an easy, light-running style, warm with humor and brilliant with wit.In place, time, and character he is American of the Americans; mainly of the west when it was west, wild if not woolly, strong, brave, and efficient. His heroes are quiet and ingenious men who astonishingly achieve the impossible in the pleasantest way.His stories are stories, fresh and original, always interesting, and with an atmosphere of practical high principles refreshing to breathe.Beyond all this Mr. Rhodes is himself a reader; his work is continuously pricked and sparkling with allusion and lightly touched quotation, filling the mind with a sense of old friendships close at hand.There is not among all our writing men one who has an equal charm to this, this embroidered lacing which connects the world of today and the work in it with the world behind us at its best and brightest. He is no feminist, his women are just women, of a delightfulness; they have character enough, but are mainly delightful.Occasionally a new story from this hand gives us fresh pleasure, but the books of them, West is West, The Desire of The Moth, Bransford of Rainbow Range, Good Men and True, and the others—where are they? One has to leave orders with the second-hand bookstores and wait, mostly wait, for the people who own these books do not sell them if they can help it. . . .There ought to be a good library edition of the works of Mr. Rhodes, there are still enough Americans left to take pleasure and pride in owning them. I am hoping that you and your new Review will be able to do something about it. Norwich, Conn. C. P. Gilman.“The Socializing of Education,” Maryland Suffrage News, 19 April 1919, 22.Education was first maternal, narrow in method, limited in purpose, as with the similar process among other animals.Then for many ages it was in the hands of a strong, highly-organized priesthood, whose method and purpose were naturally modified to its own support and advantage.This very long period, with all the force of religious belief added to the power of the teacher, has had an effect on the race mind we have by no means outgrown.There was grounded into us not merely the particular doctrine taught but the habit of believing whatever was taught; not only the forced submission to those then over us, but the habit of submitting to whoever was over us.And pouring down the ages, a slow, dark stream of ancient custom, come the diploma, the graduation exercise, the deputing of authority only to those most approved by the former authorities.Social heredity is as real as physiological heredity.By the “laying on of hands” we have long genealogical trees in ancient churches, striving always, by every means known to us, to keep things as they used to be—forever.It cannot be done. Nations, cultures may die, and do; but if they live they have to grow, and to grow means to change.If we had but known this several thousand years ago!Never mind, we know it now. We have learned at last a little of the nature of society and of the conscious active citizenship which means a healthy society.With this in mind we begin to see the real relation of education to the human mind—which is to keep it open.Education is a social process par excellence; it may be properly called the social process.An education people has a similar advantage over one uneducated that Order Mammalia has over lower orders in nature.As mother's milk gives to the young nurtured on it a “margin of safety” during their feeblest years, so does education give safety and strength to society's children. That is, it ought to.It should be a “prepared food,” socially speaking, the most commonly necessary knowledge so offered as to be absorbed by all children with the least effort.It should be further a series of exercises calculated to develop the most valuable faculties, also so arranged as to be a joy in the doing. If desirable exercises are made unpleasant, the subject naturally leaves them off as soon as he can.It should also involve such a carefully prepared environment as shall of itself tend to arouse the faculties and establish normal wishes and demands.The art of teaching should be entrusted only to those naturally gifted and who find their chief pleasure in the work.In the training of such teachers attention should be given not so much to what they know, and still less to what they can recite, as to their skill in teaching.The ability to convey knowledge from one mind to another, with the minimum of effort and the maximum of pleasure, is far more rare than the ability to pass examinations.Yet we need about six times as many teachers as we have now.And they need to be paid about six times as much.This calls for the services of women, not merely young girls teaching till they marry, but real teachers teaching all their lives, and marrying as a matter of course—if they wish to.Women now waste in housework three-fourths of their labor.Organized, professionalized housework, which means high-class and reasonably priced laundries, the hiring of cleaning services by the day or hour, and the delivery of cooked food at the home, will free the labor power of three women out of four.It means also the “Baby Garden,” the provision, at last, of a place for babies over a year old while their mothers are at work.It means that the “school,” instead of being one huge prison-like building, with checker-board classrooms and marching rows of “disciplined” children, shall be from babyhood on a second home.Places of beauty, comfort, rest, play, and a good noon meal.Places pleasanter and more attractive to children than anything now on earth.Places to which the child goes delightfully everyday, not all alike, but varying according to the needs of the children.The school day must be coterminous with the work day.Father, mother, and child go out together; father, mother, and child come back together to a home that is all for rest and companionship, and not a workshop for women.The productive industry of the women freed from housework will furnish wealth to pay for all this, while those still doing it, professionally, will have a short work day and be paid well.Under such conditions we shall have no further cause of complaint among teachers because they are not free and not sufficiently respected. Respect must be commanded, not demanded.The new citizens, whose whole youth has passed in really developing conditions, facing life with strong, dispassionate, active minds, will be able to grasp and settle our social problems.