Vital Issues - by Gary Scharnhorst

Book Synopsis

Vital Issues presents an annotated scholarly edition of the weekly columns Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the most prominent American feminist intellectual during the early twentieth century, contributed in 1904 to the Boston Woman's Journal, the leading journal of the US woman's movement.

At the height of her career in 1904, Charlotte Perkins Gilman contributed dozens of essays to the Boston Woman's Journal, "the only Voice of the Woman's Movement in this country, if not the world," as she later declared. Gilman aimed to transform "the whole woman movement" because she believed the right to vote was a necessary but insufficient goal. Her weekly column presumed that "the woman's movement is larger than the suffrage movement and includes it; and that the very cause to which this paper is devoted will be most advanced by a more inclusive treatment."

These essays silhouette the foundations of her feminism and anticipate much of her subsequent writing.

Review Quotes

"Vital Issues is a meticulously edited collection of Gilman's weekly columns published in the 1904 Women's Journal. Scharnhorst has produced an enormously useful edition that will appeal to scholars, students, and casual readers alike."--Denise D. Knight, author of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction and editor of The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"In this collection, we find the foundations of Gilman's progressive agenda for kitchenless homes, professionalized housekeeping, and childcare centers alongside her stance on topics ranging from the myth of Santa Claus to cremation, maiden names, female teachers working after marriage, and the need for cleaner air and water. In Scharnhorst's edition of Vital Issues, Gilman emerges as a woman of her time and our time."--Catherine J. Golden, author of Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book