Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s monograph, Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel (1979), is presented as a fictional narrative of the journey of three explorers that find a female society that is able to reproduce and thrive without a male presence. Sara Evans’ monograph, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (1979), discussed the historical relationship between both the civil rights movement and feminism. Evan’s book was a secondary source relying on various primary sources to allow the reader insight of feminist heroines during the time of the civil rights movement. Gilman also wrote a secondary source, but Herland presents the attitude of many feminists at the time. Gilman did not
use a thesis in her novel. On the other hand, though long, the thesis statement of Personal Politics follows:
“The stage was set. Yet the need remains to unravel the mystery of how a few young women stepped outside the assumptions on which they had been raised to articulate a radical critique of women’s position in American society. For them, a particular set of experiences in the southern civil rights movement and parts of the student new left catalyzed a new feminist consciousness. There they found the inner strength and self-respect to explore the meaning of equality and an ideology that beckoned them to do so. There they also met the same contradictory treatment most American women experienced, and it spun them out of those movements into one of their own.” The thesis was objective and told the reader that they were about to read of the movements that American women created in reaction to their contradictory treatment. According to the introduction of Herland, Gilman does not have any formal credentials as a historian, though she has written other novels as well as an autobiography and several other non-fiction books.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v011/11.2contributors.html
use a thesis in her novel. On the other hand, though long, the thesis statement of Personal Politics follows:
“The stage was set. Yet the need remains to unravel the mystery of how a few young women stepped outside the assumptions on which they had been raised to articulate a radical critique of women’s position in American society. For them, a particular set of experiences in the southern civil rights movement and parts of the student new left catalyzed a new feminist consciousness. There they found the inner strength and self-respect to explore the meaning of equality and an ideology that beckoned them to do so. There they also met the same contradictory treatment most American women experienced, and it spun them out of those movements into one of their own.” The thesis was objective and told the reader that they were about to read of the movements that American women created in reaction to their contradictory treatment. According to the introduction of Herland, Gilman does not have any formal credentials as a historian, though she has written other novels as well as an autobiography and several other non-fiction books.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_womens_history/v011/11.2contributors.html