Can a "Man-Hating" Feminist Also Be a Pragmatist?: On Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In 1915 Jessie Taft, in what was perhaps the first philosophy dissertation in the United States written on the women's movement, compared Charlotte Perkins Gilman unfavorably to a prominent Swedish feminist (see Seigfried 1993b). "Ellen Key," she said (Taft 1915, 21), "with a broad philosophic attitude, a lack of dogmatism and sex-antagonism which gives her a decided advantage over the more hostile Mrs. Gilman, insists on the final worth and importance of sex in its highly developed forms and on the necessity of maintaining sex distinction." Taft was a student in the philosophy department founded by John Dewey at the University of Chicago, but he had already left it for Columbia University before Taft's arrival. 1 She wrote her dissertation under the direction of the pragmatists George Herbert Mead and James H. Tufts. In an exchange of letters with Scudder Klyce, Dewey (1920) also disparaged Gilman by remarking on Klyce's "quite natural disgust with part of Mrs. Gilman's work." But since both Taft and Dewey agreed to the basic feminist claim that women were systematically discriminated against and that these injustices should be effectively overcome, and they publicly supported the efforts of contemporary feminists to do so, their sense that Gilman went too far in her analyses of the so-called "woman problem" is worth exploring further.