Introduction: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Sociological Perspective on Ethics and Society

Then, being nothing if not practical, they set their keen and active minds to discover the kind of conduct expected of them. This worked out in a most admirable system of ethics. Social Ethics: Sociology and the Future of Society provides a complex yet accessible statement of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's mature sociological theory of ethical life. Her perspective is welded intellectually to sociology and evolutionary thought and concretely to the well-being of children throughout the world. We have failed, writes Gilman in Social Ethics, to teach even "a simple, child-convincing ethics based on social interactions, because we have not understood sociology" (emphasis added). For Gilman, a world in which children are not loved, well fed, properly clothed, thoughtfully educated, and humanely disciplined is a world ethically at odds with logic and itself. From this fundamental premise, all else follows. diseases, and patriarchal oppression in all its manifestations-all these for Gilman are highly unethical and must not be allowed to stand if society is to be a good place for children. If, as readers of Social Ethics, we sense that we are being firmly lectured as well as cajoled by Gilman's penetrating wit and obvious intellect-that is because we are. Gilman pulls no punches, she really intends us to change our ways, and to use x INTRODUCTION sociological insights to improve our future society. Social Ethics first appeared in 1914 in serial form in Gilman's extraordinary pedagogical experiment in adult education, a self-published monthly sociological journal, issued from 1909 to 1916, written entirely by Gilman and called, aptly enough, The Forerunner. The publication of Social Ethics, now for the first time in book form, completes the republication of four of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's major sociological works originally serialized in the final volumes of The Forerunner during 1914, 1915, and 1916. Taken as a whole, Gilman's Social Ethics, Herland, With Her in Ourland, and The Dress of Women provide an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to the central sociological issues facing not only Gilman's era, but also our increasingly hyper-modern era at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Each of these works-whether fiction or non-fiction, fundamental overview or special study, hypothetical thought experiment or searing real world critique-informs, interprets, and reinforces the others. Of the major works in this sociological quartet, Herland is undoubtedly the best known and most widely read, and when first published in book form in 1979, with an introduction …