Vital Issues

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.