Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Rehabilitative Movements

Jess Libow’s paper, entitled “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Rehabilitative Movements,” considers the tension between turn of the century understandings of disability and women’s health. When Gilman was composing texts... [ view full abstract ]

Jess Libow’s paper, entitled “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Rehabilitative Movements,” considers the tension between turn of the century understandings of disability and women’s health. When Gilman was composing texts such as The Crux (1911), Herland (1915), and “The Vintage” (1916), eugenicist rhetoric was highly deterministic, deeming disabled individuals not only deviant, but permanently so. The lingering influence of the physical culture movement, however, complicates this logic. While exercise for white women supposedly primed their bodies to produce superior offspring, it also contradicted eugenics’ timeline. For Gilman and others, exercise was an antidote to the impairments wrought on women’s bodies by patriarchy. Rehabilitative exercise appears regularly in Gilman’s fiction, undermining the eugenicist framework scholars have cited in her work. She argues that her depictions of athletic women and disabled children imbue each text with ambivalence about the “unfit” body’s constancy. While eugenic and rehabilitative thinking each posits a different future, both designate the disabled body as undesirable. The aim of this paper is therefore not to recuperate what others have called Gilman’s “eugenic feminism,” but to highlight its entwinement with exercise culture and resultant uncertainty about disabled futures.