Charlotte Perkins Gilman was not the only female writer to challenge the Doctrine of the Spheres. The torch that was lit by Mary Wollstonecraft in her notable work “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” which was published in 1792 was carried forth by a number of aspiring liberators of the so-called weaker sex. The Bronte sisters, Kate Chopin, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Fanny Fern, even Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley all got in their digs. What is useful about Gilman’s work, “The Yellow Wallpaper” published a hundred years after Vindication is how on the nose it is about illustrating a common assumption of the two sexes at the time. By nature, so went the doctrine, men were more reasonable – even-tempered. In contrast, women were inclined to be more emotional. They more easily succumbed to fits of hysteria. This is where we get the word hysterectomy, after all. By removing the uterus, surgeons would render women calmer and, hence, agreeable. This was the common view, and society conducted itself with this always in mind. Reason led the way while emotion stayed home with the children.
I am not here to challenge traditional gender roles. Men and women are made differently – made to complement one another. Where one is lacking, the other compensates and vice versa. Equally yoked, it is a beautiful partnership. My concern, here, emerges out of the fact that I am the father of three teenage girls. In graduate school, I studied feminism with everybody else and was able to grasp the ins and outs of the cause. But only intellectually. I do not move about this world as a woman and so could not fully grasp what that experience must be like. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is sent to a room to convalesce after suffering from what is described as a nervous condition. She is kept separate from everybody else and is, therefore, free to let her mind wander. She keeps a hidden journal, but soon enough, begins to see another woman in the wallpaper stooping down and creeping – a recurring sight that eventually drives the narrator insane. In the end, her husband, realizing the state of his wife, faints in the doorway, causing the narrator to have to quote unquote “creep over him every time.” The finale is unsettling but likely purposefully so. The true woman must creep about; the facade woman must surrender to being the husband’s charge.
Clearly, there is a sense of responsibility the husband has for the mentally infirm wife; however, it is also clear that this responsibility can sometimes look like ownership. I am able to grasp this in the abstract, but understanding this in the realm of everyday living has been a challenge, namely because I am beginning to see how my own daughters move about the world – how, at times, they are ogled and other times, I am told, boys their age and even older feel perfectly comfortable invading their personal space as if it is their natural right. One half of the doctrine, in other words, is the nose I used to wipe. It is the chubby child I used to feed, the fleshy hand I used to hold. Indeed, it still is the blossoming young women I counsel, protect, teach, and provide for.
The feminists of the 19th century and beyond did good work in leveling the playing field so that women could truly be who God designed them to be: not in the shadows any longer but fully expressive with full access and horizons just as wide with potential as the horizons men see. Their efforts are worth commendation. I look at my daughters and rest in the fact that many battles have been fought and won just for them. But I see with my own eyes evidence that a few more adjustments might have to be made. I see the stares of the men. I see my daughters avert their eyes and quicken their pace. They do not creep. They brace themselves against a version of reason: assertive, wiser, nothing they ever asked for.
