What Diantha Did

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's domestic drama opens in the Warden household, where gentility is maintained by debt, appearances, and Roscoe's exhausted labor. His mother and four artistic, impractical sisters live as though comfort were a birthright, while Roscoe shoulders the mortgage, the grocery business, and the family's endless expectations, postponing his own scientific ambitions and even his marriage to Diantha. When Diantha finally confronts him, their love is plain, but so is the divide between his belief that women should not work and her growing conviction that such dependence is a social injustice. Diantha's awakening deepens through her conversations with her mother and her bold paper on housework, which ignites a public battle in the women's club and splits Orchardina's social order. The upheaval awakens other women too, including Mrs. Weatherstone and Viva, who begin to question the domestic system from within. Viva's dismissal of the overbearing Mrs. Halsey becomes a quiet revolution, as she claims authority in her own house and discovers, with startling joy, the freedom of acting on her own terms. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.