Herland Revisited: Narratives of Motherhood, Domesticity, And Physical Emancipation in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Feminist Utopia (Report‪)‬

Preface On April 2, 2006, in the Toronto Star, a feature article entitled "Working Girls, Broken Society" is published. This article examines a recent theory by Professor Alison Wolf, a professor of public sector management at King's College, London, and the author of Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth. Her thesis contends that women's gradual access to equal opportunity in the workplace has led to serious negative consequences. Wolf argues that the end of the 'marriage bar' in many industrialized Western nations--precipitated in 1945 by English legislation that permitted female teachers and civil servants to stay employed if they married--constituted "a rupture in human history." (1) She claims that although employment opportunity for women has brought enormous benefits, "... its repercussions are not all positive." (2) Access to education and employment, she argues, has resulted in the death of feminist sisterhood, the erosion of female altruism, and a negative impact on childbearing. The path once largely followed by Nineteenth Century White, middle-class women across the developed world entailed access to higher education and a profession in teaching; followed by motherhood, homemaking, and voluntary work in the community. Modern Twenty-First Century women, however, are now "too busy." (3) Wolf comments, "One could interpret today's feminist assumptions as reflecting the appetite of global capitalism for all talent, female and male, at the expense of the family." (4)