Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman inhabited the same generation—both were born in 1860 and died in 1935. In a rapidly industrializing America filled with overcrowded tenements, where middle-class women were encouraged to remain in the home and poor women were expected to care for their children and provide for them, Addams and Gilman both devoted themselves tirelessly to the cause of women and social reform. Their efforts brought them together: Addams invited Gilman to visit Hull-House, the settlement house she founded in Chicago, where Gilman stayed for several months in the second half of 1895 and which inspired some of Gilman's utopian writings, including Herland (Kessler Reference Kessler1995, 90).Footnote 1 After an enthusiastic beginning to her visit at Hull-House, where theory and practice were tightly connected, Gilman became uncomfortable there. Space was tight, so people had to share rooms; Gilman did not manage this well:
I didn't like it because the other occupant was not accustomed to as much air as I—only one window open for two people! One of my possible roommates raised her's [sic] about a foot—that didn't suit me at all. The other opened her's [sic] fairly wide, but she read in bed, by the light of a large lamp, until midnight, and I liked that still less.
I didn't mind the light so much as I did the greedy lamp eating up my air! So then I went down and slept in great state on a fine long wide soft smooth sofa in the drawing room. (Kessler Reference Kessler1995, 93)
The practical elements of close community life are off-putting for Gilman. Gilman identifies another difference between her own approach and the mission of Hull-House when she writes, “I found myself introduced by sonorous ministers as ‘One of those consecrated women who have given their lives to the service of the poor and needy.’ Which was true enough, except for the limited object, my interest was in all humanity, not merely in the underside of it; in sociology, not social pathology” ([1935] Reference Gilman and Stetson1987, 184). While Addams was particularly focused on one group of people, among whom she lived, and who were also among the poorest, and least cared for, members of society, Gilman understands herself to be articulating a broader vision, one that encompasses all of humanity. These differences seem minor. However, Addams's and Gilman's theories and practices of care elaborate some striking differences in their thought: while Addams's care relies on engagement with particular people, Gilman advocates universal care. Putting Addams's and Gilman's theories of care in conversation not only reveals the need for a form of care in political life—and a way to attain it—but also highlights its limits.
Early theorists of the ethics of care emphasized the opposition between justice and care (Gilligan Reference Gilligan1982) or neglected justice entirely, focusing on care as the preferable alternative to justice (Noddings Reference Noddings1984). Over time, however, the ethics of care tradition has developed an appreciation of the necessity of both justice and care in political life. Joan Tronto argues that there can be between care and justice “a relationship of compatibility rather than hostility” (Reference Tronto1993, 167). Nel Noddings argues in her later work that we can think about caring in two ways—caring for and caring about—and that the latter connects care to justice (Reference Noddings2002, 22–24).Footnote 2 Virginia Held, too, argues for the integration of justice and care, including a care for distant others (Reference Held2006, 67). For Held, care is the “wider moral framework into which justice should be fitted” (71). She argues that the functioning of the liberal polity relies on the care that civil society can facilitate (131–32). Most recently, Daniel Engster (2015) has argued for a political theory of care, in which the institutions of politics themselves are informed by care.
However, none of these theorists focuses on the way in which the engaged practices of care in the home and small associations can be leveraged in order to extend them into wider social and political life—in other words, how care can be cultivated and expanded. Critical attention to the writings and activism of Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman not only shows how individual interest and relationships of care can be expanded in order to promote caring social practices but also suggests limits to the functioning of care in political spaces.
How do Addams and Gilman help us better understand care, particularly in its political role? On the one hand, without a political role for care, we may have a liberal welfare state in which, as Michael Sandel (Reference Sandel1984) writes, we are increasingly entangled and detached. The liberal polity leans on its members to help provide resources for a citizenry from whom they may be very far removed. This article theorizes an alternative in which engaged forms of care may be extended to larger social groups. I use “engaged care” to refer to particular close relationships of care, such as the care that occurs in the family or in other small associations. I use “extended care” to refer to care that is less personal, particular, and relational, such as the care one might exhibit toward other members of a large association or toward other citizens of a country; “extended care” might even be offered over national boundaries, such as after an earthquake or during a conflict in another region. Addams observes that the family and the engaged care it houses is often, in her day, understood to be at odds with, at least in the case of women, a concern for society—a form of extended care. While acknowledging a perpetual tension between the family and politics, Addams seeks to diminish that tension by arguing that the engaged care of the family ought to be leveraged in order to cultivate an extended care for other members of society. In order to care well for their families, Addams maintains, women must extend their care to the common interest; conversely, politics and social organizations should support women in their engaged familial roles.Footnote 3
However, the extension of care to political life is not without its weaknesses, as an analysis of Addams's and Gilman's work reveals. First, care can coerce. A critical reading of Gilman's writings highlights a problem with attempting to separate extended social and political care from engaged care: even extended care relies on some degree of engagement with others, and so care must always have a relational element. To care for all people equally, without even encountering them, as Gilman advocates, would lead to a detached and entangled care that is effective only in a utopia but in real life loses its power. Politics might then become a place of maternal and coercive care, as it does in Gilman's Herland—as if care alone might be sufficient to political life. Maternal control, which is appropriate for infants, is not appropriate for adult citizens. Second, care can also confuse: close attachments can compel us toward a policy that would be best for someone we love but might not be best for the polity as a whole. Attention to Addams's work reveals that while the partiality of care might be a laudable motive for political action, it can also inhibit democratic political action: partiality can be at odds with the reflection on the whole situation that a participatory democracy hopes to cultivate. This weakness of a politics of care is particularly evident in Addams's use of stories in her writing—stories that, because of their appeal to emotion, make alternative approaches appear heartless.
This article argues that politics must involve more than care. First, politics must protect the freedoms appropriate to individuals; citizens must be able to choose their own course, even if that involves rejecting care. Second, democratic structures must be firmly held, and the political participation of all citizens should be encouraged. The ends of care ought not trump the democratic means, as they do in Gilman's Herland. Finally, politics requires a degree of detachment and impartiality that allows citizens to reflect together on interests beyond their own. Care definitionally excludes some in favor of others; in politics, partiality alone ought not prevail. While Gilman's simple application of care to politics is problematic, her use of stories to communicate her ideas, on the other hand, reflects a political and philosophical engagement that is committed to dialogue and the pursuit of truth more honestly than Addams's compelling stories. While Addams struggles to step back from a focus on the particular in her political theory, Gilman models the ability to make philosophical arguments that invite engagement in a variety of different modes.
Engaged care—whether in the family or in social organizations like Hull-House—is relational and embodied, with all of the particularity that that entails. While the need for and responsibility to give care is common to all humans—and can and should be extended in order to inform our practice of politics—the difference between engaged care and extended care ought not be elided. As Addams argues, the tension between family and politics is one that must persist. She rightly insists that family should be reimagined in order to better alert its members to their social and political responsibilities but that this must be done in a way that preserves the difference between the two. While care has a political role, bridging family and politics, politics cannot become the family, and care is not the only political virtue.
ADDAMS'S PRODUCTIVE TENSION
Jane Addams maintains both that there is a perpetual tension between care in the family and social and political responsibilities and that family care can be leveraged to encourage social and political responsibility. Addams does not eliminate particular commitments in favor of commitments to the interest of the whole; rather, she sees engagement with others as essential to even understanding how to navigate one's social and political responsibilities. Moreover, politics, according to Addams, should support familial care. However, despite the many advantages of her approach, it also has weaknesses. Care, even extended care, involves some particularity; a politics of care has difficulty in stepping back from emotional appeals in order to reflect on the whole.
Addams praises the care found in the ever-changing family. She sees familial care as crucial to maintaining human relations: “That wonderful devotion to the child seems at times, in the midst of our stupid social and industrial arrangements, all that keeps society human, the touch of nature which unites it, as it was that same devotion which first lifted it out of the swamp of bestiality” ([Reference Addams1909] Reference Addams1918, 33). However, even her celebration of the caring relations present in the family identify the family not as static but as flexible. Devotion to children is not solely limited to one's own flesh and blood, a message that Addams profoundly communicates through her own work at Hull-House, which expresses devotion to many to whom she was not related and expands care beyond the walls of the home. Addams writes of the development of the family, “The family, like every other element of human life, is susceptible of progress, and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspirations are enlarged, although its duties can never be abrogated and its obligations can never be cancelled” ([Reference Addams1902] Reference Gilman and Stetson1964, 78–79). The family must remain, but it also cannot stagnate—it must develop and change to address the new challenges that it faces in each generation. Addams calls for the family in her day not to be insular but to engage in a dynamic tension with the outside world.Footnote 4
Addams is attentive to the tension between familial care and people's duty to society—and especially women's duty to society, which Addams advocates against the tenor of her times. The modern educated woman should, according to Addams, accept “her family inheritance with loyalty and affection, but she has entered into a wider inheritance as well, which, for lack of a better phrase, we call the social claim” ([Reference Addams1902] Reference Addams1964, 85). Addams identifies this tension between two interests, “each of which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life” as “tragic” (76). However, this tension, despite its tragic nature, cannot be eliminated, for Addams argues that the destruction of either the family or social duty “would bring ruin to the ethical life” (76–77). Addams maintains that caring for both society and the family is essential, while also often at odds with one another.
Addams is hopeful that care in the family and in society, in addition to being in a tragic and ineliminable tension, can be productively connected. Addams argues that in the new world of her day, women's traditional activities will lead them outside of the home in order both to benefit others and for the interest of their families themselves. The work of care has been reconfigured such that care cannot be provided without working together with others; moreover, many of the activities of the public world are activities of care, which formerly belonged to the household, and to which women bring experience and practical wisdom. She begins to develop this idea in her 1880 speech “Bread Givers,” which she gave at her Rockford Seminary's Junior Exhibition as class president. She writes that we “proudly assert our independence, on the other hand we still retain the old ideal of womanhood—the Saxon lady whose mission it was to give bread unto her household” (Reference Addams and Elshtain2002b, 8–9). Over the course of her life, Addams expands on this idea, maintaining that women's traditional role of providing bread for their households draws them outside of their households. For instance, she argues in 1 1907 essay that problems such as “insanitary housing,” “infant mortality,” and “adulterated food,” important municipal problems of her day, should be addressed, at least in part, by “those who in the past have at least attempted to care for children, to clean houses, to prepare foods” (Reference Addams1960, 115).Footnote 5 Addams applies her idea of women as bread givers to international problems as well. She maintains that their duty of supplying food to children should turn women's attention to the famine caused by war (Reference Addams1960, 135). Moreover, women's traditional roles should encourage them to work for peace: “There might be found an antidote to war in woman's affection and all-embracing pity for helpless children” ([1922] Reference Addams2002a, 48).
Addams shows how women's traditional roles pull her outside of her own household, into the community, and to participation in government. In fact, Addams argues that women's self-interest and the interest of her family require that she collaborate with others in order to care for her family. She writes,
A woman's simplest duty, one would say, is to keep her house clean and wholesome and to feed her children properly. Yet if she lives in a tenement house, as so many of my neighbors do, she cannot fulfill these simple obligations by her own efforts because she is utterly dependent upon the city administration for the conditions which render decent living possible. … In short, if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside of her immediate household. The individual conscience and devotion are no longer effective. (1960, 104–5)
In the modern world, the family cannot be isolated. It exists within a political and social context that needs to be educated and improved in order to be a fitting home for the family.
In a lecture published in 1908, Addams recounts a cautionary tale in order to drive her point home. A widow who was very devoted to her children kept herself aloof from her neighbors. In the midst of a typhoid epidemic in her neighborhood, her two daughters visited their mother's home on a break from college. “They both fell ill,—not because their own home was not clean, not because their mother was not devoted, but because next door to them and also in the rear were wretched tenements and because the mother's utmost efforts could not keep the infection out of her own house” (Reference Addams and Elshtain2002b, 254). One daughter died and one was an invalid for two years. Here we see clearly that there are aspects of life that require collective efforts in order to be addressed, and remaining isolated and aloof is not conducive to such efforts. Addams ends the story with the moral, “Women are pushed outside of the home in order that they may preserve the home” (253).
Addams tells positive stories of women organizing together as well. In the same published lecture, she recounts the efforts of the Hull-House Woman's Club, which noticed that the death rate in its ward was high (Reference Addams1912, 285). After realizing that this was tied to the garbage conditions, the women went through the streets regularly, seeing what they could do to improve conditions, and arranged to replace the inspector who oversaw the garbage collection. After several years, the death rate returned to average. While neglecting the good of the whole can negatively impact families, caring for the social good can benefit others, as well as the women's families themselves (288).Footnote 6
Not only should family responsibilities point toward social and political responsibilities for women, but Addams maintains that there is a reciprocal responsibility on the part of politics and society to support women and families in need. She argues that mothers of young children should not be forced, out of economic necessity, to work outside the home. Addams maintains that the space for the care of young children should be supported by the state and by civil associations. Addams practiced what she preached: Hull-House helped support women in difficult situations by offering, among other things, child care. In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams makes her argument by telling heart-wrenching stories of the conflict between poor women's work outside of the home and their work within it. She writes about children who were injured when their mothers were at work, including a child who “had a curved spine due to the fact that for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with him” (Reference Addams1912, 167–68). She writes about encountering a woman who was scrubbing floors and was drenched with breast milk because she had not nursed her baby for six hours—“Her mother's milk mingled with the very water with which she scrubbed the floors until she should return at midnight, heated and exhausted, to feed her screaming child with what remained within her breasts” (174–75). Perhaps the most moving story is of a young boy named “Goosie,” after the goose feathers in his hair from the feather brush factory where his mother worked (173). Addams writes of his death, “One March morning, Goosie's mother was hanging out the washing on a shed roof before she left for the factory. Five-year-old Goosie was trotting at her heels handing her clothes pins, when he was suddenly blown off the roof by the high wind into the alley below” (173). When Addams asks Goosie's mother what she can do after the funeral,
The overworked, sorrow-stricken woman looked up and replied, “If you could give me my wages for to-morrow, I would not go to work in the factory at all. I would like to stay at home all day and hold the baby. Goosie was always asking me to take him and I never had any time.” This statement revealed the condition of many nursery mothers who are obliged to forego the joys and solaces which belong to even the most poverty-stricken. The long hours of factory labor necessary for earning the support of a child leave no time for the tender care and caressing which may enrich the life of the most piteous baby. (173–74)
Goosie's mother longs for the opportunity to care for him by simply holding him, a luxury of which her difficult economic circumstances deprived her. Both the mother and her child are impoverished by the lack of space for care. In this emotional story, Addams highlights the tension between familial care and work, arguing that the government and social organizations can help alleviate this tension by providing support services.
Addams uses these stories to argue that political society should support the work of care and that care should and does motivate women to participate in politics. In her use of stories, which Katherine Joslin calls “an autobiography … of the collective community,” Addams provides context for her arguments and draws new voices into political discussions, including the voices of those outside of her class (Reference Joslin2004, 15–16). Addams's connection of theory to practice and her literary incorporation of many different perspectives through the use of the stories of others parallels her own approach to social reform, which she describes as informed by trial and error: “A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and end must also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constant correction of his process” ([Reference Addams1902] Reference Addams1964, 176). Christopher Lasch writes, “Her method was essentially autobiographical, and the virtues and defects of her work were those that come from writing directly out of one's experience” (Addams Reference Addams and Lasch1965, xxv–xxvi). Her theory, informed by practice, articulated in part by stories from the lives of others, was personal and passionate. These stories provide rhetorical force to Addams's arguments. When she writes about a mother grieving for the loss of her child, a child disabled because he was tied to the leg of a chair while his parents worked, a woman soaked by leaking breast milk because she is forced to be separated from her new child while she scrubbed floors, her arguments gain immeasurable strength. Who can argue against these terrible injustices? Others of Addams's stories are moralistic—the mother who kept an immaculate house but ignored her neighbors, and, as a result, loses a daughter to typhoid; the women who band together to lower the death rate in their ward by taking care of the garbage problem. These stories are meant to motivate women to work together for the common interest, and they are effective.
However, as Lasch points out, not only are there many virtues to her work, but also there are “defects … that come from writing directly out of one's experience” (Addams Reference Addams and Lasch1965, xxvi). The weakness of these stories is a weakness of care that Tronto identifies: parochialism. Tronto writes, “How are we to guarantee that people, who are enmeshed in their daily rounds of care-giving and care-receiving, will be able to disengage themselves from their own local concerns and to address broader needs and concerns for care?” (Reference Tronto1993, 142). Indeed, the use of emotional stories can threaten to close down conversation, encouraging listeners to focus on only one particular need with a seemingly clear solution, which is always, in reality, one particular need for care among many others. While Addams certainly encourages people intentionally to choose experiences that expand beyond the limitations of familiarity, widening the reach of care (Hamington Reference Hamington2004, 105, 107; Seigfried Reference Seigfried2013, 135), care always has limits—one cannot care equally for all; there will always be people outside of one's experience.
While recognizing a tension between the family and social and political life that cannot be done away with, Addams seeks to reimagine a new family for a new political era: as the government grows, so familial ties must be reconceived to lead women into the social and political world. Similarly, politics should support familial care. She finds a tension that, though tragic and persistent, may be leveraged to help create caring citizens. However, while her intimate acquaintance with the possibilities of care enriches her theories, it also weakens them: understanding politics to be only or primarily a place of care can neuter the philosophical conversation that is also appropriate to it.
GILMAN'S NEW MOTHERHOOD
Like Addams, Gilman advocates extending care; however, unlike Addams, who understands that extended care depends on engaged care, Gilman seeks to disentangle the two. Gilman advocates an extended care that is universal and equal; because this care applies equally to all members of a society, it cannot rely on or require particular engagement. Gilman wants to create a polity defined entirely by care, and she finds the care that takes place in the family to be an eliminable distraction that interferes with the equitable extension of care. Her conception of care loses the partiality that is characteristic of care. However, the absence of that partiality—and the absence of an attempt to compel her reader—makes her use of stories admirable. She uses the utopian and fictional forms as ways to flesh out her philosophical argument, which invites readers’ critiques; never is the reader coerced by the emotion that accompanies care.
Gilman characterizes the family, or at least the patriarchal family of her day, with its gendered division of labor and its economically inefficient performance of work in the home, as inhibiting the commitment of women to the common interest: “The love of human beings for each other … is a law of nature. It is bred of human contact, of human relation, of human service” ([1903] Reference Gilman and Stetson1972, 346). Gilman calls the family an “earlier form of life” that, though once valuable to human development, now stands in the way of the emergence of a collective consciousness, “smother[ing] the full-grown people of to-day” (346). The family, which originally—through care—admirably facilitated contact, relation, and service among its members, now holds women back from the contact, relation, and service that will connect them to all human beings. The engaged care present in the family, in its current form, opposes a progress of mutual care, extended beyond the home. Gilman clearly prioritizes social responsibilities over the familial responsibilities that she perceives as inhibiting the social: “The love of mother and child is beautiful; but there is a higher law than that—the love of one another” (10–11).
The social consciousness that Gilman longs for can only emerge when both men and women work outside of the home, which will connect them to the broader needs of society ([1903] Reference Gilman and Stetson1972, 322). To cultivate the collective consciousness and facilitate women's work outside the home, Gilman maintains that the work of housekeeping, cooking, and caring for and educating children—and even entertainment—should be outsourced to trained professionals who will both do a better job and do it more efficiently. The only activity that remains in the home is rest (346). For instance, she advocates kitchen-less homes (Reference Gilman and Stetson1898, 255). Similarly, Gilman maintains that care by specialists would be in infants’ interest: “The mere bodily care of a young infant is as well given by one wise, loving hand as another. It is that trained hand that the baby needs, not mere blood-relationship” (291). Specialization trumps relationships of care, for Gilman. She explains, “‘But the nurse does not love it!’ we wildly protest. What if she does not? Cannot the mother love it while the nurse takes care of it? This is the whole position in a nutshell” ([Reference Gilman and Stetson1903] Reference Gilman and Stetson1972, 340). Here love and care are separable roles; it is possible to love one's family without participating in the activities of engaged care, which have been outsourced. Moreover, Gilman offers two contradictory takes on the value of practical experience: practical experience in work outside the home is necessary in order to cultivate the collective consciousness. However, in the domestic sphere, practical experience is not sufficient to learn the skills of motherhood, which should rather be taught by doctors, nurses, and teachers. She writes, incorporating not only her racial prejudice but also her belief that professional skills are superior to relational care, “In extreme terms that it would be better for a child to-day to be left absolutely without mother or family of any sort, in the city of Boston, for instance, than to be supplied with a large and affectionate family and be planted with them in Darkest Africa” (Reference Gilman and Stetson1898, 180).
Moving the Mountain
Gilman's utopias, Moving the Mountain and Herland (together with its sequel With Her in Ourland), communicate in literary form two versions of the reimagined family. Moving the Mountain is a description of an America improved in accordance with Gilman's hopes; her goals for the family as articulated in her nonfiction have been achieved. Women work and hold positions of leadership. Women's new working life does not interfere with the duties of motherhood. Because of the socialization of the work of the home, such as cooking and cleaning, women have time to continue in their careers, which only require a utopian two to four hours of work per day ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1911] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 76). The care of children is similarly specialized. The most fit devote themselves to it, and “no woman was allowed to care for her children without proof of capacity” from the Department of Child Culture. Gilman sums up the ideal of home incarnated in the future America she depicts: “From earliest infancy they absorbed the idea that home was a place to come out from and go back to; the sweetest, dearest place—for there was mother, and father, and one's own little room to sleep in; but the day hours were to go somewhere to learn and do, to work and play, to grow in” (115).
This is not to say that all homes are the same in this utopian vision; it has space for alternative conceptions of the good life. Mrs. Masson is a self-described reactionary who prefers to work at home with her children near her. She took the child-culture course and was allowed to care for her children, who still love to go off and play with the other children at the state-sponsored Child Garden ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1911] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 95). Mrs. Masson prefers not to cooperate with others in the public world, but she still takes advantage of the socialization of housework (96).
The dark side of the transition to a new world is eugenics, which was widely espoused in Gilman's day and which Gilman accepts as a necessary evil. Gilman writes that to improve, the country has to deal with the results of the foolishness and ignorance of the past by removing “hopeless degenerates … promptly and mercifully” and by “incapacitat[ing] for parentage” “a large class of perverts” ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1911] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 98). They put the “helpless residue; blind and crippled through no fault of their own” in asylums, but they “don't make that kind of people any more” (98). The weakest and most vulnerable of society are removed from the care of the home and family; they are instead cared for by specialists, before being bred out of humanity altogether. For Gilman, the collective consciousness leads to progress—a progress that has no room for the particularity of difference and disability. Gilman's care is for humanity as a whole and not for what she calls “merely … the underside of it” ([1935] Reference Gilman and Stetson1987, 184).
Herland and With Her in Ourland
Rather than depicting a new, improved version of America, Herland offers a different country entirely, with its own history and, most notably, composed entirely of women—through a miracle, they are able to reproduce without men. In this country, women have created their own civilization: they are governed by an ideal of care and united action rather than competition ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1915] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 198). The novel is told from the perspective of a male explorer, Van, who, with two of his friends—Terry the braggart and Jeff the southern romantic—discovers Herland. At first they feel themselves prisoners of the women and even attempt to escape.Footnote 7 As time passes, Jeff and Van come to admire the country. All three men marry women from Herland.
The women of Herland all work for the common interest, an expansion of their care and commitment to motherhood. Motherhood in Herland is redefined: it means that women care about the cultivation and education of all of the country's children ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1915] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 198). One of the characters explains, “‘The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. … You see we are mothers,’ she repeated, as if in that she had said it all” (204). Motherhood implies control; it means that the women of Herland are “Conscious Makers of People” (205). Even the forgoing of motherhood, which those who are “held unfit” are asked to do, is in the service of their country and, implicitly, of the good of the whole, and so it is an act of “motherhood,” of caring for future generations (206).
Motherhood has developed to encompass a commitment to the inhabitants of the country as a whole. As a result, the homes themselves are different. Everyone has their own bedroom and bathroom from earliest childhood; when they are older, they receive a second room in which to receive friends ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1915] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 215).Footnote 8 The men want to live together in separate houses with their wives once they are married, but the women see no point in doing so (252). In Herland, children do not belong to the woman who gave birth to them (and the women do not belong to their husbands) but are seen as a common responsibility; the living situations reflect this understanding.
The extended care of mothering the nation usurps political life. The messy and sometimes combative work of self-government is not depicted in the novel; rather, the government of Herland is maternal, ruled by a Land-Mother and local Over-Mothers, who are great and wise thinkers reminiscent of Plato's philosopher-king ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1915] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 210). Gilman writes of Herland, “They loved their country because it was their nursery, playground and workshop” (227). Herland is not a political association, designed to provide a basis for common action to secure what a family cannot. Rather, it is a family practiced on a large scale—a nursery, playground, and workshop. Perhaps most telling is a conversation between Terry and Jeff:
“Home!” [Terry] sneered. “There isn't a home in the whole pitiful place.”
“There isn't anything else, and you know it,” Jeff retorted hotly. (231)
In one sense, Terry is right—home life is fundamentally altered and the concerns of the family are outsourced. On the other hand, the whole country is a home, as Jeff, the romantic, notes. By reconceiving and expanding motherhood and care, the women of Herland have entirely altered it. Care is no longer a partial and exclusive care for one's children and family; care has become something offered to all others equally. It has replaced politics.
Politics in the novel is replaced by the total education of the citizens of Herland, a sort of Tocquevillian soft despotism. Laws are not needed: because they have bred out “the lowest types,” they no longer have criminals ([Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1915] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 217). Punishment has been replaced with the compassionate care of a mother nursing her child back to health: “‘Do you punish a person for a broken leg or a fever? We have preventive measures, and cures; sometimes we have to “send the patient to bed,” as it were; but that's not a punishment—it's only part of the treatment,’” one subject of Herland explains (241–42). Of course, Herland's preventive measures control its citizens even more than punishments do, molding its subjects by education into what Herland has determined is the best way of life.Footnote 9 Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls Herland authoritarian and hierarchical (Reference Sutton-Ramspeck2004, 101). Gilman's maternal polity becomes not a polity at all but rather a maternal society in which individual liberty is subordinated to the common consciousness and in which politics is replaced by education. Government as mother turns quickly from utopia to dystopia, where a kind, loving, but guiding hand reveals itself to be more suited to infants and children than to adults and citizens. Here we see again a weakness of a politics of care: it can coerce and control its subjects, rather than creating a democratic polity comprised of free citizens.
In With Her in Ourland, the sequel to Herland, Van and his wife, Ellador, leave Herland. Van is particularly excited to show Ellador his home—something that he thought Herland lacked:
In all the peace and beauty of Herland there was nowhere the small lit circle of intimate love and mutually considered comfort which means so much to us. The love, the comfort, were everywhere, to be sure, but that was different. It was like reflected lighting instead of a lamp on the center table; it was like an evenly steam-heated house, instead of one with an open fire in each room. We had missed those fires, so warm to the front, so inadequate on the back, so inclusive of those who can sit near it, so exclusive of everyone else. ([1916] 1999, 327)
Even in Van's ostensible praise of the home is shrouded Gilman's critique: it is comforting to those who are close, but by offering an engaged care to some, it excludes others. Ellador argues that the care present in families is ill suited to people with broader commitments: “The family relation demands close, interconnected love, authority and service. The democratic relation demands universal justice and good will, the capacity for the widest coordinate action in the common interest” (333). The engaged care of the home is not something that can be extended to democratic relations; rather, the home drains energy and loyalty from the state (333).
While Gilman's theory advocates a version of extended care that detaches itself from engaged care, breaking down particular bonds in favor of universal commitments, exclusionary relationships of care are not entirely absent from the work: Van's marriage to Ellador itself is a relationship that, although it is not housed in a shared home, is exclusive. With the advent of marriage in Herland comes the introduction of relational care. In fact, their marriage inaugurates politics: it provides the context for an extensive dialogue about what the good life is and how political life should best be ordered, albeit a dialogue in which Ellador is always proved right. Van nonetheless contributes by showing Ellador America and the rest of the world. Even in the midst of Herland's praise of abstraction and universal care, particularity and relational, engaged care returns.
Gilman's preference for a caring polity at the expense of the family forces us to ask whether the cultivation of such a universal love—a perfectly extended care detached from engaged care—is indeed possible. When every child is your child, as Herland boasts, then no one is your child, allowing you to shirk your duties, when the intention is only to expand them. As Aristophanes writes in Ecclesiazusae about a city in which lovers and children are all shared, which bears some similarities to Herland: “Ah! how heartily they will strangle all the old men, since even now, when each one knows his father, they make no bones about strangling him! then, my word! won't they just scorn and crap upon the old folks!”Footnote 10 Aristophanes worries that children will not respect all of their elders in a world of diffuse care, when they cannot even respect their own parents in families of engaged care. Gilman writes of Ellador's welcome back to Herland in a way that hints at this difficulty of mass love, “If you live in a country of about three million inhabitants, and love them all … why, your hands are pretty full for a while” ([1916] Reference Gilman, Stetson and Doskow1999, 385). One cannot love three million friends equally; even if Ellador devoted all of her time to friendship, she would not have time for three million friends. Dostoevsky questions the possibility of universal love in The Brothers Karamazov:
“It's just the same story as a doctor once told me,” observed the elder. …“‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. … But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.’” ([Reference Dostoevsky1880] Reference Dostoevsky2002, Part 1, Book 2, Chapter 4)
Dostoevsky asks whether love for humanity, attained through abstract mental ascent, and not accompanied by practices of care for one's neighbors, is really love. This question could be rephrased: is extended care that is divorced from engaged care sustainable?
Gilman's reimagination of the family goes too far, eliding the differences between the family and politics. Gilman's care neglects the shared activities of the home and of associational life that define engaged care and upon which even extended care relies; her treatment of care reminds us that political care can coerce and compel. While the universal care advocated in Gilman's utopias is problematic, the way she deploys fiction and literature in making her arguments is admirable. Literary approaches, even in the case of utopia, tend to resist philosophical abstraction: Gilman tells the story of the women of Herland and their development of universal care through particular characters and relationships. And when viewed as a contribution to a philosophical dialogue, utopia becomes a useful instrument. It can provide a much-needed critique of existing institutions, carving out a space to highlight serious problems with the inflexible, patriarchal families of Gilman's day. Gilman invites the reader to join her as she imagines a life lived otherwise. Utopias—and Gilman gives us three utopian novels in addition to her short stories—provide the opportunity to imaginatively flesh out her philosophy in a different form. Her utopias, while riddled with problems, are one part of a conversation to which the reader is invited to critically respond. And utopia is not the only form in which Gilman writes: From 1909 to 1916, Gilman wrote The Forerunner, a monthly magazine that was composed entirely of her work—from essays to stories, serialized novels, poetry, and even advertisements. Each of these different approaches offers a voice for her philosophy, allowing the reader to access it—and engage with it—through many different forms.
Philosophical arguments should not be aimed simply at gaining adherents but at pursuing the common interest with others through dialogue and discussion, as Addams exemplified by living with the people she sought to aid and learning from them. While an appreciation of the relational aspect of care is not foregrounded in Gilman's philosophy, her arguments respect her interlocutors more by presenting themselves as one voice in a discussion than a rhetoric that uses emotion to compel. There is a fine line, as we see in Addams's writing, between the necessary work of giving voice to those who are voiceless and the compulsion that can accompany a story that cannot be interrogated or refuted. As important as it is to engage with and learn from others, no one person that we encounter and learn from can alone determine the common interest. Indeed, our experiences, as diverse as they might be, always miss perspectives of which we are unaware and are unable to remedy. Here are the limits of the particularity of care.
TOWARD A LIMITED POLITICS OF CARE
Care can be a crucial bridge connecting the individual and familial interests of citizens to the common interest: the practices of engaged and relational care of domestic life and small associations can and should be extended to inform the broader social and political life. The extension of care in this way allows citizens to buy into the communal action of politics, understanding the connection between themselves and other members of the polity. Indeed, without such care, politics that involves the redistribution of some resources can be alienating, giving rise to an embittered citizenry. However, extended political care should remain indebted to and responsive to engaged care: engaged care precedes and informs extended political care. Extended political care should respect, encourage, and aid the engaged care of small associations, rather than seek to replace and eliminate their function. I argue that a care that entirely eschews partiality, aiming for universality, is not care at all.
While political care should be cultivated in citizens in order to aid their deliberations regarding the political good, political decisions themselves are not reducible entirely to care. Politics should also be committed to freedom and democracy, which are at times at odds with care; care, which always involves some partiality, can be controlling and coercive. The goal of self-rule, both at an individual and communal level, is crucial to limiting care and restraining its authoritarian tendencies. Understanding care to be one element of a democratic political life shows the way in which care can connect citizens without giving them permission to tyrannize over others. Simultaneously inspired and cautioned by the innovative practices of Hull-House and the imagined world of Herland, we can both recognize the importance of and encourage the practice of care, as well as restrict its excesses.
