Families, Marriages, and Children

Like many of her contemporaries, she maintained a paradoxical sense of social justice: on one hand, she was deeply committed to the advancement of white women, and on the other, she sought to restrict the rights of immigrants and African Americans. Hill notes that ''Gilman never hides her conclusions behind sociological jargon, as do many writers today'' (p. xii), but the collection is likely to generate bewilderment in students schooled in current dominant disciplinary norms for social scientists (in which night visions, exclamation points, and humor figure less prominently).