The Critique of “Sexuo-Economic Relation” and the Technological Emancipation of Women: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Kitchenless Home

Abstract

Between the 1860s and the First World War, a largely overlooked kitchen debate emerged, in which women, feminists, and reformers across the United States and Europe critically examined the home and domestic labour. Central to this debate was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose work brings together evolutionary social sciences and a technological redefinition of the domestic sphere. Gilman’s critique situates the home as both a site of sex-based power relations and a barrier to social evolution, arguing that women’s emancipation, economic independence, and professionalization are essential for the development of cooperative industrial society. Her proposal of the kitchenless home exemplifies a feminist politics of technology rooted in socio-economic relations, aimed at challenging women’s subordination and at sustaining the broader evolutionary process.