A novel-length argument that housework, organized and paid, is real business — and a woman can run it.

What Diantha Did

Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1910

Gilman's 1910 novel puts her economic theory to work as fiction: Diantha Bell leaves her fiancé and family behind to build a professionalized domestic-service company, betting that cooking, cleaning, and childcare can be organized as skilled, paid labor rather than unpaid duty. Equal parts business plan and marriage plot, it's Gilman testing in a story the same claim she argued directly in Women and Economics and The Man-Made World.

14 chapters · 55,842 words · ~4.2 hr read