What Diantha Did
Glossary
"
- "A Crying Need"
- The title of Chapter IV and the novel's diagnosis of its problem: inefficient, isolated, unpaid domestic work performed by untrained women in every separate household is a waste crying out for exactly the kind of professional, centralized solution Diantha invents.
- Related: Domestic Labor as Business
- "Day Service" ("d.s.")
- One of Union House's core offerings alongside cooked-food delivery: trained workers who come to a home for a set number of hours a day rather than living in as a servant, giving both the worker and the household more independence than the traditional live-in arrangement.
- Related: Union House, House Worker's Union
- "Miss Bell" (Alias)
- The name Diantha works under as a hired domestic servant in Orchardina, concealing her first name and background so that her respectable family will not be immediately implicated in her scandalous choice to do paid housework.
- Related: Diantha Bell, Isabel Porne
C
- Cooked Food Delivery ("c.f.d.")
- One of Diantha's core services: meals prepared in bulk at Union House's professional kitchen and delivered to private homes, sparing families the expense and inefficiency of a full home kitchen — an idea Gilman treats as obviously more rational than every household cooking separately.
- Related: Union House, Domestic Labor as Business
D
- Diantha Bell
- The novel's heroine, a schoolteacher's daughter who leaves her family and her engagement to Ross Warden to build a professionalized domestic-service business, proving through practice that housework can be organized, efficient, paid labor rather than unpaid family duty.
- Related: Union House, Ross Warden
- Domestic Labor as Business
- The novel's central thesis, argued through Diantha's plot rather than direct essay: housework done efficiently, scientifically, and for fair pay is real economic production, deserving the same organization, training, and wages as any other skilled trade — the same claim Gilman makes directly in Women and Economics.
- Related: The Itemized Account, Union House
E
- Edgar Porne
- Isabel's husband, a real estate man who is sympathetic to his wife's frustration with housework without ever questioning that it should be hers to do — until Diantha's arrival transforms the household and, indirectly, his marriage.
- Related: Isabel Porne
H
- Hector
- Julianna's young son, employed at Union House as a bellboy and kitchen helper — one of several small details through which Gilman shows Diantha's enterprise providing dignified work and stability to an entire family, not just a single servant.
- Related: Julianna, Union House
- Hotel del las Casas
- The luxury hotel-and-cottage development that becomes Diantha's crowning achievement: individual homes clustered around a central hotel offering shared professional kitchens, laundry, and childcare — proving her domestic-service model scalable to the wealthy as well as the middle class.
- Related: Mrs. Weatherstone, Union House
- House Worker's Union
- The core labor arrangement at Union House: some thirty trained women who work agreed hours for hourly or daily pay, keep their own rooms, and are 'found' (housed and fed) themselves, in contrast to the live-in servant model that gave employers near-total control over a worker's off hours.
- Related: Union House
I
- Isabel Porne
- A trained architect turned reluctant housewife, whose marriage to Edgar Porne collapses her professional ambitions into an endless, ill-suited struggle with cooking and cleaning. Diantha's first employer, under the assumed name 'Miss Bell,' and the novel's clearest portrait of talent wasted on undesired domestic drudgery.
- Related: Edgar Porne, Miss Bell (Alias)
J
- Julianna
- The sharp-tongued, formidably capable cook Diantha hires for Union House, a Black woman with a complicated marital history and no patience for foolishness, whose skill anchors the kitchen and whose son Hector works alongside her as an errand boy.
- Related: Union House
M
- Madam Weatherstone
- A wealthy, distantly related relation of the Wardens whom Mrs. Warden hopes might help the family financially — an early, passive contrast to the far more consequential Mrs. Weatherstone, the widow who actually becomes Diantha's patron and business partner.
- Related: Mrs. Weatherstone, Mrs. Warden
- Mr. and Mrs. Bell
- Diantha's parents. Her father, Henderson Bell, is a failed rancher who insists a daughter owes her family unpaid labor as a matter of course; her mother is a capable woman worn down by decades of unpaid, unloved housework, whose quiet regret over her own wasted talent for accounts partly inspires Diantha's mission.
- Related: Diantha Bell, The Itemized Account
- Mr. and Mrs. Thaddler
- A quarrelsome Orchardina couple: Mrs. Thaddler is Diantha's most vocal social opponent, dismissing her enterprise as scandalous, while Mr. Thaddler, largely out of spite toward his wife, becomes one of Diantha's most enthusiastic supporters and a part-owner of the grocery store that gives her business favorable rates.
- Mrs. Ellen A. Dankshire
- The vigorous, well-intentioned president of the Home and Culture Club who champions Diantha as a fascinating case study in 'the sacredness of home duties,' largely missing that Diantha's business is meant to dismantle, not sanctify, the unpaid domestic ideal.
- Related: Home and Culture Club
- Mrs. Ree
- The Home and Culture Club's timid corresponding secretary, who worries that exposing servants to Diantha's ideas about the dignity and pay of household labor might be 'dangerous' — voicing the anxiety respectable Orchardina feels about Diantha's example spreading.
- Related: Home and Culture Club
- Mrs. Roscoe Warden
- Ross's mother, a genteel widow devoted to crocheting afghans and family pride, who leans on Ross financially and emotionally without recognizing the burden it places on him, and who regards Diantha's paid work as a disgrace to the family.
- Related: The Warden Household, Ross Warden
- Mrs. Thorald
- A Danish laundress Diantha hires for Union House along with her husband, a former miller left unable to hold steady work after a head injury; Diantha gives him a job as porter, matching the household's needs to a couple most employers would have turned away separately.
- Related: Union House
- Mrs. Weatherstone
- A wealthy widow and Diantha's most important backer, who first employs her as a housekeeper, then provides the capital and credit that let Union House expand into the Hotel del las Casas — insisting all the while that her investment, not charity, is what makes the partnership work.
- Related: Union House, Hotel del las Casas
O
- Orchardina
- The fictional Southern California town where the novel is set, chosen by Diantha deliberately for its mild climate, wealthy residents, tourist trade, and chronic shortage of domestic servants — conditions she calculates will make her business model succeed.
R
- Ross Warden
- Diantha's fiancé and later husband, a scientifically minded man burdened with running his late father's grocery store to support his mother and four sisters. His discomfort with Diantha's public, paid work drives the novel's central tension, and his slow, hard-won approval of it closes the book.
- Related: Diantha Bell, The Warden Household
S
- Sexuo-Economic Dependence
- Gilman's term, developed at length in her nonfiction work Women and Economics, for women's economic dependence on men through marriage in exchange for domestic and sexual labor. The novel dramatizes a practical solution to this dependence: paid, professional domestic work that lets women earn independently.
- Related: Domestic Labor as Business
T
- The Home and Culture Club
- Orchardina's women's club, led by the well-meaning but conventional Mrs. Dankshire, which invites Diantha to lecture on 'The True Nature of Domestic Industry' — a scene through which Gilman satirizes reform-minded women who admire Diantha's efficiency without grasping the radical economic argument behind it.
- Related: Domestic Labor as Business
- The Itemized Account
- Diantha's detailed ledger, presented to her father in Chapter II, calculating in dollars both what he spent raising her and what her years of unpaid household labor were worth — proving that he in fact owes her money, not the reverse. It is the novel's clearest dramatization of Gilman's argument that domestic work has real, calculable economic value.
- Related: Mr. and Mrs. Bell, Domestic Labor as Business
- The Warden Household
- Ross's mother and four sisters — Madeline, Adeline, Coraline, and Doraline — who live in genteel, ornamental idleness on Ross's grocery income, embroidering gifts for him and declining even light housework while he strains under mortgage debt to support them.
- Related: Ross Warden
- The Weismann Controversy
- The real scientific debate over August Weismann's theory that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, which Ross Warden spends years testing through a multi-generation guinea pig breeding experiment — his parallel intellectual struggle for recognition mirrors Diantha's fight to have her own work taken seriously.
- Related: Ross Warden
U
- Union House
- The cooperative boarding-and-service establishment Diantha founds in a converted old hotel building — offering trained household help, cooked-food delivery, and a workers' club on a business footing, meant to professionalize domestic labor and free other women from its unpaid, isolated form.
- Related: Diantha Bell, House Worker's Union, Cooked Food Delivery