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In one of the stranger passages in her autobiography, the famous turn-of-the-century feminist writer, reformer, and activist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, humorously registers her concerns about wayward reproduction while in the process confessing half-seriously that she never feels completely confident in regarding herself as a true American because of her symbolically inauspicious birthday. Noting that her arrival into the world on July 3, 1860, was untimely, she laments, "If only I'd made it to the glorious fourth! This may be called the first misplay in a long game that is full of them."1 Here, as in much of her work, Gilman informs readers that the ideal national is hard to (re)produce, for the perfect American citizen must be free of the various forms of "misplay" to which reproduction is prey in current form.
The idea that something was terribly wrong with the national reproductive process is, I suggest, the issue that most compelled Gilman. The diagnosis of this situation and the proposal of an array of solutions was her life's work. Curiously, neither those feminists credited with the discovery/recovery of Gilman's writings in the 1970s, nor more pressingly, the vast majority of those who have recently written on Gilman, have noted the centrality of racialized reproductive thinking to her feminism, or her express concern with women's role in creating a "pure" national genealogy. Indeed, most critics continue to celebrate Gilman as a feminist foremother, who, despite her flaws, should be situated at the origin of the genealogy of feminism which they wish to sketch. In assessing the relationship between the dominant trends within Gilman scholarship and Gilman's own writings, this article locates the conceptual continuities between Gilman's work and that of many of her critics. It excavates Gilman's racism and nativism, while simultaneously tracking the persistent celebration of her feminism by her readers. In so doing, it pays close attention to the relationship between issues of racial formation, racism, nationalism, and imperialism, and the politics of contemporary feminist knowledge production.
Within this investigation, genealogy emerges as a pivotal concept; it is the central object of analysis and the principal method of scholarly inquiry. It is a central object because in Gilman's substantial corpus, genealogy emerges as her lifelong obsession; her belief in women's reproductive role in...