"Moving the Mountain"

1911 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860-1935). “Moving the Mountain.” The Forerunner 2.1 - 12 (January - December 1911): 21-25, 51-56, 79-84, 107-13, 135-41, 163-68, 190-95, 219-24, 247-80, 302-09, 330-35. Repub. New York: Charlton Company, 1911. Serial rpt. in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: “Moving the Mountain,” “Herland,” and “With Her in Ourland”. Ed. Minna Doskow (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 37-149. This ed. compares The Forerunner version with the Clarion version and includes the brief “Preface” from the Clarion version that was not in The Forerunner (37). Excerpt published in The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Ed. Ann J. Lane (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 178-88; and in Carol Farley Kessler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia With Selected Writings (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 159-73. KU, PSt

Detailed feminist eutopia. “‘Moving the Mountain’ is a short distance Utopia, a baby Utopia, a little one that can grow. It involves no other change than a change of mind, the mere awakening of people, especially the women, to existing possibilities. It indicates what people might do, real people, now living, in thirty years--if they would” (6). No poverty, no pollution, no racial problems, no gender conflict, and little disease. A two-hour workday is required, but most work four.   Female author.