Moving the Mountain (1911)

AUTHOR: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

KEYWORDS: gender, social reform, women

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SUMMARY (Deborah Madsen):

The first of Gilman's feminist utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911) imagines a future US narrated by the protagonist who has been missing for thirty years. He returns to his family unchanged from the moment he disappeared but the world he finds has transformed dramatically in the course of three decades, and in ways that he finds difficult to accept. The focus of the novel is social reform: equal opportunities for women, communal living, rational efficiency, and technological social management. In this future society food is plentiful and affordable but it is a world that uses "humane" slaughterhouses that are still considered necessary. Gilman's sympathy with eugenic thinking, in relation to animal welfare,  is more dominant in this novel than her subsequent utopias, Herland (1915) and With Her in Ourland (1916).