ABSTRACT
In a letter written from Belmont, New Hampshire, September 2, 1897, Charlotte Perldns Stetson exclaimed, “Thirty-five hundred words I wrote this morning, in three hours!” A book’s chapter in one sitting; a successive six-week dizzy pace of morning writing; elaborate consultations with her closest critic, Houghton Gilman, soon to be her second husband; and thus was Women and Economics dashed into print. Jane Addams, already emerging as one of America’s foremost social reformers, expressed her gratitude to Charlotte, her “pleasure and satisfaction,” her “greatest admiration55 for the “Masterpiece.” Florence Kelly, another pioneer of social settlement reform viewed it as “the first real, substantial contribution made by a woman to the science of economics.” According to The Nation, “Since John Stuart Mill’s essays on The Subjection of Women, there has been no book dealing with the whole position of women to approach it in originality of conception and brilliancy of exposition. 1
