The Crux portrays a multigenerational group of women who flee the repressive traditions of their New England village on the advice of a woman physician. Migrating to the free and progressive West, they find personal growth and self-fulfillment in a Colorado town. An argument against the nineteenth-century ideal of female "innocence" that left women vulnerable to sexually transmitted disease, the novel invokes classic frontier ideology along with a feminist critique of the male-dominated medical establishment in order to argue for women's sexual self-determination. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a pioneering figure in twentieth-century feminism, an intrepid social theorist, writer, and activist. Originally serialized in Gilman's magazine The Forerunner in 1911, The Crux envisions many of her best-known reformist ideas for gender relations and social organization. In their Massachusetts hometown, her female protagonists languish out of duty to Victorian values that circumscribe women's personal and intellectual development. In Colorado, however they help to establish a thriving new world founded on many of Gilman's principles for progressive social change, including socialized housekeeping, professionalized child care, and economic independence for white, middle-class women.
This edition of the novel includes explanatory notes to Gilman's text and a scholarly introduction.
