When I Was a Witch & Other Stories

A powerful collection of early feminist stories from the activist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Gilman created a world that could be viewed from the feminist gaze. She focused on how women were not just stay-at-home mothers they were expected to be but also people who had dreams, who were able to travel and work just as men did, and whose goals included a society where women were just as important as men. In the early 1900s this was striking and revolutionary. The stories in this collection are: ’A Coincidence’; ’According To Solomon’, ’An Offender’, ’A Middle-Sized Artist’, ’Martha’s Mother’, ’Her Housekeeper’, ’When I Was A Witch’, ’Making a Living’, ’A Coincidence, The Cottagette’, ’The Boys and the Butter’, ’My Astonishing Dodo’, and ’A Word In Season’.

Foundations of Feminist Fiction. The early 1900s saw a quiet revolution in literature dominated by male adventure heroes. Both men and women moved beyond the norms of the male gaze to write from a different gender perpective, sometimes with female protagonists, but also expressing the universal freedom to write on any subject whatsoever.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935), also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, advocate for social reform. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.