First published serially in Gilman’s magazine The Forerunner from 1909–1910, What Diantha Did is the story of Diantha Bell, a young woman who leaves her home and her fiancé to start a housecleaning business. A resourceful heroine, Diantha quickly expands her business into an enterprise that includes a maid service, cooked food delivery service, a restaurant, and a hotel. By assigning a cash value to women’s “invisible” work, providing a means for the well-being and moral uplift of working girls, and releasing middle-class and leisure-class women from the burden of conventional domestic chores, Diantha proves to her family and community the benefits of professionalized housekeeping.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is best known for “The Yellow Wallpaper,” her famous 1892 tale of a woman’s descent into madness, which is considered an important early work of American feminist literature due to its illustration of the attitudes toward the mental and physical health of women in the nineteenth century. What Diantha Did, Gilman’s first novel, provides indispensable insight into Gilman’s legacy of social thought.
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