Women’s Studies, 34:159–189, Copyright © Taylor & Francis Inc. ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online DOI: 10.1080/ 00497870590923908 159 Women’s Studies 342Taylor & FrancisTaylor and Francis 325 Chestnut StreetPhiladelphiaPA191060049-78781547-7045 GWST Taylor & Francis Inc. 52577 10.1080/ 00497870590923908 2005 1 44 Karsten H. Piep War as Feminist Utopia WAR AS FEMINIST UTOPIA IN DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER’S HOME FIRES IN FRANCE AND GERTRUDE ATHERTON’S THE WHITE MORNING KARSTEN H. PIEP Miami University of Ohio Now is the time for practical Utopias. —Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “A Woman’s Utopia” (1907) See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women! —Mabel Potter Daggett, Women Wanted (1918) In 1915, as Europe’s war toll was mounting and hopes for a quick peace settlement were fading, Charlotte Perkins Gilman presented readers of her magazine Forerunner with a very different world: a world without “wars,” “kings,” “priests,” and “aristocracies”; a rural world of fecund pastures and lush peach groves, where disease and poverty are unknown; a world in which the upbringing and educa- tion of children is the highest societal duty; a world dedicated to the pursuit of beauty, health, intellect, and strength of character; a world populated by “the best kind of people,” who are bound “together—not by competition, but by united action” ( Herland 51). Notably, Herland is also a world without men. For Gilman, whose Women and Economics (1898) had established her alongside Edward Bellamy as one of America’s preeminent feminists and Fabian-style socialists—masculinity, warfare, and domination were inextricably linked. Gilman, like most of her contemporaries, subscribed to the theory of innate gender differences. Men, according to this widely accepted notion, possessed certain sex traits that predisposed them to a combative, competitive, and highly individualistic (“self-expressive”) behavior, which found full expression within patriarchic or, in Gilman’s words, “androcentric” Address correspondence to Karsten H. Piep, Miami University Oxford, Ohio, 45056- 3414. E-mail: piepkh@