The author of this text, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is regarded by many as one of the leading intellectuals in the women's movement in the US from 1900 to 1920. Yet by the mid-1960s she was nearly forgotten, and "Women and Economics" was long out of print. Revived here with a new introduction, the text anticipates many of the issues and thinkers of 1960s.

Gilman's ideas represent an integration of socialist thought and Darwinian theory and provide a disruption of the nearly all-male canon of American economic and social thought. She stresses the connection between work and home and between public and private life; calls for extensive childcare facilities, parental leave policies and wages for housework; and argues for new housing arrangements with communal kitchens and hired cooks. She contends that women's entry into the public arena and the reforms of the family would be a win-win situation for both women and men as the public sphere would no longer be deprived of women's particular abilities, and men would be able to enlarge the possibilities to experience and express the emotional sustenance of family life.