Moving the Mountain

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was imagining feminist futures before the word existed. In this startling 1911 novel, a man named John Robertson sleeps through thirty years of revolution and wakes to find everything he knew has been turned inside out. Women now govern, work, and live without the chains he took for granted. His wife has become a physician. His daughter flies airplanes. The world he left behind was a sleepy Victorian America; the world he enters is something else entirely. As John struggles to understand this transformed society, Gilman uses his bewilderment to interrogate every assumption her readers held dear. Part utopian vision, part uncomfortable mirror, Moving the Mountain asks what progress actually costs those who benefited from the old order, and whether any of us can truly see the prison we live in until we're suddenly outside it.