"Charlotte Perkins Gilman-brilliant, outspoken, and iconoclastic-was both a socialist and a leader of the organized women's rights movement. Undoubtedly the most radical of the second generation of suffrage leaders, she attacked the home and domesticity because of its deadening influence on the female mind and spirit, and she announced her willingness-even eagerness-to abandon the conventional social structure to which most of her sisters in the mainstream feminist movement were committed. Gilman's socialism was non-Marxist; Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward and a sequel, Equality, had influenced her profoundly. Both of Bellamy's utopian visions, but particularly the latter, advocated participation of women in the work force in traditionally masculine occupations such as engineering and the skilled crafts as well as in more conventionally feminine pursuits; economic equality; and the removal of domestic tasks, including child care, to the public realm. Gilman concurred that equality would never be possible without full participation in economic life. And such participation required the socialization of childrearing and domestic tasks. Men and children, as well as women, would benefit under the new arrangement. An economically independent woman would marry for love, and children would grow to maturity in an environment that consisted not merely of an untrained mother's efforts, but of the attention of specialists in child care and education. Although she attacked conventional domestic arrangements, Gilman was not against the family. She argued: "Like all natural institutions the family has a purpose; and is to be measured primarily as it serves that purpose; which is, the care and nurture of the young. To protect the helpless little ones, to feed and shelter them, to ensure them the benefits of an even longer period of immaturity, and so to improve the race-this is the original purpose of the family." Men, she determined, had subverted that purpose: "What man has done to the family, speaking broadly, is to change it from an institution for the best service of the child, to one modified to his own service, the vehicle of his comfort, power and pride." In order to create a mutually rewarding family life a family "based on love and ... maintained because of its happiness and use"-society must destroy the old notion of home." People trained for the tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child care could better perform house-keeping duties than the isolated wife. Women would become free to develop their special talents, and Gilman believed that a free womanhood was necessary to full social development."