The suffragettes were not the only force making waves for the mainstream. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote the groundbreaking Women and Economics, published in 1898, which viewed marriage with an economic perspective: A wife pays for her room and board in her husband's house by bearing his children, rendering sexual reproduction an economic function and the American family nothing more than a system of barter. Edna attempts to exit this system by funding her own little household but still cannot escape its grip — hardly good news for those women who agreed with Gilman's analysis.
Edna's status as a trophy wife — a woman whose life of leisure is a testament to her husband's financial success — is essential to her development, however. Because she has servants to attend to necessary household tasks and take care of her children, she can devote time to art, solitary reflection, and the influential relationships. Reviewers from the 1970s until the present note that the servants in Edna's household are rarely heard to speak, and frequently their names are not given. The lack of attention in the novel to the servant women's perspectives tells a great deal in the omission — if Edna could not free herself from the role society cast her in, how much more difficult must it have been for those women trapped in Louisiana's elaborate racial caste system. Only a few short decades after the Civil War, Louisiana retained its intensely bigoted environment and practices.
In addition, the sexism associated with the antebellum South was alive and well for Chopin and Edna. In highly conservative Louisiana, women were expected to behave as stereotypical Southern belles, pure of heart and chaste in action. Such a role symbolically prohibited an active place in public life. Literal constraints were in place, as well, such as the law that declared married women, along with children and the mentally ill, incompetent to initiate or complete legal contracts. As an independent-minded woman and native of St. Louis, Chopin drew on her own experiences as an outsider in Louisiana to flesh out Edna's portrait as a scandalously independent woman. Like Edna, Chopin sought to create her own life, such as instituting a literary salon to replace all the other social visits society expected her to pay. However, unlike Edna, Chopin was very much at home in her independence.
