Forerunner (magazine)

The Forerunner was a monthly magazine produced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (best known as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper), from 1909 through 1916. During that time, she wrote all of every issue—editorials, critical articles, book reviews, essays, poems, stories, and six serialized novels. The magazine was based in New York City.

The first issue of the Forerunner appeared in November 1909. Among the most interesting pieces published in The Forerunner are the three novels of Gilman's feminist utopian trilogy, Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916). Herland, the most famous of these books, presents an all-women society in which women reproduce themselves through parthenogenesis, and the female value of nurturing is upheld by the community.

Gilman used The Forerunner as the venue for other major works, including Man-Made World (1911) and her novels What Diantha Did (1909–10), The Crux (1911), Mag-Marjorie (1912), Won Over (1913), and Begnina Machiavelli (1914). The magazine ceased publication in 1916.

The Forerunner takes up 28 full-length books.

As an advocate for women’s rights, Gilman began publishing Forerunner to reach out to women during the early 1900s who hoped to further their franchise and natural rights to become equal to the rights which were afforded to men. She aimed to change the idea that women must be passive and their only role be in household duties. Gilman wanted to attract the average woman to become a reader, and aid in persuading them to fight for a just change in society. According to Cane and Alves, “The short fiction written and published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her magazine, the Forerunner (1909–16), concerns ordinary women who deflect the traditional trajectories of their lives to create better situations for themselves and, in so doing, improve the lives of those around them.” Forerunner not only fought to contradict the popular media of the time, but also proposed new ideas on the place of women in society.

The writings published by Gilman in Forerunner were of sharp contrast to the texts that were available to women during the early 1900s. Women were expected to read about the appropriate etiquette assumed for them in marriage and the household. For example, the paramount journal of the early 1900s was Ladies’ Home Journal, which portrayed women as passive, focused on marriage and family issues, and was concerned with reaching the specific audience of middle class white women. Cane and Alves bring to light Gilman’s goals. “Gilman’s Forerunner, on the other hand, existed to counteract popular images of women and such personal limitations on their everyday lives that the mass media promulgated.” Fighting the assumed roles of women and the representation of women in society was not a simple undertaking given the constraints placed upon women by the general public and prevailing cultural standards. A patriarchal society was rampantly dominant throughout the standing government and general population. The beliefs held by the community of a woman’s place restricted a woman’s access to opportunity and education, a problem which Gilman was passionately determined to change.

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