What Diantha Did.

What Diantha Did is the first novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the American feminist theorist, writer, and social reformer best known for her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and her landmark work of feminist economics Women and Economics (1898). First published serially in Gilman's own magazine The Forerunner in 1909–10, the novel tells the story of Diantha Bell, a young woman who leaves her home and her fiancé to start a housecleaning business, which she rapidly expands into an enterprise encompassing a maid service, cooked food delivery service, restaurant, and hotel — assigning a cash value to women's invisible domestic labor, providing for the well-being of working girls, and releasing middle-class women from the burden of conventional domestic chores. The novel engages directly with hotly debated Progressive Era issues including the "servant question," the rise of domestic science, and middle-class efforts to protect and aid the working girl, making it less a conventional novel than what one scholar has aptly described as a novelized essay — a vehicle for demonstrating that Gilman's feminist socioeconomic theories were not merely abstract but practically realizable.