Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Life

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860. Her father left the family soon after her birth, and she grew up in poverty, moving frequently with her mother and brother. She was related through her father to the Beecher family, including the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she was largely self-educated, with some study at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she supported herself as a painter of trade cards.

In 1884 she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson, and after the birth of their daughter the following year she fell into a severe depression. She was treated by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell with his rest cure, which she later described as nearly destroying her, and her recovery began only after she left for California in 1888 and separated from her husband. Her story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) came directly out of that experience. The couple divorced in 1894, and she sent her daughter to live with Stetson and his new wife, a decision for which she was widely criticized.

Gilman spent the 1890s lecturing on women, labor, and social reform. Women and Economics (1898), which argued that women’s economic dependence on men was the root of their subordination, made her internationally known. In 1900 she married her cousin George Houghton Gilman. From 1909 to 1916 she wrote and published a monthly magazine, The Forerunner, entirely by herself, including the utopian novel Herland (1915). Diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, she ended her own life in Pasadena in 1935.

Literary significance

Gilman was one of the leading feminist intellectuals of her generation in the United States, and her nonfiction on the economics of the household was widely read and debated in its time. Her fiction was long neglected; The Yellow Wallpaper was rediscovered in the 1970s and is now a standard text in American literature courses, read both as a gothic story and as an account of how medical authority was used to control women. Herland has also been revived as an early feminist utopia.

Where to start

The Yellow Wallpaper takes less than an hour and is the reason most readers come to her.