Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist, novelist and lecturer for social reform in the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She is most famous today for her novella The Yellow Wallpaper, a semi-autobiographical work she wrote after a bout of post-partum psychosis.
Gilman was born in 1860, in Connecticut to a family which was impoverished by her father leaving when she was five. She grew up moving around (she attended 7 different schools) and with several aunts (including Harriet Beecher Stowe) at various times, as her mother could not support the family. She spent a lot of time reading in public libraries, so although her formal education was fairly rudimentary, she had read widely and had great general knowledge by the time she reached adulthood.
She became an artist, and supported herself by designing trade cards, and married a fellow artist, Charles Walter Stetson, in 1884, despite not being sure if he was right for her. She had a daughter, Katherine, the year after, and suffered serious post partum psychosis, for which doctor’s treatment was “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time… Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.”. By 1888, she and Charles had both decided that they must separate, for the sake of Charlotte’s mental health, and Charlotte moved to California with her daughter.
In California, she became very active in feminist and reformist organisations, writing and editing for several of them. In 1890, she had a very successful year, writing The Yellow Wallpaper, as well as fifteen other works, a mixture of poetry, prose, fiction and non fiction.
As an example of living by her feminist principles, in 1894 Charlotte sent her (now 9 year old) daughter to live with her father, and his new wife (a good friend of Charlotte’s). She believed that it was important for both father and daughter to know each other.
By this time, Charlotte was becoming an important feminist and reformer. She was a successful speechmaker, who earned her living making speeches, as well as a poet, and novelist. She represented California at the national Suffrage convention, and the International Socialist and Labour congress in Great Britain. She began writing on economics, and women, and her book Women and Economics propelled her into the international spotlight. In it and its successor The Home: its work and Influence, she argued that the domestic environment oppressed women through the patriarchal beliefs upheld by society. Gilman argued that male aggressiveness and maternal roles for women were artificial and no longer necessary for survival in post-prehistoric times. She wrote, “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver”.
She moved back east to New York, in 1893, and in 1900 married her cousin, Houghton Gilman, and their marriage seems to have been a happy one. He died in 1922, suddenly, and she moved back to California to be near her daughter. In 1932, at the age of 72, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and in 1935 she took her own life using an overdose of chloroform, choosing “chloroform over cancer” as she wrote in her suicide note.
Reading the issues that she campaigned about and wrote about – the assigning of gender roles through toys early in a child’s life, the need for reform of the home to enable women to live equal lives with men, and the need for more equal relationships between men and women to make for happy marriages. It seems sad that today she is remembered mostly for The Yellow Wallpaper when she had so much more to say.
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This is part of a serious of notable women from where we are as we travel the world. Unusually, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was actually a feminist – most of the others have been notable for ways in which they stepped outside their assigned gender roles in times when that was very difficult. I’d love suggestions for future subjects – our itinerary is here.
Yay! Love Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her sociological anlysis of patriarchy, although it makes me a bit sad that so many of the topics of her analysis are still live issues 120 years later. Listen up, people!
Hi JV! Yes I meant to say in the post that this post was especially for you. I think I first discovered Charlotte Perkins Gilman when you were studying her when we lived at North Road.
Jennifer