Meet the writers: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
American writer, economist, and lecturer, an early theorist of the feminist movement, who wrote over two hundred short stories and about ten novels, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also famous for her positions as a feminist - although she refused to call herself so. She used to say that the domestic environment had become an institution which oppressed women.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860. Her father, a librarian and writer, abandoned her mother, Mary Westcott Perkins, after their infant died in 1866 - Mary Perkins lived with her children on poverty and was often forced to move from relative to relative.
Gilman was a voracious reader and largely self-educated. She studied two years at Rhode Island School of Design (1878-80) and then earned her living designing greetings cards. In 1884 she married Charles Walter Stetson, an aspiring artist. From her early adulthood, she had suffered from periodic bouts of melancloly, and after the birth of their daughter Katharine, she was beset by depression. Gilman began treatment with a famous doctor at their time, who recommender her to ”live as domestic a life as possible” and “never touch a pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman later satirized this in her autobiography, and used the discussions in her most renowned short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Loosely based on Gilman’s own experiendes it tells of a young mother suffering from a temporary nervous depression. John, her husband, is a physician, who doesn’t believe in supernatural things. He has ordered her to “rest” in the bedroom of their rented house. There narrator records her psychological torment in a secret diary. The patterns of the room’s hideous yellow wallpaper start to haunt her. She sees a woman creeping around it, as if she wanted to get out. Finally she locks her inside the room to creep around as she pleases:
“Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal - having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometime fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus - but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (from ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’)
After divorcing her first husband in 1894, Gilman moved to California and married her cousin George Houghton Gilman, a New York lawyer. She worked as an editor as well as a lecturer and writer, and had her own feminist newspaper, , The Forerunner, in which most of her fiction appeared. The magazine had nearly 1,500 subscribers. She also wrote non-fiction books such as economic analysis of the U.S. and sociological discussions on labor and women’s conditions.
In 1932 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After her husband died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, she returned to California to live near her daughter. Gilman died on August 17, 1935, in Pasadena, California - an advocate of euthanasia, she ended her own life by taking an overdose of chloroform. Gilman and her work were mostly forgotten for two decades until the feminist movement of the 1960s revived the interest in her work.
