Bio+Charlotte+Perkins+Gilman

CHARLOTTE (ANNA) PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) - Original name Charlotte Anna Perkins, earlier married name Stetson

American writer, economist, and lecturer, an early theorist of the feminist movement, who wrote over two hundred short stories and some ten novels. Gilman refused to call herself a "feminist" - her goal as a humanist was to campaign for the cause of women's suffrage. Gilman saw that the domestic environment has become an institution which oppresses women. Her famous story, 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892), depicted a depressed woman who slowly descends into madness in her room while her well-meaning husband is often away due to his work at a hospital.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Frederick Beecher Perkins, a librarian and writer, and Mary (Westcott) Perkins. Among her father's forebears was the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, his aunt. Perkins abandoned his wife after their infant died in 1866 - Mary Perkins lived with her children on the brink of poverty and was often forced to move from relative to relative or to other temporary lodgings.

Charlotte Perkins 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. After the birth of their daughter Katharine, she was beset by depression, and began treatment with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in 1886. His recommendations, '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', which first appeared in New England Magazine (1892).

In 1888 Gilman separated from Stetson (divorced in 1894), and moved to California, where she wrote her first books in the 1890s, starting with IN THIS OUR WORLD, a collection of satiric poems with feminist themes. Gilman became active in Nationalism, a reform movement inspired by Edward Bellamy's utopian socialist romance Looking Backward.

Gilman's best-known work is WOMEN AND ECONOMICS (1898), in which she attacked the old division of social roles. According to Gilman, male aggressiveness and maternal roles of women are artificial and not necessary for survival any more. "There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver." (from Woman and Economics, 1898) Only economic independence could bring true freedom for women and make them equal partners to their husbands. In CONCERNING CHILDREN (1900) Gilman advocated professional child-care.

Gilman married her cousin George Gillman, a New York lawyer, in 1902. During the next two decades she gained fame with her lectures on women's issues, ethics, labor, and social concerns. Gilman founded, edited and wrote her own monthly journal Forerunner from 1909 to 1916. Several of her novels also appeared first in the paper.

Annoyed with life in a multiracial metropolis, she moved in 1922 with her husband from New York to Norwich, Connecticut, and wrote there HIS RELIGION AND HERS, in which she planned a religion freed from the dictates of oppressive patriarchal instincts. In 1932 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After her husband died in 1934, she returned to California to live near her daughter. Gilman died on August 17, 1935, in Pasadena, California - she ended her own life by taking an overdose of chloroform. Her autobiography, THE LIVING OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1935), appeared posthumously. Gilman´s mystery novel - UNPUNISHED - was not published during her lifetime but appeared in 1997 from The Feminist Press. Gilman and her work were mostly forgotten for two decades until the feminist movement of the 1960s revived interest in her.