Charlotte Perkins Gilman

She is best known for her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), based on her experience with postpartum depression; her manifesto calling for women's economic independence, Women and Economics (1898); and the utopian feminist novel, Herland (1915). She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.

The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is poetry. Works named in the authority record are The Yellow Wall Paper, Herland and Women and Economics. Distinctions recorded are National Women's Hall of Fame and Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame.

Charlotte Anna Perkins was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Mary Fitch Westcott and Frederic Beecher Perkins, a member of a prominent American religious and literary family. Charlotte had one brother, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months older. During Charlotte's infancy, her father moved out and abandoned his wife and children, and the remainder of her childhood was spent in poverty. Her mother was not affectionate with her children. She forbade her children from forming strong friendships or reading fiction. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gilman wrote that her mother showed affection only when she thought her young daughter was asleep. Though estranged from Frederic, the Perkins relied on his aunts for support, including Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, both of whom influenced Charlotte's perceptions of the world. In written communication with her father, he provided her with reading lists for scholarly works on history, anthropology, and the sciences. Much of Gilman's youth was spent in Providence, Rhode Island. What friends she had were mainly male, and she was unashamed to call herself a "tomboy". Her schooling was erratic: she attended seven different schools, for a cumulative total of just four years, ending when she was fifteen. Her natural intelligence and breadth of knowledge always impressed her teachers, who were nonetheless disappointed in her because she was a poor student. She was known to frequent the public library to study physics, literature, history (particularly ancient civilizations) on her own. Her favorite subject was "natural philosophy", especially what later would become known as physics. In 1878, the eighteen-year-old enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design with the monetary help of her absent father, and subsequently supported herself as an artist of trade cards. She was a tutor, and encouraged others to expand their artistic creativity. She was also a painter. During her time at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gilman met Martha Luther in about 1879 and was believed to be in a romantic relationship with her. Gilman described the close relationship she had with Luther in her autobiography: We were closely together, increasingly happy together, for four of those long years of girlhood. She was nearer and dearer than any one up to that time. This was love, but not sex... With Martha I knew perfect happiness... We were not only extremely fond of each other, but we had fun together, deliciously... Letters between the two women chronicles their lives from 1883 to 1889 and contains over 50 letters, including correspondence, illustrations and manuscripts. They pursued their relationship until Luther ended the relationship to marry a man in 1881. Gilman was devastated and detested romance and love until she met her first husband.

In 1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson, whom she met while studying art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson (1885–1979), was born the following year on March 23, 1885. Gilman suffered a serious bout of postpartum depression, and was prescribed lengthy confinement to her bed, known as the "rest cure treatment" under supervision of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who developed the treatment. Gilman was given the following instructions: "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." She tried for a few months to follow Mitchell's advice, but her depression deepened, and she came perilously close to a full emotional collapse. She began to display suicidal behavior that involved talk of pistols and chloroform, as recorded in her husband's diaries. This experience inspired her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892). In 1888, Charlotte separated from her husband—a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth century—and moved to Pasadena, California with her daughter and lived with friend Grace Ellery Channing. She officially divorced Stetson in 1894, and he married Channing. Gilman reported in her memoir that she was happy for the couple, since Katharine's "second mother was fully as good as the first, [and perhaps] better in some ways." Gilman also held progressive views about paternal rights and acknowledged that her ex-husband "had a right to some of [Katharine's] society" and that Katharine "had a right to know and love her father." After her mother died in 1893, Gilman decided to move back east for the first time in eight years. She contacted Houghton Gilman, her first cousin, whom she had not seen in roughly fifteen years, who was a Wall Street attorney. They began spending time together almost immediately and became romantically involved. While she went on lecture tours, Houghton and Charlotte exchanged letters and spent as much time as they could together before she left. From their wedding in 1900 until 1922, they lived in New York City. In 1922, Gilman moved from New York to Houghton's old homestead in Norwich, Connecticut. Following Houghton's sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, Gilman moved back to Pasadena, California, where her daughter lived. In January 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer. An advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, Gilman died by suicide on August 17, 1935, by taking an overdose of chloroform. In both her autobiography and suicide note, she wrote that she "chose chloroform over cancer" and she died quickly and quietly.

After moving to Pasadena, Gilman became active in organizing social reform movements. As a delegate, she represented California in 1896 at both the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C., and the International Socialist and Labor Congress in London. In 1890, she was introduced to the Nationalist Clubs movement which worked to "end capitalism's greed and distinctions between classes while promoting a peaceful, ethical, and truly progressive human race." Published in the Nationalist magazine, her poem "Similar Cases" was a satirical review of people who resisted social change, and she received positive feedback from critics for it. Throughout that same year, 1890, she became inspired enough to write fifteen essays, poems, a novella, and the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper". Her career was launched when she began lecturing on Nationalism and gained the public's eye with her first volume of poetry, In This Our World, published in 1893. As a successful lecturer who relied on giving speeches as a source of income, her fame grew along with her social circle of similar-minded activists and writers of the feminist movement. Over the course of her career, in addition to publishing poems and fiction, Gilman published six significant books of non-fiction; a contribution which led her to be seen as one of the “women founders” of the discipline of sociology. These works, and additional published journal articles, exposed both gender and class inequality, criticizing it as illegitimate and unfair. She was a member of the American Sociological Association from the time of its founding in 1905 to her death in 1935.

In 1890, Gilman wrote her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which is now the all-time best selling book of the Feminist Press. She wrote it on June 6 and 7, 1890, in her home of Pasadena, and it was printed a year and a half later in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. Since its original printing, it has been anthologized in numerous collections of women's literature, American literature, and textbooks, though not always in its original form. For instance, many textbooks omit the phrase "in marriage" from a very important line in the beginning of story: "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage." The reason for this omission is a mystery, as Gilman's views on marriage are made clear throughout the story. The story is about a woman who suffers from mental illness after three months of being closeted in a room by her husband for the sake of her health. She becomes obsessed with the room's revolting yellow wallpaper. Gilman wrote this story to change people's minds about the role of women in society, illustrating how women's lack of autonomy is detrimental to their mental, emotional, and even physical wellbeing. This story was inspired by her treatment from her first husband. The narrator in the story must do as her husband (who is also her doctor) demands, although the treatment he prescribes contrasts directly with what she truly needs—mental stimulation and the freedom to escape the monotony of the room to which she is confined. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was essentially a response to the doctor (Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell) who had tried to cure her of her depression through a "rest cure" and who is mentioned in the story: "John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall." She sent him a copy of the story. "The Yellow Wallpaper" has very similar aspects to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s own life, specifically her struggles with mental health and her experience with the “rest cure”-therapy. After the birth of her daughter in 1885, Gilman suffered from severe depression. On the advice of her doctor, she got a treatment for that she had to live a quiet, domestic life, avoid intellectual work, and keep her distance from any form of creative expression, including writing or painting. This treatment, intended to improve her health, instead it worsened her mental state, which made her write the story about the experience from the perspective of her own fictional character “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In the short story, the narrator, Jane, goes through a similar treatment, to stay in a room and unallowed to write. The isolation and lack of tasks lead her to a mental decline and following breakdown, symbolized by her obsession with the yellow wallpaper.

The Crux is an important early feminist work of fiction that brings to the fore complicated issues of gender, citizenship, eugenics, and frontier nationalism. First published serially in the feminist journal The Forerunner in 1910, The Crux tells the story of a group of New England women who move west to start a boardinghouse for men in Colorado. The innocent central character, Vivian Lane, falls in love with Morton Elder, who has both gonorrhea and syphilis. The concern of the novel is not so much that Vivian will catch syphilis, but that, if she were to marry and have children with Morton, she would harm the "national stock." The novel was written, in Gilman's words, as a "story... for young women to read... in order that they may protect themselves and their children to come." What was to be protected was the civic imperative to produce "pureblooded" citizens for a utopian ideal.

Suffrage Songs and Verses is a collection of poems and songs written by Gilman, published during the suffrage movement in the early 20th century. In this collection, Gilman uses her poetic voice to advocate for women's rights, particularly the right to vote. Through verse, she expresses the frustrations of women who were denied political participation and calls for gender equality. The poems celebrate the strength, resilience, and determination of suffragists while critiquing the patriarchal society that oppresses women. "Suffrage Songs and Verses" serves as both a literary work and a rallying cry for the suffrage movement, capturing the spirit and passion of the activists who fought for women's enfranchisement.

In 1888 Gilman published her first book, Art Gems for the Home and Fireside (1888); however, it was her first volume of poetry, In This Our World (1893), a collection of satirical poems, that first brought her recognition. During the next two decades she gained much of her fame with lectures on women's issues, ethics, labor, human rights, and social reform. She often referred to these themes in her fiction. Her lecture tours took her across the United States.

In 1894–95 Gilman served as editor of the magazine The Impress, a literary weekly that was published by the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association (formerly the Bulletin). For the twenty weeks the magazine was printed, she was consumed in the satisfying accomplishment of contributing its poems, editorials, and other articles. The short-lived paper's printing came to an end as a result of a social bias against her lifestyle which included being an unconventional mother and a woman who had divorced a man. After a four-month-long lecture tour that ended in April 1897, Gilman began to think more deeply about sexual relationships and economics in American life, eventually completing the first draft of Women and Economics (1898). This book discussed the role of women in the home, arguing for changes in the practices of child-raising and housekeeping to alleviate pressures from women and potentially allow them to expand their work to the public sphere. She argued that separate spheres are unfair due to 3 reasons. First, women are not truly men's economic partners. Second, women's economic profit comes from “sex attraction” for example marrying up. Third, the contradictions of motherhood, to attract a man a woman must behave timid and weak, yet be a good mother, she must be strong and determined. Her solution to this is baby gardens, community kitchens, hiring domestic help, and training children better. The book was published in the following year and propelled Gilman into the international spotlight. In 1903, she addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin. The next year, she toured in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Hungary.

From 1909 to 1916 Gilman single-handedly wrote and edited her own magazine, The Forerunner, in which much of her fiction appeared. By presenting material in her magazine that would "stimulate thought", "arouse hope, courage and impatience", and "express ideas which need a special medium", she aimed to go against the mainstream media which was overly sensational. Over seven years and two months the magazine produced eighty-six issues, each twenty eight pages long. The magazine had nearly 1,500 subscribers and featured such serialized works as "What Diantha Did" (1910), The Crux (1911), Moving the Mountain (1911), and Herland (1915). The Forerunner has been cited as being "perhaps the greatest literary accomplishment of her long career". After its seven years, she wrote hundreds of articles that were submitted to the Louisville Herald, The Baltimore Sun, and the Buffalo Evening News. Her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which she began to write in 1925, was published posthumously in 1935.

In This Our World: Poems, Oakland, California: McCombs & Vaughn (1893) Suffrage Songs and Verses, New York: The Charlton Company (1911)

Gilman created a world in many of her stories with a feminist point of view. Two of her narratives, "What Diantha Did", and Herland, are good examples of Gilman focusing her work on how women are not just stay-at-home mothers they are expected to be; they are also people who have dreams, who are able to travel and work just as men do, and whose goals include a society where women are just as important as men. The world-building that is executed by Gilman, as well as the characters in these two stories and others, embody the change that was needed in the early 1900s in a way that is now commonly seen as feminism. Gilman uses world-building in Herland to demonstrate the equality that she longed to see. The women of Herland are the providers as there are no men in their society. This makes them appear to be the dominant sex, taking over the gender roles that are typically given to men. Elizabeth Keyser notes, "In Herland the supposedly superior sex becomes the inferior or disadvantaged..." In this utopian world, the women reproduce asexually and consider it an honor to be mothers. Unlike the patriarchal society that exists outside of Herland, the women do not have surnames for themselves or their children, as they do not believe that human beings should be "claimed" by others. In this society, Gilman makes it to where women are focused on having leadership within the community, fulfilling roles that are stereotypically seen as being male roles, and running an entire community without the same attitudes that men have concerning their work and the community. However, the attitude men carried concerning women were degrading, especially by progressive women, like Gilman. Using Herland, Gilman challenged this stereotype, and made the society of Herland a type of paradise. Gilman uses this story to confirm the stereotypically devalued qualities of women are valuable, show strength, and shatters traditional utopian structure for future works. Essentially, Gilman creates Herland's society to have women hold all the power, showing more equality in this world, alluding to changes she wanted to see in her lifetime. Gilman's feminism is seen more clearly in her work "What Diantha Did" than in Herland. Diantha breaks through the traditional expectation of women, which shows Gilman's desires for what women would be allowed to do in her own real-life society. Throughout the story, Gilman portrays Diantha as a character who strikes through the image of businesses in the U.S., who challenges gender norms and roles, and who believed that women could provide the solution to the corruption in big business in society. Gilman chooses to have Diantha choose a career that is stereotypically not one a woman would have because in doing so, she is showing that the salaries and wages of traditional women's jobs are unfair. Diantha's choice to run a business allows her to come out of the shadows and join society. Gilman's works, especially her work "What Diantha Did", were a call for change, a battle cry that caused panic in men and power in women. Gilman used her work as a platform for a call to change, as a way to reach women and have them begin the movement toward freedom.

In 1908, Gilman published an article in the American Journal of Sociology, titled "A Suggestion on the Negro Problem", in which she set out her views on what she considered a "sociological problem" involving the condition of the large African American minority in America. She immediately stated that they "were forcibly extradited from a distant country" and given a "compulsory introduction into our economic group". She then noted that "in a certain number of cases the negro has developed an ability" to succeed in the business world, and "admitt[ed], most cheerfully, that this proves the ultimate capacity of the race to do so". While referring to them as "a large body of aliens" that was "widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior," Gilman averred that the economic and social situation of African Americans was "to us a social injury". She contended that the history of slavery in the United States meant that it was therefore the responsibility of white Americans to alleviate the situation, and pointedly observed that, if her own race could not "so behave itself as thus to elevate and improve" the Black race, then white Americans, "with all our boasted advancement", would themselves "need some scheme of race betterment". Gilman was unequivocal about the ills of slavery and the wrongs which many White Americans had done to Black Americans, stating that irrespective of any crimes committed by Black Americans, "[Whites] were the original offender, and have a list of injuries to [Black Americans], greatly outnumbering the counter list." She proposed that those Black Americans who were not "self-supporting" or who were "actual criminals" (which she clearly distinguished from "the decent, self-supporting, progressive negroes") could be "enlisted" into a quasi-military state labour force, which she viewed as akin to conscription in certain countries. Such force would be deployed in "modern agriculture" and infrastructure, and those who had eventually acquired adequate skills and training "would be graduated with honor" – Gilman believed that any such conscription should be "compulsory at the bottom, perfectly free at the top." Gilman's racialist views led her to espouse eugenicist beliefs, claiming that Old Stock Americans were surrendering their country to immigrants who were diluting the nation's racial purity. When asked about her stance on the matter during a trip to London she declared "I am an Anglo-Saxon before everything." In an effort to gain the vote for all women, she spoke out against literacy voting tests at the 1903 National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in New Orleans. Literary critic Susan S. Lanser says "The Yellow Wallpaper" should be interpreted by focusing on Gilman's racism. Other literary critics have built on Lanser's work to understand Gilman's ideas in relation to turn-of-the-century culture more broadly.

Gilman's feminist works often included stances and arguments for reforming the use of domesticated animals. In Herland, Gilman's utopian society excludes all domesticated animals, including livestock. In Moving the Mountain Gilman addresses the ills of animal domestication related to inbreeding. In "When I Was a Witch", the narrator witnesses and intervenes in instances of animal use as she travels through New York, liberating work horses, cats, and lapdogs by rendering them "comfortably dead". One literary scholar connected the regression of the female narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" to the parallel status of domesticated felines. She wrote in a letter to the Saturday Evening Post that the automobile would eliminate the cruelty to horses used to pull carriages and cars.

Gilman published 186 short stories in magazines, newspapers, and many were published in her self-published monthly, The Forerunner. Many literary critics have ignored these short stories.

The majority of Gilman's dramas are inaccessible as they are only available from the originals. Some were printed/reprinted in Forerunner, however.

Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898. The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890-1894. (2024)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist. Mary A. Hill. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900. Ed. Mary A. Hill. Lewisburg: Bucknill UP, 1995. The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 Vols. Ed. Denise D. Knight. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935; NY: Arno Press, 1972; and Harper & Row, 1975.

In 1903 Gilman published a non-fiction book The Home: Its Work and Influence. In this influential work, Gilman explores the role of the home in society and its impact on individuals, particularly women. She challenges traditional gender roles and argues for greater autonomy and fulfillment for women beyond domestic responsibilities. Gilman critiques the notion of the home as solely a woman's domain and advocates for social and economic reforms to empower women and improve their well-being. "The Home: Its Work and Influence" is a seminal text in the early feminist movement and continues to be studied for its insights into gender, society, and the domestic sphere.

In 1903 she wrote one of her most critically acclaimed books, The Home: Its Work and Influence, which expanded upon Women and Economics, proposing that women are oppressed in their home and that the environment in which they live needs to be modified in order to be healthy for their mental states. In between traveling and writing, her career as a literary figure was secured.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" was initially met with a mixed reception. One anonymous letter submitted to the Boston Transcript read, "The story could hardly, it would seem, give pleasure to any reader, and to many whose lives have been touched through the dearest ties by this dread disease, it must bring the keenest pain. To others, whose lives have become a struggle against heredity of mental derangement, such literature contains deadly peril. Should such stories be allowed to pass without severest censure?" Positive reviewers describe it as impressive because it is the most suggestive and graphic account of why women who live monotonous lives are susceptible to mental illness. Although Gilman had gained international fame with the publication of Women and Economics in 1898, by the end of World War I, she seemed out of tune with her times. In her autobiography she admitted that "unfortunately my views on the sex question do not appeal to the Freudian complex of today, nor are people satisfied with a presentation of religion as a help in our tremendous work of improving this world." Ann J. Lane writes in Herland and Beyond that "Gilman offered perspectives on major issues of gender with which we still grapple; the origins of women's subjugation, the struggle to achieve both autonomy and intimacy in human relationships; the central role of work as a definition of self; new strategies for rearing and educating future generations to create a humane and nurturing environment."

Virginia's Sisters: An Anthology of Women's Writings, 2023. London: Aurora Metro Books, ISBN 9781912430789 In This Our World, 1st ed. Oakland: McCombs & Vaughn, 1893. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. 2nd ed.; San Francisco: Press of James H. Barry, 1895. Suffrage Songs and Verses. New York: Charlton Co., 1911. Microfilm. New Haven: Research Publications, 1977, History of Women #6558. The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996.