Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the most important feminist intellectual of the Progressive Era and the author of one of the most famous short stories in American literature — “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), a harrowing first-person account of a woman’s descent into madness under the enforced idleness of a “rest cure” that has become one of the foundational texts of feminist literary criticism. But Gilman was far more than the author of a single story. She was a public intellectual of extraordinary range and energy — a lecturer who spoke to audiences across the United States and Europe, a theorist whose Women and Economics (1898) was compared to Mill’s The Subjection of Women and Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and a writer who produced novels, poetry, nonfiction, and a monthly magazine, The Forerunner (1909–1916), virtually single-handed.

Providence and Breakdown

Charlotte Anna Perkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860, into a distinguished New England family — she was a great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her father, Frederic Beecher Perkins, a librarian and writer, abandoned the family when Charlotte was young, and she grew up in genteel poverty, moving frequently, attending school erratically, and supporting herself from an early age as an artist and teacher.

In 1884 she married Charles Walter Stetson, a Providence artist. The marriage was catastrophic for her mental health. After the birth of her daughter Katharine in 1885, she suffered severe postpartum depression. Her physician, the famous Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, prescribed his “rest cure” — complete bed rest, isolation, overfeeding, and the prohibition of all intellectual activity. The treatment nearly destroyed her. She later wrote: “I came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.”

The Yellow Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), published in the New England Magazine, was Gilman’s fictional account of the rest cure — a first-person narrative by a woman confined to an upstairs room by her physician husband, who gradually becomes obsessed with the patterns in the yellow wallpaper and descends into psychotic breakdown. The story was read as a horror tale when it was first published (William Dean Howells included it in an anthology of ghost stories), but feminist scholars in the 1970s rediscovered it as a powerful critique of medical patriarchy and the silencing of women’s voices.

Women and Economics

Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898) was Gilman’s most important theoretical work. She argued that women’s economic dependence on men was the fundamental cause of their subordination — that the “sexuo-economic” relationship, in which women traded domestic and sexual services for financial support, distorted both sexes and retarded social evolution. The solution was economic independence for women through paid employment, professional child care, and cooperative housekeeping. The book was translated into seven languages and made Gilman internationally famous.

Herland

Herland (1915), serialised in The Forerunner, was a utopian novel depicting an all-female society that had developed advanced agriculture, education, and social organisation without men. Three male explorers discover the society and find their assumptions about gender challenged at every turn. The novel was forgotten for decades after its serialisation and was not published in book form until 1979, when it was rediscovered by feminist scholars and became a central text in feminist science fiction. Its sequel, With Her in Ourland (1916), sent the characters into the real world.

The Forerunner and Later Career

From 1909 to 1916, Gilman single-handedly wrote, edited, and published The Forerunner, a monthly magazine that contained fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and serialised novels — all written by Gilman herself. The magazine was an extraordinary feat of sustained intellectual production. After its cessation, Gilman continued to lecture and write, but her influence waned as younger feminists found her social Darwinism and her racial views — she shared the white supremacist assumptions common to many Progressive-era reformers — increasingly objectionable.

Gilman was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932. She chose to end her own life in 1935, leaving a note that read: “When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

Collecting Gilman

“The Yellow Wallpaper” first appeared in The New England Magazine (January 1892); copies of the magazine are the primary collecting target. Women and Economics (Small, Maynard, 1898) in first edition is the major theoretical work. The Home (McClure, Phillips, 1903) and Human Work (McClure, Phillips, 1904) are early titles. Herland was not published in book form until 1979 (Pantheon), so first book editions are of that date. Complete runs of The Forerunner (1909–1916) are scarce and valuable. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Appleton-Century, 1935), her autobiography, was published posthumously.