Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born
in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860, the second
child of Mary Fitch and Frederick Beecher Perkins.
In spite of the family connections to the famous
Beecher clan (including Gilman's great-aunt, Harriet
Beecher Stowe), Gilman's childhood was difficult
and economically precarious. Her father abandoned
the family soon after the birth of the third child,
who subsequently died, and Gilman, her brother,
and her mother were constantly on the move, frequently
living on the edge of poverty. In Rhode Island,
where they lived, they were forced to move nineteen
times in eighteen years. Although her father barely
provided
financial support and infrequently visited the
family, he nevertheless assumed the responsibility
for Gilman's education, emphasizing reading in
history and the sciences. Her only formal education
was her brief attendance at the Rhode Island School
of Design.
Gilman's early experiences forcefully
underscored the economic plight of her mother
and many New England housewives. Determined to
be self-supporting, Gilman spent her teenage years
working as a governess, a commercial artist, and
an art teacher. In 1884 she married a fellow artist,
Charles Stetson, in spite of her serious reservations
about the difficulties of combining marriage and
motherhood with professional work. When their
only daughter was born almost a year after their
marriage, Gilman suffered severe depression. She
consulted the prominent nerve specialist Dr. S.
Weir Mitchell and followed his prescribed cure:
total bed rest, confinement, and isolation. Mitchell
also recommended that she devote herself to domestic
work and her child, severely limit intellectual
work, and absolutely avoid artistic production.
A trial separation from her husband and a trip
to California with her young daughter helped to
restore Gilman's health. She and Stetson agreed
to an amicable divorce in 1887, and, in view of
her poor health and uncertain income, Gilman reluctantly
decided that their daughter should live with Stetson
and his new wife, a decision for which she was
publicly condemned. In 1890 she moved to California,
the first step toward launching a public career
that would establish her as a leading feminist
writer and lecturer. In her early years in California,
she taught school, maintained a boardinghouse,
and edited newspapers at the same time that she
lectured on socialism and freedom for women. In
the midst of this period, she produced the work
now regarded by many readers and critics as her
masterpiece, "The Yellow Wallpaper."
In 1900 she married her first cousin,
George Houghton Gilman, a lawyer from New York,
a marriage that endured until his death in 1934.
Like her great-aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman
was deeply involved in the major reform movements
of her times. While she was in her early twenties,
she collected a number of her poems in a volume
titled In This Our World. First published
in England in 1893, the poems are an early expression
of Gilman's social and economic views. While she
was living in California, she began to write and
lecture on women's rights, and, for a while, she
was an active member and spokesperson of the Nationalist
Movement, inspired by the utopian ideas expressed
in Edward Bellamy's best-selling novel Looking
Backward.
By the end of the last decade of
the nineteenth century, Gilman had established
herself as a forceful, passionate writer and lecturer.
In 1898 she published the book for which she became
best known in her lifetime, Women and Economics,
a witty, satiric account of the position of women
in society, past and present, and a probing analysis
of the reasons for their subordination. The book
brought her immediate national and international
recognition. Gilman expanded on her arguments
on behalf of women's rights in her books Concerning
Children (1900), The Home (1904), and
Human Work (1904). In 1909 she began a
seven-year editorship of her own monthly magazine,
The Forerunner, for which she wrote all
of the copy, editorials, poems, articles, short
stories, and serialized novels. By Gilman's estimate,
her total output over this period was the equivalent
of twenty-eight books, including the full-length
novels What Diantha Did (1910), The
Crux (1911), The Man-Made World (1911),
and her utopian novel Herland (1915), a
portrayal of a world without men at its center.
After Gilman ended her relationship with The
Forerunner, she continued her exploration
of the differences between women and men in His
Religion and Hers (1923). Her last book, fittingly,
was her summing up of her life and philosophical
outlook, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
An Autobiography (1935). However, "Unpunished,"
a mystery story from the late 1920s, was released
by the Feminist Press in 1997. Its publication
was heralded as a major literary find. After her
husband's unexpected death in 1934, Gilman, suffering
from breast cancer, lived quietly for a time near
her daughter in Pasadena, California. She committed
suicide by taking chloroform in 1935. -James A. Miller
Photograph courtesy of Brown
Brothers
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