Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Born: July 3, 1860
• Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
• Died: August 17, 1935
• Place of death: Pasadena, California

American writer and journalist

In her writings, Gilman addressed both women’s contemporary status and the social and economic changes necessary to improve that status. Her work fiction as well as analysis focused on ideas rather than on aesthetics or entertainment value. Her short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” describes a woman’s descent into madness during a medical treatment and the disastrous effects of stifled sexual and verbal expression, enforced passivity, and externally imposed roles on women.

Areas of achievement Literature, women’s rights, journalism

Early Life

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Her intellectual father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, tried a variety of careers, including teaching, writing, and library work. Her mother, Mary Westcott Perkins, like most young women of her time and class, had not prepared for any career besides domesticity. Unfortunately, Frederick found family responsibilities confining and had difficulty sticking to a career. From her earliest years, Gilman saw her family coping with unpaid debts, frequent moves, dependence on friends and relatives, and a tense emotional environment. In 1869, her parents agreed to separate, and in 1873, when divorce was rare and considered shameful, Mary divorced Frederick so that he could remarry.

In spite of her family’s problems, however, Gilman enjoyed a rich intellectual environment. Through her father, she had family ties to the famous Beecher clan, including clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Beecher, and suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker. Although these Beecher women extolled images of domesticity, their lives of achievement in the world undermined their rhetoric. Gilman learned to read before she was five and in her teens took pleasure in writing fanciful stories and poetry. Her mother, who saw herself as having been critically wounded by emotion, strongly discouraged this activity. At seventeen, Gilman wrote to her father requesting a reading list; he responded with suggestions of works on history, anthropology, and evolutionary science, to which she applied herself diligently.

Gilman studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and at twenty-one was supporting herself as a commercial artist. In 1882, she met Charles Walter Stetson, an aspiring artist who proposed marriage within three weeks of their meeting. She approached marriage warily, mindful of her parents’ unhappy experience. Despite her doubts, they married in 1884. She gave birth to a daughter, Katharine, a year later and soon fell into a nearly incapacitating depression. She improved during a long vacation away from her husband and child but declined after her return; indeed, she almost went mad during a “rest cure” with nerve specialist S. Weir Mitchell. In 1887, she and Walter agreed to separate; that fall, she and her daughter moved to Pasadena, California, where she began to work seriously on her writing.

Life’s Work

The combination of her excellent though informal education, her Beecher heritage of independent thinking, and her family experiences fitted Gilman well for the work she would soon do. Her wide reading had converted her to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, though definitely not to laissez-faire Social Darwinism. Instead, she subscribed wholeheartedly to the ideas in Lester Frank Ward’s Dynamic Sociology (1883), which stressed human responsibility to mold the social environment rationally for optimal human evolution. She especially liked Ward’s discussion of women’s crucial role in evolution and of how women’s potential had been stunted by artificial social constraints. Her Beecher heritage encouraged her to trust her own ideas and express them publicly. Finally, as a daughter, she had seen that the prescribed family roles did not always work, while her experiences as a wife and mother almost cost her her sanity. She used her life as material for her writings, drawing on the powerful emotions her experiences had bequeathed. Although she considered herself a rationalist, her best work often derived its energy from her unacknowledged anger toward those she loved, including her parents and child.

In Pasadena, Gilman moved near her close friend Grace Channing and determined to be self-supporting. Her finances were always shaky, so she supplemented her writing with tutoring, lecturing, and commercial art projects; for a time, she supported herself and Katharine by managing a boardinghouse. She initially allowed some poems to be published without pay, for the exposure led to speaking engagements and other opportunities. She became increasingly active in Nationalism, an all-American socialist movement, inspired by Edward Bellamy’s best seller Looking Backward (1888), which flourished through Nationalist clubs around the country. This work brought her speaking engagements and contacts in San Francisco, where she moved in 1891. There she met and impressed many well-known feminists and reformers. Her newfound prominence allowed her to become a full-time writer and speaker, and in 1893, she published her first volume of poetry, In This Our World.

The following year, 1894, brought several changes. Gilman’s mother, whom she had nursed through her struggle with cancer, died, and Gilman’s obsessive relationship with a woman friend collapsed around the same time. Her divorce from Walter, following negative press coverage and legal complications, became final in April, and Walter promptly married her friend Grace. Far from being distressed by their marriage, Gilman seemed almost relieved, and relations among the three remained cordial. By mutual agreement, she sent Katharine, at age nine, to live with Walter and Grace, on the grounds that they could care for her better. Gilman was now free to travel and concentrate on her own career.

In her writing and public speaking, Gilman focused on ideas rather than on aesthetics or entertainment value. She preferred all writing, whether poetry, fiction, or analysis, to have a didactic purpose. This is apparent in her most important early works. In 1892, she published the terrifying short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Superficially, it describes a woman’s descent into madness during a medical treatment resembling Mitchell’s rest cure. More profoundly, the story depicts the disastrous effects on women of stifled sexual and verbal expression, enforced passivity, and externally imposed roles.

Gilman explored these same themes in another context in Women and Economics (1898), the book that firmly established her reputation. By then, she had attended the first national women’s rights convention in 1896, traveled throughout the United States and England, and established friendships with leading reformers of the day. In 1897, she had experienced another bout of severe depression but this time had sought relief by writing; within seventeen days, she had drafted her first prose book. Based on Ward’s ideas and her own observations, Women and Economics criticized how women were defined by their sexual function and described the negative consequences of women’s dependence on men. Women who did not develop to their potential could not contribute fully to the evolutionary progress of society, as mothers or anything else. Winning the vote, while important, could not undo centuries of economic dependence. Women would discover their true social role only when they could support themselves outside the home, which would simultaneously liberate men and allow society to evolve without distortion. Naturally, such a change would require major social modifications, especially in the home. Though considered radical, the book was an immediate success in the United States and abroad. Gilman became increasingly popular as a writer and speaker, and her own economic independence was assured.

Gilman’s new financial security may have persuaded her to try marriage again. She and her cousin Houghton Gilman, a New York banker, married in June, 1900. They quickly implemented some ideas from Women and Economics, including a “home without a kitchen.” Their happy marriage modified Charlotte’s nomadic lifestyle, allowed her to spend more time with her daughter, and lasted until Houghton’s death.

Gilman continued writing about women’s status, family roles, and work. In 1900, she published Concerning Children, which discussed the influence of environment on children but unfortunately reflected the nativism of the period. The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903) elaborated on themes from Women and Economics, while Human Work (1904) focused on the interdependency of the human community and the need for the contributions of all. Gilman also participated in an International Congress of Women in 1904, gave a lecture tour throughout Europe in 1905, and wrote articles and poems for periodicals.

In 1909, Gilman launched her own monthly magazine, The Forerunner, and wrote virtually everything that appeared in it editorials, poetry, fiction, reviews, and more. This allowed her to express herself freely without editorial constraint and to serialize works in progress. One of her most interesting works was the utopian novel Herland (1915). In this dramatization of her theoretical ideas, Gilman envisioned three American men discovering a completely female society in which the institution of the family does not exist, only individuals and the community. She discontinued the magazine in 1916.

Whether because of the general disillusionment following World War I or the sense that the “woman question” was resolved once the vote had been won, Gilman’s later works, on topics such as birth control, urban planning, and religion, were not well received. Still, she kept writing. In 1926, she wrote her autobiography, but she found a publisher for it only in the last year of her life. She seemed to have been largely forgotten by the postwar generation. In 1932, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and, in 1934, after Houghton died, Gilman moved to Pasadena to be near Katharine. When the cancer spread and a painful death was approaching, Gilman chose to commit suicide on August 17, 1935.

Significance

Gilman made major contributions to the development of feminist thought in her own time and for later generations. For her contemporaries, she developed a scathing critique of the Victorian family, whose damaging effects on women she had observed. More important, she went beyond describing what was wrong with women’s social roles to envision how to improve relations between the sexes for the good of society as a whole. In her fiction, poetry, and analysis, she drew on her own experiences and pain to come up with solutions that many of her contemporaries saw as far more radical than the successful goal of woman suffrage.

After years of being ignored, Gilman’s work was rediscovered during the women’s movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, speaking even more clearly to that generation than to her own. Not only her words but also her life itself had resonance for modern feminists. They too grappled with practical questions of reproductive freedom, child care, sexual expression, and the role of supportive same-gender relationships. They too sought to strike a balance between family and work responsibilities, between the personal and the political, between nurturing others and maintaining a sense of self. They also understood, probably better than her contemporaries, the critical importance of economic independence. Gilman’s energetic and passionate struggle made her truly a forerunner of the modern feminist movement.

Bibliography

Davis, Cynthia J., and Denise D. Knight, eds. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Collection of essays comparing and contrasting Gilman’s writing and ideas to those of William Dean Howells, Ambrose Bierce, Owen Wister, and other contemporaries.

Degler, Carl N. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman on the Theory and Practice of Feminism.” American Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Spring, 1956): 21-39. This crucial work in the rediscovery of Gilman, written in the context of the new wave of feminism inspired by philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, focuses on Gilman’s writing, not on her life.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. The author’s autobiography is especially good on her unconventional childhood and adolescence, her emotional breakdown, her work life, and her theories of child rearing, but it contains little but platitudes about her second marriage.

Golden, Catherine J., and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, eds. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Collection of fourteen essays analyzing Gilman’s “mixed legacy”: her vision of a humane and egalitarian society alongside her depiction of class, ethnic, and racial stereotypes.

Hill, Mary A. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860-1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. This is the first major biography to make use of Gilman’s personal papers and to reveal the passionate relationships that Gilman purposely left out of her autobiography. Occasionally, the book slights Gilman’s published works to restore the missing personal aspect of her life.

Karpinski, Joanne B., ed. Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. A useful collection of essays by both Gilman’s contemporaries and recent scholars. Carol Ruth Berkin’s essay “Private Woman, Public Woman: The Contradictions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman” is a particularly fine assessment of Gilman’s character and work.

Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. A sensitive, intuitive, scholarly biography that examines Gilman in the context of her most intimate relationships and the ways in which these shaped her work; the personal approach and organization are somewhat jarring but offer fascinating insights.

Rudd, Jill, and Val Gough, eds. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Collection of essays analyzing how Gilman used her writing to effect political reform.

Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Concentrates primarily on analyzing Gilman’s fiction and poetry, rather than her life or her works of social criticism. Includes a useful annotated bibliography and a chronology.

Sutton-Rampseck, Beth. Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary War, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Describes how Gilman and two other late-Victorian-era writers used housekeeping imagery in their respective works to empower women both inside and outside the home.