Author Gilman Charlotte Perkins

wife and children, leaving them in an impoverished state.[2] Since their mother was unable to support the family on her own, the Perkinses were often in the presence of aunts on her father's side of the family, namely Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, (author of Uncle Tom's Cabin), and Catharine Beecher. At the age of five, the young girl taught herself to read because her mother was ill.[3] Gilman's mother was not affectionate with her children. To keep them from getting hurt as she did, she forbade her children to make strong friendships or read 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.[4] Although she lived a childhood of isolated, impoverished loneliness, she unknowingly prepared herself for the life that lay ahead by frequently visiting the public library and studying ancient civilizations on her own. Additionally, her father's love for literature influenced her, and years later, he contacted her with a list of books he felt would be worthwhile for her to read. [5] 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".[6] She attended seven different public schools, and was a correspondent student of the Society to Encourage Studies at Home.[7] but only studied until she was fifteen.[8] Her natural intelligence and breadth of knowledge always impressed her teachers, who were nonetheless disappointed in her because she was a poor student.[9] Her favorite subject was physics, or "natural philosophy" as it was called at the time. In 1878, the eighteen-year-old enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design, and subsequently supported herself as an artist of trade cards. She also became a tutor, and encouraged others to expand their artistic creativity.[10] she was also a painter. In 1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson after initially declining his proposal because a gut feeling told her it was not the right thing for her.[11] Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born the following year. Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered a very serious bout of post-partum depression in the months after Katharine's birth. This was an age in which woman were seen as "hysterical" and "nervous" beings; thus, when a woman claimed to be seriously ill after giving birth, her claims were sometimes dismissed as being invalid. Doctors at the time referred to this as “nervous prostration."[12] In 1888, Gilman separated from her husband--a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth century, but one that was necessary for the improvement of her mental health. The two legally divorced several years later in 1894.[13] Following the separation, Gilman moved with her daughter to Pasadena, California where she became active in several feminist and reformist organizations such as The Pacific Coast Woman's Press Association, the Woman's Alliance, the Economic Club, the Ebell Society, the Parents Association, and the State Council of Women, in addition to writing and editing the Bulletin, a journal put out by one of the aforementioned organizations.[14] In 1894, Gilman sent her daughter West to live with her husband and his other wife, Grace Ellery Channing, who was a close friend of Gilman's. 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."[15] 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 she "had a right to know and love her father."[16] After her mother died in 1895, Charlotte 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 a significant amount of time together almost immediately and became romantically involved. While she would go on lecture tours, Houghton and Charlotte would exchange letters and spend as much time as they could together before she left. In her diaries, she describes him as being "pleasurable" and it is clear that she was deeply interested in him.[17] From their wedding in 1900 until 1922, they lived in New York City. Their marriage was nothing like Charlotte and Walter's. 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 resided.[18] In January of 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer.[19] An advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, Gilman committed 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.[20] After moving to Pasadena, Charlotte became active in organizing social reform movements. As a delegate, she represented California in 1896 at both the Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C. and the International Socialist and Labor Congress which was held in England.[21] In 1890, she was introduced to Nationalism, a 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 pump out fiften essays, poems, and a novella, in addition to "The Yellow Wall-paper". She began lecturing on Nationalism and gained the public's visibility with her first volume of poetry, In This Our World, published in 1893. Her career was launched.[22] 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. Although it was not the first or longest of her works, without question Gilman's most famous piece is her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which became a best-seller of the Feminist Press. She wrote it on June 6 and 7 of 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.[23] The story is about a woman who suffers from mental illness after three months of being trapped within her home staring at the same revolting yellow wall paper. Gilman wrote this story to change people's minds about the role of women in her society, illustrating how women's lack of autonomy is detrimental to their mental, emotional, and even physical well being. The narrator in the story must do as her husband and male doctor demand, although the treatment they prescribe to her 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 who had tried to cure her of her depression through a "rest cure," Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and she sent him a copy of the story.[24] Gilman's first book was Gems of Art for the Home and Fireside (1888). It was her first volume of poetry, however, In This World (1893), a collection of satirical poems, that initially 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.[25] 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 that the magazine was printed, she was consumed in its work, contributing poems, editorials, and other articles, resulting in a satisfying feeling of accomplishment for her. The short-lived paper's printing came to an end as a result of a social bias against her lifestyle which included being an unnatural mother and a woman who had divorced a man.[26] After a four-month-long lecture tour that ended in April of 1897, Gilman began to have thoughts in her head regarding sexual relationships and economics in American life, which eventually spawned her first draft of Women and Economics (1898). The book was published in the following year, and propelled Gilman into the international spotlight.[27] In 1903, Charlotte addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin, and, the next year, toured in England, Holland, Germany, Austria, and Hungary. In 1903 she wrote one of her most critically acclaimed books, The Home: Its Work and Influence, which expanded upon Women and Economics, stating that women are oppressed in their home and 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.[28] 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.[29] 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. The Forerunner has been cited as being "perhaps the greatest literary accomplishment of her long career".[30] After its seven years, she still wrote hundreds of articles which were submitted to the Louisville Herald, The Baltimore Sun, and the Buffalo Evening News. Additionally, her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which she began to write in 1925, appeared posthumously in 1935.[31]