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|---|---|
 Charlotte Perkins Gilman | |
| Born | July 4, 1860 |
| Died | August 17, 1935 |
| Occupation | Short story and non-fiction writer, novelist, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer. |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3 1860 – August 17 1935) was a prominent American non-fiction writer, short story writer, novelist, commercial artist, lecturer, and social reformer. She is mainly known today for her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", based on her own bout with mental illness and misguided medical treatment.
Life
Gilman was born Charlotte Anna Perkins in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Mary Perkins (formerly Mary Fitch Westcott) and Frederic Beecher Perkins, a well-known librarian and magazine editor, and nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She had a brother Thomas Aide, who was fourteen months older then her. Her father was rarely home, leaving his wife and daughter with his progressive aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Beecher, advocate of domestic feminism, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, suffragist and supporter of women’s right to vote. Gilman reported that her mother only showed affection when she thought her two children were asleep. Gilman also had 2 siblings that died as infants. Afterwards her mother was told she would never have another child, and the father left them. Possibly he left her because he was afraid he would kill his wife if she got pregnant again. Afterwards, the three lived on the brink of poverty, moving from relative to relative.
At age 21, Gilman had a passionate lesbian relationship with Martha Luther. They wrote letters to each other over many years. Luther soon married and ended their love affair. Gilman continued to have other intimate relationships with women. After two years at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gilman supported herself as a greeting-card artist. She married Charles Walter Stetson, a fellow artist, in 1884, and her only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born the same year. During this time—and throughout her life—she suffered from depression, which influenced her writing.
She separated from her husband in 1888 (and divorced him six years later), and moved with her daughter to California, where she was active in organizing for social reform movements; she lectured across the country and in the United Kingdom. Her daughter subsequently went to live with her ex-husband and his second wife, Grace Ellery Channing, who was also Gilman’s best friend since childhood. Gilman was genuinely happy for the couple, despite the circumstances, and said that Channing probably made a better mother then she could have in many ways.
For a time she lived in a so-called Boston marriage with Adeline Knapp, a San Francisco newspaper reporter who shared her interests in social reform and the Nationalist Club, based on Edward Bellamy's socialist utopian vision.
Her second marriage—from 1900 to his death in 1934—was to her first cousin, New York lawyer George Houghton Gilman; in her letters to him, she worried that her correspondence with Knapp would be published and cause a scandal.
In 1922, Gilman moved from New York to Norwich, Connecticut, where she wrote His Religion and Hers. Ten years later, having moved back to Pasadena—following the death of her husband (1934), and in order to be closer to her daughter—she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer was inoperable, and she committed suicide on August 17 1935, by inhaling chloroform. Gilman’s mother had also died of cancer. After watching her suffer, she said that if she had ever got cancer she would kill herself rather than suffer.
Career
Gilman's first book was In This World (1893), which was a collection of satiric poems with feminist themes. 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.
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: This helped her gain contacts within the women’s movement.
At the end of the summer and early fall of 1897 she wrote the first draft of Women and Economics in barely five weeks, writing more then four thousand words a day, and on October 8th she actually wrote a manuscript of 35600 words. She had the final draft submitted in January of 1898, and by May 1st the book was for sale. After the book became so popular she lectured around the world. In June of 1903 she addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin, and the next year toured in England, Holland, Germany, Austria, and Hungary.
From 1909 to 1916 Gilman singled-handedly edited and wrote her own feminist paper, The Forerunner, in which most of her fiction appeared. Over seven years and two months the magazine contained eighty-six issues, each twenty-eight pages long. The magazine had nearly 1,500 subscribers. The paper contained famous stories such as “What Diantha Did,” (1910), “The Crux,” (1911), and “Moving the Mountain,” (1911), and also one of her most famous works “Herland,” which was later made into a book and published by the Women’s Press in 1979. In 1915 Gilman co-founded the Women’s Peace Party with activist Jane Addams.
In 1935 The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, her autobiography appeared posthumously. Her mystery novel Unpunished also appeared after her death in 1997 from The Feminist Press. For two decades Gilman was basically forgotten along with her work, until feminist movements of the 1960’s brought back an interest in her.
Rest Treatment
Gilman married Walter Stetson in 1884. One year later, she gives birth to her girl Katherine. She became depressed that first year as she adapted to the domestic life of a wife. When she held her baby, she felt pain rather than happiness. Winter of 1885, Charlotte accompanied Grace Channing to Pasedena, where she wrote plays with Grace and painted. Her mood was lifted by the ability to work again. However, when she returned to her husband and daughter, she sunk to her states of hysteria and depression.
In April of 1897, Gilman sought help from the famous Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the nervous disease specialist of the time. He diagnosed her with suffering from exhaustion of the nerves. The treatment he prescribed Gilman was called the Rest Treatment; it included: 1. bed rest, 2. isolation from family, 3. overfeeding to increase fat volume, 4. massage and occasional use of electricity on the muscles. To begin, the patient could not even leave her bed, read, write, sew, talk, or feed herself.
After a month, Gilman was sent home with Mitchell’s 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 this for a few months and became drastically worse. She knew she had to return to work in order to relieve her nervousness and depression. She did escape her depression and wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” to tell her story (with embellishments added). She clearly states her purpose for writing “The Yellow Wallpaper”: “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked,” Gilman wrote in The Forerunner years later. She sent a copy of it to Mitchell; he never responded, but he reportedly altered his treatment method after reading it.
Feminism
Although we call her a feminist today, Gilman refused to call herself a "feminist", she believed she was simply a humanist, who’s goal was to campaign for the cause of women’s suffrage. Gilman believed the domestic environment oppressed women. According to Gilman, male aggressiveness and maternal roles of women are artificial and not necessary for survival any more. - "There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver." (from Woman and Economics, 1898). Gilman believed economic independence is the only thing that could really bring freedom for women, and make them equal to men.
Her Feminism began when she was asked to join the women’s suffrage movement. In January ] 1896 attended the 28th Annual Women’s Suffrage Convention in Washington DC where she lectured on “the spiritual significance of democracy and woman’s relation to it.” Her book Women and Economics played a huge role in her growing feminism. The book was greatly influenced by Lester Frank Ward whom was the leading reform Darwinist in America. This book stated that it all began in prehistoric times, when men would not compete naturally for mates, would use their strength to subjugate women, and put them into the “household duties.” This book also stated that motherhood does not disqualify a woman to work outside the home. It called for a creation of professional housekeepers, cooks, and child care services so that the mother may work outside of her home. “The ideal woman was not only assigned a social role that locked her into her home, but she was also expected to like it, to be cheerful and gay, smiling and good-humored.” Her story Concerning Children is where she really advocates child care. After this book was published in 1898 she was finally established as a writer. In the summer of 1899 she attended the Congress of Women in London and was already an international celebrity due to Women and Economics.
Gilman soon became a spokesperson on topics such as women’s perspectives on work and family. She believed that housework should be equally shared by men and women, and that at an early age women should be encouraged to be independent and to work for them. In two of her essays Human Work(1904), and The Man-Made World (1911) she states that women should work outside of the home, using their abilities to make society better, and to better their own lives.
Critical appreciation
Although Perkins 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 even admitted, "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."
Her work would not be rediscovered by American readers until several decades later, when, in the 1970s, women entered institutions of higher learning in larger numbers. Special attention should be paid to feminist critic Elaine Hedges, who extolled "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a castigation of modern marriage. In the introduction to The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels gives a detailed analysis of "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Women and Economics" in terms of their commitment to a "political economy of the self." That is, how these works express the economic underpinings of the notion of personhood and self constitution. Rather than a critique of capitalist ethos, as some authors have argued, these works embody the predicament of capitalism and the ubiquity of commodity fetishism at turn of the century America.
Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”
“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.”
“There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.”
“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”
"It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it."
"The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain -- the hardest and most iron-bound as well."
"A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband."
"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." (from her suicide note).
"When one is assured of 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."
Bibliography
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Poetry
In This Our World. 1895
Suffrage Songs and Verses. 1911
She wrote other poetry but these were the only two collections published.
Short Stories
She published 186 short stories in magazines (many in her own journal, the Forerunner).
Only the ones collected and republished since her death are listed below.
"Circumstances Alter Cases." 1890
"That Rare Jewel." 1890
"The Unexpected." 1890
"An Extinct Angel." 1891
"The Giant Wistaria." 1891
"The Yellow Wall-paper." 1892
"The Rocking-Chair." 1893
"An Elopement." 1893
"Deserted." 1893
"Through This." 1893
"A Day's Berryin.'" 1894
"Five Girls." 1894
"One Way Out." 1894
"The Misleading of Pendleton Oaks." 1894
"An Unnatural Mother." 1895
"An Unpatented Process." 1895
"According to Solomon." 1909
"Three Thanksgivings." 1909
"What Diantha Did." 1909-11
"The Cottagette." 1910
"When I Was a Witch." 1910
"In Two Houses." 1911
"Making a Change." 1911
"Moving the Mountain." 1911
"The Crux." 1910
"The Jumping-off Place." 1911
"The Widow's Might." 1911
"Turned." 1911
"Mrs. Elder's Idea." 1912
"Their House." 1912
"A Council of War." 1913
"Bee Wise." 1913
"Her Beauty." 1913
"Mrs. Hines's Money." 1913
"A Partnership." 1914
"Begnina Machiavelli." 1914
"Fulfilment." 1914
"If I Were a Man." 1914
"Mr. Peebles's Heart." 1914
"Dr. Clair's Place." 1915
"Girls and Land." 1915
"Herland." 1915
"Mrs. Merrill's Duties." 1915
"A Surplus Woman." 1916
"Joan's Defender." 1916
"The Girl in the Pink Hat." 1916
"With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Herland." 1916
Posthumous First-Time Printings (Fiction)
Unpunished: A Mystery 1998
Drama/Dialogues
"The Ceaseless Struggle of Sex: A Dramatic View." 1890
"Dame Nature Interviewed on the Woman Question as It Looks to Her" 1890
"The Twilight." 1894
"Three Women." 1911
"Something to Vote For." 1911
Non-Fiction
Gilman wrote more than one thousand works of non-fiction; the most prominent works are listed below.
Book-Length
Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. 1898
Concerning Children. 1900
The Home: Its Work and Influence 1903
Human Work 1904
The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture 1911
His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. 1923
Our Changing Morality 1930
Short and Serial Non-Fiction
"Why Women Do Not Reform Their Dress." 1886
"A Protest Against Petticoats." 1887
"The Providence Ladies Gymnasium.." 1888
"How Much Must We Read?" 1889
"Altering Human Nature." 1890
"Are Women Better Than Men?" 1891
"A Lady on the Cap and Apron Question." 1891
"The Reactive Lies of Gallantry." 1892
"The Vegetable Chinaman." 1893
"The Saloon and Its Annex." 1893
"The Business League for Women." 1894
"Official Report of Woman's Congress." 1894
"John Smith and Armenia." 1895
"The American Government." 1896
"When Socialism Began." 1897
"Causes and Uses of the Subjection of Women." 1898
"The Automobile as a Reformer." 1899
"Esthetic Dyspepsia." 1900
"Ideals of Child Culture." 1901
"Should Wives Work?" 1902
"Fortschritte der Frauen in Amerika." 1903
"The Passing of the Home in Great American Cities." 1904
"The Beauty of a Block." 1904
"The Home and the Hospital." 1905
"Some Light on the 'Problem.'" 1906
"Social Darwinism." 1907
"A Suggestion on the Negro Problem." 1908
"How Home Conditions React Upon the Family." 1909
"Children's Clothing." 1910
"On Dogs." 1911
"How to Lighten the Labor of Women." 1912
"What 'Love' Really Is." 1913
"Gum Chewing in Public." 1914
"A Rational Position on Suffrage/At the Request of the New York Times, Mrs. Gilman Presents the Best Arguments Possible in Behalf of Votes for Women." 1915
"What is Feminism?" 1916
"The Housekeeper and the Food Problem." 1917
"Concerning Clothes." 1918
"The Socializing of Education." 1919
"A Woman's Party." 1920
"Making Towns Fit to Live In." 1921
"Cross-Examining Santa Claus." 1922
"Is America Too Hospitable?" 1923
"Toward Monogamy." 1924
"The Nobler Male." 1925
"American Radicals.” 1926
"Progress through Birth Control." 1927
"Divorce and Birth Control." 1928
"Feminism and Social Progress." 1929
"Sex and Race Progress." 1929
"Parasitism and Civilized Vice." 1931
"Birth Control, Religion and the Unfit." 1932
"The Right to Die." 1935
Selected Lectures
Gilman lectured across the USA. Here is a selection that covers the major topics she lectured on.
"Club News." Weekly Nationalist 21 June 1890: 6.
"With Women Who Write." San Francisco Examiner. March 1891, 3:3.
"Safeguards Suggested for Social Evils." San Francisco Call 24 April 1892: 12:4. "The Labor Movement." Alameda County Federation of Trades, 1893. Alameda County, CA Labor Union Meetings. 2 September 1892.
"Announcement." Impress 1 (1894): 2.
"All the Comforts of a Home." San Francisco Examiner. 22 May 1895: 9.
"The Washington Convention." Woman's Journal 15 Feb 1896: 49-50.
"Woman Suffrage League." Boston Advertiser 10 Nov 1897: 8:1.
"Bellamy Memorial Meeting." American Fabian 4: (1898): 3.
"An Evening With Kipling." Daily Argus 14 March 1899: 4:2.
"Scientific Training of Domestic Servants." Women and Industrial Life Vol 6 of International Congress of Women of 1899. Ed Countess of Aberdeen. London: T. Unwin Fisher, 1900. 109.
No lectures listed in 1901.
"Society and the Child." Brooklyn Eagle 11 Dec 1902: 8:4.
"Woman and Work/ Popular Fallacy that They are a Leisure Class, Says Mrs. Gilman." New York Tribune 26 Feb 1903: 7:1.
"A New Light on the Woman Question." Woman's Journal 25 April 1904: 76-77.
"Straight Talk by Mrs. Gilman is Looked For." San Francisco Call 16 July 1905: 33:2.
No lectures listed in 1906.
"Women and Social Service." Warren: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1907.
"Higher Marriage Mrs. Gilman's Plea." New York Times 29 Dec 1908: 2:3.
"Three Women Leaders in Hub." Boston Post 7 Dec 1909: 1:1-2 and 14:5-6.
"Warless World When Women's Slavery Ends.' San Francisco Examiner 14 Nov 1910: 4:1.
"Lecture Given by Mrs. Gilman." San Francisco Call 15 Nov 1911: 7:3.
No lectures listed in 1912.
"Mrs. Gilman Assorts Sins." New York Times 3 June 1913: 3:8
"Adam the Real Rib, Mrs. Gilman Insists." New York Times. 19 Feb 1914: 9:3.
"Advocates a 'World City.'" New York Times 6 Jan 1915: 15:5.
No lectures listed in 1916.
"The Listener." Boston Transcript 14 April 1917: 14:1.
"Great Duty for Women After War." Boston Post 26 Feb 1918: 2:7.
"Mrs. Gilman Urges Hired Mother Idea." New York Times 23 Sept 1919: 36:1-2.
"Eulogize Susan B. Anthony." New York Times 16 Feb 1920: 15:6.
"Walt Whitman Dinner." New York Times 1 June 1921: 16:7.
No lectures from 1922-1926 listed.
"Fiction of America Being Melting Pot Unmasked by CPG." Dallas Morning News 15 Feb 1926: 9:7-8 and 15:8.
Diaries, Journals and Letters
A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897-1900. Ed. Mary A. Hill. Lewisburg: Bucknill UP, 1995.
The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 Vols. Ed. Denise D. Knight. n.p.:Virginia UP, 1998.
Autobiography
The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. NY and London: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935; NY: Arno Press, 1972; and Harper & Row, 1975.
References
1. Lane, Ann J. To "Herland" and Beyond: the Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlottesville: University P of Virginia, 1990. 3-362.
2. Golden, Catherine J., and Joanna Zangrando. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark: University of Delaware P, 2000. 9-220.
3. Wells, Kim. "Sarah Orne Jewett." Domestic Goddesses. August 23, 1999. Online. Internet. <http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/jewett1.htm>.
4. Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. 342-343.
5. Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Twayne Publishers, Boston. 1985.
6.Kessler, Carol Farley. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings. Syracuse University Press, New York, 1995.
7.Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Katharine Beecher Stetson Chamberlain, 1935.
8.http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/cgilman.html
External links
- Works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at Project Gutenberg
- "A Guide for Research Materials"
- "Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Domestic Goddess"
- "Similar Cases" A poem by Gilman
- "Charlotte Perkins Gilman" Short biography and bibliography from Author's Calendar
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1987). The living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: an autobiography. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 0405044593.