GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS 1860-1935

FEMINIST WRITER AND LECTURER

Background

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of the most prominent lecturers and social critics of the 1900s, was born in Hartford, Connecticut, into one of the most intellectually prestigious families in the United States. Her father was the nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and was the brother-in-law of Edward Everett Hale. Gilman had a difficult childhood. Her father left the household in 1866, and Gilman grew up fatherless with her mother dependent on family members for support. Gilman later recalled her great-aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe fondly and early on chose her as a role model. Although she had a somewhat limited formal education, Gilman was a voracious reader from the age of fifteen. At seventeen she requested from her distant father Frederick Perkins, author of The Best Reading (1877), a list of books to read. He replied with a long list of nonfiction titles on evolution, anthropology, and ethnology. In 1880, at the age of twenty, Gilman completed two years of study at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her modest education was over. She began earning a living as a freelance commercial artist, but in 1882 she met Charles Walter Stetson, an aspiring artist. After much reluctance and inner struggle she married Stetson in 1884; she gave birth to a daughter, Katherine, the following year. Marriage and motherhood had an immediate and devastating effect on Gilman. She broke down, depressed and hysterical, mortified that she had given up her freedom. She traveled to Utah and California to visit friends and family in late 1885 and recovered almost instantly. When she returned home in 1886, she again succumbed to despair. A year later she visited the famous physician S. Weir Mitchell in Philadelphia. He did not take her condition seriously and simply ordered her to "Live as domestic a life as possible," a common "cure" for women of the nineteenth century. Gilman skirted the edge of madness all summer, and finally, in October 1887, she traveled with her daughter and mother to Pasadena, California, separated from her husband and truly free for the first time in her adult life.

Writer and Activist

In the West she began writing articles and poems for the Pacific Monthly and Pacific Rural Press. She was then and would remain a didactic writer, believing that to instruct was the true role of the writer. She was deeply influenced by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Bellamy's conception of a socialist, Utopian future swept the country in the form of the Nationalist movement. Gilman became an active Nationalist, joining a Nationalist Club and contributing to the California Nationalist and the Nationalist magazines. Her poem "Similar Cases," which parodied social conservatism, appeared in the Nationalist in 1890 and became a minor classic, attracting the notice of William Dean Howells, among others. In a sense, the poem launched her lecturing career. She began giving public lectures on Nationalism and at Nationalist meetings, a period which peaked in 1891 and 1892. She also published in Bellamy's New Nation. But the phase passed. Nationalism declined and Gilman stepped away from it. In the meantime she had sued for divorce, which was finally granted in 1894.

The Yellow Wallpaper

In January 1892 Gilman published "The Yellow Wallpaper" in the New England Magazine. The story, a harrowing account of a woman's spiral into madness and hysteria based on Gilman's own illness, caused an instant controversy while also being hailed as a masterpiece of horror fiction worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. To this day the story remains Gilman's most widely known work. Gilman's first book, a collection of poetry titled In This Our World, appeared in 1893 and was received well in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Another controversy followed in 1894, when Gilman, feeling the need to "serve" by writing full-time, gave up motherhood. She sent her nine-year-old daughter to the East to live with Walter Stetson and his new wife. This decision provoked a public scandal. Though she privately grieved over the decision, she worked harder at her writing. She edited and published a weekly magazine, Impress, for twenty weeks. She also became more active in women's political issues, helping to organize a Woman's Congress in San Francisco. She met suffragists Anna Howard Shaw, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Addams, who would become a close friend.

Women and Economics.

The 1890s were a busy decade for Gilman and culminated with the publication of Women and Economics in 1898. She had spent the previous three years in constant travel, including a stay at Addams's Hull House in Chicago. She had lectured on women's issues and testified before the House Judiciary Committee hearings on suffrage. In 1896, at a Women's Congress in Washington, D.C., she met Lester Ward, a reform Darwinist who had attacked Herbert Spencer's doctrine of social Darwinism. Ward's work had a major impact on Gilman and her social writings. Another influence came from the Fabian movement in England. Gilman traveled there for a Socialist Congress in 1896 and met with George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and William Morris. She later contributed to the monthly American Fabian. By 1897 she had decided to write a long essay about economics and sexual repression. The result, written in just five weeks, was Women and Economics (1897). The book won great acclaim, with reviewers comparing it to John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869). The book outlined marriage as an economic transaction forced by circumstance, not a natural arrangement that could not be undone. It also questioned the idea of motherhood as something sacred, considering it instead an occupation. The book was radical and well received and opened Gilman's most productive period.

1900s

As the new century opened, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (she had married her cousin Houghton Gilman in 1900) was among the leading lights of American intellectuals. The decade would prove to be her most productive, though much of her lasting work was by then done. She published Concerning Children in 1900, The Home in 1903, Human Work in 1904, The Man-Made World in 1910, and also that year her first novel, What Diantha Did. She became a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, Harper's Bazaar, Scribner's, Appletons, and the Woman's Home Companion. She also became a regular speaker at suffrage conventions. Among her most radical ideas was the socialization of housekeeping proposed in The Home. Gilman argued that the home should be without a kitchen, or at least only a kitchen staffed by hired workers. While asserting the positive aspects of the home, she criticized the subjection of women that resulted from the kitchen. Following Bellamy's model in hooking Backward, Gilman imagined a socialized kitchen replacing a private one, serving the needs of many at lower cost to all. The book is among her most coherent of the period and was critically acclaimed, in contrast to ambivalent reviews of Concerning Children and Human Work. Gilman seemed to be at her height of pricking contemporary mores.

Forerunner and Beyond

Gilman took on a new challenge in 1906, even as her celebrity began to wane. She began the incredible task of single-handedly writing, editing, and publishing a magazine called Forerunner. The venture would last more than seven years, and even though the circulation was never more than about fifteen hundred, Gilman had subscribers all over the world. In Forerunner Gilman wrote political essays, sociology, poems, serialized novels, book reviews, and contemporary news. She was a one-woman tour de force, and in eighty-six issues of the magazine she wrote an estimated twenty-eight full-length books of prose. Included in Forerunner were What Diantha Did, The Man-Made World, and three romances—Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Outland (1916). Unfortunately, Gilman exhibited some unattractive beliefs in Forerunner, beliefs that seem incongruous with modern progressive stances. She at times exhibited racist opinions regarding Jews and blacks and endorsed "race-improvement" via birth control, eugenics, and sterilization of the "unfit," ideas to which many progressives gave serious consideraton at the time. She ceased producing Forerunner in 1916 and at sixty-six slowed down her work. In 1922 Carrie Chapman Catt ranked her at the top of her list of a dozen prominent American women. Through the 1920s Gilman wrote an autobiography, contributed an occasional essay, and wrote a detective novel. She committed suicide in 1935, two years after being diagnosed with breast cancer. She had disappeared from the public eye, and her work was only rediscovered in the 1960s with the advent of the modern women's movement.