Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1860 - 1935
Gilman's life was shaped by two principle circumstances of her family; one was their status as intellectuals and reformers (Harriet Beecher Stowe was Gilman's great-aunt, and her great-grandfather was the fmous minister Lyman Beecher, among other lesser luminaries) and the other was the instability of her nuclear family, with her mother's consequent unhappiness. The first encouraged Gilman to participate in the family tradition of progressive public works, while the second left her estranged from her father, and with an emotionally distant mother. Gilman described her mother's system of child-rearing as deliberately "deny[ing] the child all expression of affection as far as possible, so that she should not be used to it or long for it." This had a naturally unhappy effect on Gilman, who was frequently visited by self-doubt and depression throughout her adult life.
Gilman's first vocation was painting, by which she was able to maintain herself prior to her first marriage. Through art, in fact, she met her husband, the artist Walter Stetson. From early in the marriage, Gilman suffered from debilitating depression, and her symptoms only lessened when she was separated from her husband. She tried S. Weir Mitchell's rest cure, which, with its requirements that she never touch a pen or brush again, had an effect the reverse of heathful. Stetson's belief that Gilman should become less "selfish" - that is, wholly devoted to his service, rather than involved in the public welfare - exacerbated her mental troubles, particularly as she seems to have internalized his (and society's) prescription that wives should abnegate their individuality on the shrine of spousal devotion. Gilman later traced the baleful effects of this philosophy in "The Yellow Wallpaper"; for a similarly devastating portrayal of the 19th-century tenet of husbandly superiority, see Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man. (Interestingly enough, contemporaries read "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a horror story, rather than as a critique of women's mental health care).
In any event, the marriage
come to an inevitable conclusion when the couple separated in 1891 and divorced
in 1894.
Gilman moved to California, where she became involved in socialism via the Nationalist Party. This affiliation led to Gilman's career as a lecturer, first for the Nationalist Party, and later independently. In this period, she also began writing short stories, poems, and articles for the Impress, the journal of the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association. At the same time, Gilman met and set up housekeeping with Adeline Knapp, with whom she had a passionate and apparently sexual relationship. However, Gilman's mother, fatally ill with cancer, moved in with the couple, and that, in addition to the strains associated with Gilman's divorce proceedings, ended the relationship in 1894.
After this period, Gilman traveled and lectured on American Fabianism (a form of socialism). She also met and married a cousin of hers, George Houghton Gilman. They moved to New York, where they were joined by Gilman's daughter from her first marriage. George was sympathetic to Gilman's feminist work, and the marriage was a successful and happy one.
She also completed her magnum opus, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relationship between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. This work cemented Gilman's status as one of the most important women thinkers in the U.S. It posits the idea that women are subjugated because they are economically dependent on men. Although immensely popular in its time, the work disappeared in the 1920s, only to emerge in the 60s.
After this success, Gilman
continued to write sociological works, including The Home: Its Work and
is Influence and Human Work. He second most important feminist
treatise was The
Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture. Gilman (like Simone
de Beauvoir, later) points out that because our culture had been dominated by
men, the values, skills, and achievements of our culture reflect only the
masculine perspective. Gilman, whose view of sexual difference was
essentialist, held that public 
institutions
reflected a male-oriented view of the world, rather than a genderless
outlook.
Like Bloomer, Gilman was devoted to dress reform, viewing women's clothes are invidious emblems of both class and servile feminity (see in particular "The Dress of Women").
In Gilman's later years, she turned increasingly to poetry and fiction, her most famous of these being Herland, the story of a utopian country inhabited solely by women. Herland radically seeks to combine women's maternal and public lives, and end the Victorian separation of the spheres. In general, however, Gilman's fictional works suffer from being overly didactic.
Gilman was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, and, after arranging her affairs, administerd chloroform to herself and so died in 1935.
Information drawn from:
Les Stone in Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000.
Carol Fairley Kessler. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
in Modern American Women Writers Pages 155–170 Copyright 1991 Charles Scribner's Sons
Herland http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/GilHerl.html
Women and Economics A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/economics/economics.html
Our Androcentric Culture ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext02/andro10.txt
The Yellow Wall-Paper http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~daniel/amlit/wallpaper/wallpapertext.html
FICTION
VERSE
COLLECTIONS
OTHER
