Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Life, Feminism, and Literary Legacy

Introduction

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an important social activist and one of the leading figures in the women's movement during the early twentieth century. She is also known for her theoretical contributions, through which she helped expand the ideas and scope of feminism, as well as for her novels and short stories that described the experiences of many women of her time. Possibly one of the most striking aspects of her life and work is the close correspondence between the events of her personal life and her views of women and their place in society.

She wrote extensively, producing volumes of articles and numerous books — both factual theoretical works such as Women and Economics and other non-fiction books, novels, and short stories. One of her best-known works is a short story entitled "The Yellow Wallpaper." This work largely parallels her own life and is based on personal experiences in its description of a woman's mental breakdown. She was a staunch advocate of women's rights and believed that the position and role of women in society should be changed for the better.

Early Life and Personal Influences

Charlotte Gilman was born in 1860 in New England. Although she was born into the historically wealthy and influential Beecher family, she lived in poverty. An important aspect of her early life that can be seen to have influenced her later writing was the fact that her father abandoned the family when she was very young. Another contributing factor was that she received only four years of formal education.

Although she had vowed never to marry, she eventually married Charles Walter Stetson, an artist from Rhode Island. After the birth of her daughter, Charlotte became depressed and suffered from this condition for many years. This resulted in her admittance to a sanitarium in Philadelphia, where she was subjected to the infamous "rest cure" — a treatment essentially based on a system of deprivation that denied her any physical or intellectual stimulation. This proved to be another formative period in her life, leaving a significant impact on her views and writing. After leaving the sanitarium she subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown, and only recovered after she divorced her husband.

Early in her life, Gilman displayed the independence she would later advocate for all women: she insisted on payment for her household chores and paid her mother room and board while supporting herself as a teacher and commercial artist. She had no desire for clothes and jewelry, preferring instead to engage in physical exercise and to read books of philosophy.

Literary Career and Major Works

It was in the 1890s that her literary career began in earnest. This was the period in which she published the famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the book Women and Economics, among other works including poetry. These two publications, particularly Women and Economics, established her name in the literary world. With its publication and its subsequent translation into seven languages, Gilman earned international acclaim.

In Women and Economics, she argues that women's secondary status in society, and especially their economic dependence on men, is not the result of biological inferiority but rather of culturally enforced behavior. She married again in 1900, this time to her first cousin Houghton Gilman, and went on to write more than twenty books over the next twenty-five years. She committed suicide at the age of seventy-five after learning she had contracted cancer.