Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born:	July 4, 1860
Died:	August 17, 1935
Occupation(s):	Short story and non-fiction writer, novelist, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer.
Magnum opus:	"The Yellow Wallpaper"

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. Her father was rarely home, leaving his wife and daughter with his progressive aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Beecher, and Isabella Beecher Hooker

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, Ellery Channing, who was also her best friend.

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.

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

Template:Move section to Wikiquote "The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life — of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle."

"A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband."

"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."

"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).

Bibliography

• The Yellow Wallpaper (1890)
• In This World (1893)
• Women and Economics (1898)
• Concerning Children (1900)
• The Home, Its Work And Influence (1903)
• Human Work (1904)
• Forerunner (monthly journal with prose - 1909-1916)
• The Crux (1910)
• Moving the Mountain (1911)
• The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911)
• Our Brains and What Ails Them (1912)
• Humanness (1913)
• Benigna Machiavelli (1914)
• Social Ethics: Sociology and the Future of Society (1914)
• The Dress of Women (1915)
• Her Land (1915)
• Growth and Combat (1916)
• With Her in Our Land (1916)
• His Religion and Hers (1922)
• What Diantha Did
• The living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: an autobiography (posthumous - 1987)

External links

• Works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Project Gutenberg, Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• "Similar Cases by Charlotte Gilman", About, Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• "Charlotte Perkins Gilman", Books and Writers, Retrieved April 4, 2007.

Credits

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