Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 – 1935

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American sociologist, philosopher, novelist, and one of the leading feminist theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Women and Economics of 1898, her most important philosophical work, argued that the economic dependence of women on men is the root of their political subordination and the cause of much of the moral and intellectual distortion of modern society. Her novel The Yellow Wallpaper of 1892 turned a personal experience of medical mistreatment into a sustained literary critique of nineteenth-century medical and domestic patriarchy, and her later utopian novel Herland imagined a society of women whose institutions reflect the philosophical alternatives she defended in her treatises.

Charlotte Anna Perkins was born at Hartford, Connecticut, in July 1860, the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her father deserted the family in her infancy; she was educated unevenly at the Rhode Island School of Design and supported herself as a teacher and commercial artist. Her marriage in 1884 to the painter Charles Walter Stetson was followed by the birth of their daughter Katharine and a severe postpartum depression treated with Silas Weir Mitchell's notorious 'rest cure', the experience that became the basis of her short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. She separated from Stetson, moved to California, and in 1900 married her cousin George Houghton Gilman, with whom she lived until his death in 1934.

Her books include Women and Economics (1898), Concerning Children (1900), The Home (1903), Human Work (1904), the utopian feminist novel Herland (1915), His Religion and Hers (1923), and the autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). From 1909 to 1916 she wrote and published almost single-handedly the journal The Forerunner.

Gilman argued that the economic dependence of married women on their husbands was the foundation of their subordination and that the household tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing should be professionalised and shared so that women could enter productive labour as full equals. She combined this feminist economics with a Bellamy-inspired nationalist socialism. Diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, she ended her own life at Pasadena, California, in August 1935.