The Blog of Awesome Women/ Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Land is Your Land

Niece of Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman also felt, in her own words, “the Beecher urge to social service, the Beecher wit and gift of words.” Born in 1860, Charlotte attended the Rhode Island School of Design and worked after graduation as a commercial artist. Exposed to the “domestic feminism” of the Beechers, the extremely sensitive and imaginative young woman had resolved to avoid her mother’s fate of penniless desertion by her father and assiduously avoided marriage, but after two years of relentless wooing, Charlotte reluctantly agreed to marry artist Walter Stetson. After she bore her daughter Katherine, she had a nervous breakdown that inspired her famous story The Yellow Wallpaper and subsequent nonfiction accounts of her struggle with manic-depressive episodes. She wrote The Yellow Wallpaper for humanistic reasons: “It was not intended to drive people crazy,” she said, “but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.” Attributing her emotional problems in part to women’s status in marriage, she divorced her husband and moved to California with her daughter (later, when Walter remarried, she sent Katherine to live with her father and stepmother, a move that was considered incredibly scandalous).

Although she suffered weakness and “extreme distress, shame, discouragement, and misery,” her whole life, Charlotte’s accomplishments are more than that of most healthy folks. A social reformer who wrote in order to push for equality for women, she lectured, founded the Women’s Peace Part with Jane Addams in World War I, and wrote her best-known book, Women and Economics in only seventeen days. At one point, she undertook a well-publicized  debate in the New York Times with Anna Howard Shaw, defending her contention that women are not “rewarded in proportion to their work” as “unpaid servant(s) merely a comfort and a luxury agreeable to have if a man can afford it.” Gilman was unbelievably forward thinking for her time, even going so far as to devise architectural plans for houses without kitchens to end women’s slavery to the stove so they could take up professional occupations.

Perkins Gilman wrote five more books pushing for economic change for women, a critically acclaimed autobiography, three utopian novels, and countless articles, stories, and poetry before her death by suicide after a long struggle with cancer in 1935. With the passing of time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is usually remembered only for The Yellow Wallpaper and for her feminist utopian novel Herland in which three American men enter Herland, an all-female society that reproduces through parthenogenesis, the development of an unfertilized egg. Less known is her impact as a nationally recognized speaker, political theorist, and tireless champion of women’s causes at the turn of the century. She lived an unconventional life and suffered for it, revealing through her writing the often grim realities behind the Victorian ideals of womanhood and how it was possible to change the way men and women related to one another.

“I knew it was normal and right in general, and held that a woman should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world, also.”—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Sheroism

• In 1870, as a ten-year-old girl, Charlotte wrote a feminist tale of the sheroism of Princess Araphenia, only heir to the good King Ezephon. When the kingdom fell under attack from a wicked enemy, Princess Araphenia disguised herself as a warrior-prince with a magical sword supplied by an interplanetary visitro, Elmondine. Brave Princess Araphenia saved her father’s kingdom and revealed herself after vanquishing the evil foes to the amazement and delight of her royal father.
• In 1911 on the subject of heroes: “strong, square, determined jaw. He may be cross-eyed, wide-eared, thick-necked, bandy-legged—what you please; but he must have a more or a less (protruding) jaw.”
• On society run by women as depicted in Herland, written in 1915: “like a pleasant family—an old, established, perfectly-run country place.” Herland’s society is made up entirely of women; therefore they have no enemies thanks to policies of “sister love” and “mother love.”

This bio of Charlotte Perkins Gilman was taken from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.