Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

A major American writer of the early twentieth century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1860–1935) literary contribution to feminist theory was largely forgotten for several decades after her death. However, during the 1960s women’s movement, a new generation rediscovered her writings.

Charlotte Anna Perkins lost her father shortly after her birth when he abandoned his wife and children. Perkins and her brother grew up in near poverty. As an adult, Perkins designed greeting cards and taught art to support herself. In 1884 she married artist Charles Stetson. After giving birth to their only child, Katherine Beecher Stetson, Perkins suffered from depression and was instructed by well-known physician Silas Mitchell to live a quiet domestic life caring for her husband and child and to cease all writing and drawing. Nearly driven to insanity by her domestic captivity, Perkins left her husband and moved to California with her daughter.

Instead of causing a mental breakdown, writing enabled Perkins to challenge the nineteenth-century social restrictions that limited women. Her first novel, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), explores the ordeal of a dutiful wife who undergoes Dr. Mitchell’s rest cure. Determined to influence public opinion, she also became coeditor of The Impress, a women’s journal, and contributing editor of The American Fabian, along with Edward Bellamy. She admired Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888), and gave public lectures on his ideal socialist society. Like Bellamy, Lester Ward, and other prominent social critics of the late nineteenth century, Perkins was optimistic that a greater understanding of Darwin’s evolutionary laws would produce the fundamental economic and social changes she believed were necessary to truly liberate the human potential of women.

In 1898 Perkins published her most famous work, Women and Economics, which challenged the sexual and maternal roles of women. She argued that domestic duties and economic dependence prevented both women and men from realizing their full humanity. In her subsequent books, including The Home: Its Work and Influence (1904), she held that only women’s economic independence could bring genuine social progress. Women’s contribution to the social, or “human,” sphere must be released for the next stage of human evolution. The author’s utopian novel, Herland (1915), originally serialized in her monthly journal, The Forerunner, offered a preview of this next stage of human evolution through the eyes of three male travelers. Herland’s “new” women were conscientious agents of natural selection who had created a society of peace, beauty, and plenty.

In 1900 Charlotte Perkins married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman, an attorney. They lived happily together until his death in 1934, two years after Charlotte Gilman was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. She moved back to California to live near her daughter and complete her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). She concluded the book with the line, “I have preferred chloroform to cancer.” By the time of her suicide in 1935, Gilman’s calls for a radical restructuring of society had ceased to influence the women’s movement. But her conviction, stated in her 1911 work, The Man-Made World, that “women are not undeveloped men; but the feminine half of humanity is undeveloped human” has continued to inspire many American feminists.

Bibliography:

Gilman, Charotte Perkins. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York: Arno Press, 1972.
The Man-Made World. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2001.
Karpinksi, Joanne B., ed. Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.
Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.

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