Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS (1860–1935). An exceptionally popular and prolific writer on the “woman question,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman influenced many thousands of women through her sociological studies, novels, stories, poems, and lectures. Gilman had little direct influence upon political organizations, choosing to remain unaffiliated most of her life. By 1900, she had created an analytical bridge between the views of the nineteenth-century woman’s movement and the “scientific” socialist conceptions of woman’s advancement common in the works of Engels and August Bebel.

Grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman spent most of her impoverished childhood in Providence, Rhode Island. After attending college briefly, she married a local artist and the next year gave birth to her only child. Shortly thereafter, she fell into extreme despondence, leading to near nervous collapse. Her best-known short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1892, recounts in fictional form her mental breakdown and ensuing treatment. Relocating to California, she gained a divorce and returned her daughter to the care of her husband, a fact treated as scandalous by Boston and California papers. Throughout the rest of her life, she suffered emotionally from the aftereffects of these experiences.

Building a base in the Bay Area and desperate to earn money, Gilman turned to literary and journalistic pursuits. A volume of poetry earned praise, and for a short time she joined the socialistic Helen Campbell in editing the organ of the Pacific Coast Woman’s Press Association. Most important, she embraced Edward Bellamy’s ideas and lectured on Nationalism to groups of all kinds. As her reputation spread, and she became known as well as an authority on women’s issues. Soon Gilman was devoting most of her time to the national lecture circuit. Although disinclined to become active in the sectarian Socialist Labor Party, she attended the Second International Congress in 1896 in London as an American delegate. She contributed to the short-lived American Fabian.

In 1898, Gilman published her major work, Woman and Economics. Influenced by Lester Frank Ward’s Dynamic Sociology and providing a “scientific” socialist text paralleling August Bebel’s Frau und der Sozialismus, she broke decisively with the earlier communalistic-utopian views of work and the home. Women’s emancipation, rather than coming through men and women sharing the “unproductive” labor of homemaking, would come through equal engagement in productive labor, she insisted, while the tasks of domestic labor, including child care, were socialized entirely. Woman’s status, unhinged from a gendered division of labor, would now advance dramatically. The greatest immediate need, she believed, was to set women on the path to earn their own livelihood, that is, to be financially independent of men. Shortly after the turn of the century, she expanded this argument to advocate collective nurseries and kitchens to replace individualized homes entirely and to eclipse motherhood as women’s specialty.

Women and Economics won praise from many sources, even conservatives, and was soon translated into seven languages. Her socialist contemporary Florence Kelley praised it as “the first real, substantial contribution made by a woman to the science of economics.”

After marrying her first cousin in 1900, Gilman lived first in New York City and later in Norwalk, Connecticut, where she and her husband were joined by Helen Campbell, who cooked and cleaned while Gilman wrote essays and prepared Human Work (1904), a sequel of Women and Economics making an even more emphatic case against "sexuo-economic oppression of women." She also edited, largely wrote, and published the Forerunner (1909–1916), one of the most unusual of independent socialist magazines, equally devoted to improving the status of women and promoting social evolution. She filled the magazine’s pages, in part, with manuscripts of her own rejected by other publications or never submitted. She boasted of “no capital except a mental one,” and met half the magazine’s expenses through her lecturing and writing. Much as Walt Whitman’s literary executor, Horace Traubel, conducted his personal socialistic journal, the Conservator, Gilman filled the pages of the Forerunner with her own cultural commentary on the age, addressing herself directly to her few thousand readers. She also frankly took up questions of private morality, such as prostitution, social diseases, and marriage. For the Forerunner, she serialized some seven novels, including her major fantasy contribution, Herland, a visit to an island community of women governed by the principle of the New Motherhood, in which cooperative ideals (and parthenogenesis) replaced the male-dominated competitive social-sexual order.

After joining Jane Addams as a founding leader of the Women’s Peace Party in 1915, Gilman lost her milieu with the decline of the socialist movement and the upswing of Freudianism in the 1920s. Positioning herself as an old-fashioned scientific evolutionist who looked forward to the obliteration of gender differences, she slid into obscurity. Nevertheless, she dedicated herself to her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, at last published posthumously. Overwhelmed by spreading disease, she preferred “chloroform to cancer,” taking her own life in 1935. Only in the late 1960s, with the upswing of second-wave feminism, were her publications revived. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with its depiction of a woman made mad by her male physician’s oppressive rest-cure treatment, brought her ideas back into play.

Allen, Judith. The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Ceplair, Larry, ed., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Hill, Mary A. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Lane, Ann J. Introduction to The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, edited by Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Stern, Madeleine B. “The Forerunner.” In The American Radical Press, 1890–1916, vol. 2, edited by Joseph Conlin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Digital Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.