Gilman Bio

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 - 1935)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father, a librarian and writer, was the nephew of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Frederick Beecher Perkins abandoned his family in 1866, forcing Charlotte's mother to look after the remaining children on her own. Charlotte was largely self-educated. After two years at the Rhode Island School of Design (1878-80), she began to support herself as a designer of greeting cards. She married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884. Her depression following the birth of their daughter, and the treatment she underwent beginning in 1886, would later inspire the short story by which she is best known today. "The Yellow Wallpaper" first appeared in New England Magazine in 1892. Charlotte Perkins separated from Stetson in 1888 and moved to California, where she wrote and published her first book, a collection of satirical poems on feminist themes. Her increased involvement in politics in the 1890's led to larger piece of polemical writing, Women and Economics (published in 1898). In this book, Perkins argued that the prescribed social roles of the sexes were artificial and had grown obsolete; its insistence on economic independence for women anticipates Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Charlotte Perkins married her cousin George Gilman, a New York lawyer, in 1902. She devoted much of her energy in the next two decades to lecturing and writing on women's issues and other socio-political topics. She also founded and edited a monthly journal, Forerunner, from 1909 to 1916. George Gilman died in 1934, and Charlotte returned to California to live near her daughter. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932 and took her own life on August 17, 1935 at her home in Pasadena, California. Her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was published shortly after her death.

Selected Work:

In This Our World (1893)
Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898)
Concerning Children (1900)
The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903)
His Religion and Hers (1923)
The Living of Charlotte Perkins (1935)
Herland (written late 1890's, published 1979)

The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society has a website with biography, newsletters, and links to related sites:
www.cortland.edu/gilman/