Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860. Her father, writer Frederick Beecher Perkins, abandoned the family shortly after Gilman’s birth. Gilman was raised by her mother and her father’s aunts and lacked a stable education due to the family’s frequent moves. At age 24, Gilman married artist Walter Stetson. After the birth of their first child, Gilman suffered extreme post-partum depression that lead to a near emotional breakdown. This lead her to divorce Stetson, leave her daughter in his care, and move across the country. On her own in California, Gilman turned to writing to earn a living and fully developed her interest in women’s independence and economics. In her 1898 book Women and Economics, she argues that women’s economic potential has been neglected while women are limited to sexual and maternal roles. In 1900, at age 40, Gilman married her cousin George Houghton Gilman, and in 1909 founded her own journal, Forerunner. She also founded the Women’s Peace Party in 1915 with activist Jane Addams. Gilman took her own life in Pasadena, California, at age 75 after being diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer.
Major works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
Herland (1915)
Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Momen as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898)
The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903)
The Man-Made World (1911)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Web
The Charlotte Perkins Gilman society’s web page offers past issues of its newsletter, a listserv and links to online resources.
This page from the Domestic Goddess website gives a biography of Gilman, links to criticism and an extensive guide for researchers.