Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860–1935), short story writer, novelist. Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, deserted his family soon after Charlotte's birth in Hartford, Conn., and her childhood was difficult. In 1884 she married Charles Stetson. She wrote her best known work, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), after being institutionalized as a consequence of post‐natal depression. She divorced Stetson in 1887 and moved with her daughter to California. In the 1890s she lectured widely on women's rights. In Women and Economics (1898) she maintained that the dependence of women on men, economically, hinders the happiness of all. Other books, Concerning Children (1900), and The Home (1904), propose changes to liberate women for more productive lives. Man Made World (1911) and His Religion and Hers (1923) envision important roles for women in world affairs and church, leading to fewer wars. In 1900 she married her cousin George Houghton Gilman. It was a happy marriage. Late in her career, Gilman wrote novels, often utopian, including Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916), all touching on social evils and giving feminist remedies. In the same year as her death appeared The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an Autobiography. Her Diaries were published in 1994.