Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860–1935), author, lecturer, feminist intellectual.Born in Hartford, Connecticut, to parents descended from William Bradford of the
Plymouth Colony and the evangelical revivalist Lyman Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman grew up in poverty after her father left the family and withheld economic support. So began Gilman's lifelong attention to women's dependence on men, a concern intensified by her first marriage, in 1884, to Charles Stetson, which quickly led to depression, rest‐cure treatment from the
Philadelphia neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, and her partially autobiographical short story
The Yellow Wall‐Paper (1892).
Having moved to
California in 1888, and after scandalously sending her daughter to live with her husband (whom she divorced in 1894), Gilman began her public life as a socialist and feminist reformer, taking up a tireless regimen of speaking and writing that culminated in her most important work,
Women and Economics (1898). Marrying her cousin George Houghton Gilman in 1900 and relocating to
New York City, Gilman played a leading role in one of the most active periods of American
feminism. Always independent in thought, Gilman single‐handedly produced the
Forerunner (1909–1916), a monthly journal of literary and cultural criticism,
social science, fiction, and
poetry. In 1922, Gilman and her husband moved to Connecticut, where she wrote her autobiography. Suffering from breast cancer, Gilman took her own life in 1935, explaining that she “preferred chloroform to cancer.”
Gilman made two major intellectual contributions to American feminism. First, influenced by the sociologist Lester
Ward and Edward Bellamy's utopian novel
Looking Backward, Gilman used Darwinian evolutionary theory to expose how overemphasis on sexuality and motherhood had retarded woman's development. Matching social remedy with historical analysis, Gilman envisioned the collectivization and professionalization of child care, laundry service, and cooking, thereby freeing women to achieve coequal status with men through more meaningful work. Second, Gilman introduced the concept of “androcentricism”: the broad‐based set of social practices, relationships, and institutions that systematically subjugated women to men. Her delineation of a “man‐made world” became a key building block in late twentieth‐century understandings of
gender. Gilman implored women to “shake ourselves free” from constricted feminine identities by pursuing (in one of her favorite words) the quality of “humanness.” This idea underlies her utopian novel
Herland (1915), which tells of a communitarian society of women that has erased gender difference. Gilman's legacy is conflicted, as even sympathetic biographers find it difficult to explain her
racism and her ethnocentrism. Gilman's limitations are perhaps outweighed, however, by the boldness and originality of her contribution not only to feminist thought but to American intellectual history generally.
See also
Evolution, Theory of;
Gilded Age;
Progressive Era;
Women's Rights Movements.
Bibliography
Mary Armfield Hill , Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1980.
Ann J. Lane , To “Herland” and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1990.
John Pettegrew
