Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | 2008 | The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright 2008 Columbia University Press. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860-1935, American feminist and reformer, b. Hartford, Conn.; great-granddaughter of Lyman Beecher . Prominent as a lecturer and writer on the labor movement and feminism, she edited the Forerunner, a liberal journal. She wrote many works on social and economic problems, the most important of which is Women and Economics (1898, repr. 1970). Incurably ill, she committed suicide.

Bibliography: See her autobiography (1935).

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Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

The Oxford Companion to United States History | 2001 | | © The Oxford Companion to United States History 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001. (Hide copyright information) Copyright

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

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Paul S. Boyer. "Gilman, Charlotte Perkins." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Oxford University Press. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. 11 Nov. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

Paul S. Boyer. "Gilman, Charlotte Perkins." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Oxford University Press. 2001. Encyclopedia.com. (November 11, 2009). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-GilmanCharlottePerkins.html

Paul S. Boyer. "Gilman, Charlotte Perkins." The Oxford Companion to United States History. Oxford University Press. 2001. Retrieved November 11, 2009 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-GilmanCharlottePerkins.html

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Free newspaper and magazine articles

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