Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman (; née Perkins; July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935), also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, early sociologist, and advocate for social reform. She was an early and leading figure in the women's rights movement in the United States, and in modern terms is regarded as a socialist feminist.
Gilman's works were primarily focused on gender, specifically the gendered labor division in society, and the problem of male supremacism. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), based on her experience with postpartum depression; her manifesto calling for women's economic independence, Women and Economics (1898); and the utopian feminist novel, Herland (1915). She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.
Charlotte Anna Perkins was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Mary Fitch Westcott and Frederic Beecher Perkins, a member of a prominent American religious and literary family. Charlotte had one brother, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months older. During Charlotte's infancy, her father moved out and abandoned his wife and children, and the remainder of her childhood was spent in poverty. Her mother was not affectionate with her children. She forbade her children from forming strong friendships or reading fiction. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gilman wrote that her mother showed affection only when she thought her young daughter was asleep.
Though estranged from Frederic, the Perkins relied on his aunts for support, including Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, both of whom influenced Charlotte's perceptions of the world. In written communication with her father, he provided her with reading lists for scholarly works on history, anthropology, and the sciences.
Much of Gilman's youth was spent in Providence, Rhode Island. What friends she had were mainly male, and she was unashamed to call herself a "tomboy". Her schooling was erratic: she attended seven different schools, for a cumulative total of just four years, ending when she was fifteen. Her natural intelligence and breadth of knowledge always impressed her teachers, who were nonetheless disappointed in her because she was a poor student.
She was known to frequent the public library to study physics, literature, history (particularly ancient civilizations) on her own. Her favorite subject was "natural philosophy", especially what later would become known as physics. In 1878, the eighteen-year-old enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design with the monetary help of her absent father, and subsequently supported herself as an artist of trade cards. She was a tutor, and encouraged others to expand their artistic creativity. She was also a painter.
During her time at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gilman met Martha Luther in about 1879 and was believed to be in a romantic relationship with her. Gilman described the close relationship she had with Luther in her autobiography:
We were closely together, increasingly happy together, for four of those long years of girlhood. She was nearer and dearer than any one up to that time. This was love, but not sex ... With Martha I knew perfect happiness ... We were not only extremely fond of each other, but we had fun together, deliciously ...
Letters between the two women chronicles their lives from 1883 to 1889 and contains over 50 letters, including correspondence, illustrations and manuscripts. They pursued their relationship until Luther ended the relationship to marry a man in 1881. Gilman was devastated and detested romance and love until she met her first husband.
In 1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson, whom she met while studying art at the Rhode Island School of Design. Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson (1885–1979), was born the following year on March 23, 1885. Gilman suffered a serious bout of postpartum depression, and was prescribed lengthy confinement to her bed, known as the "rest cure treatment" under supervision of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who developed the treatment. Gilman was given the following instructions: "Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time ... Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours' intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live." She tried for a few months to follow Mitchell's advice, but her depression deepened, and she came perilously close to a full emotional collapse. She began to display suicidal behavior that involved talk of pistols and chloroform, as recorded in her husband's diaries. This experience inspired her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892).
In 1888, Charlotte separated from her husband—a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth century—and moved to Pasadena, California with her daughter and lived with friend Grace Ellery Channing. She officially divorced Stetson in 1894, and he married Channing. Gilman reported in her memoir that she was happy for the couple, since Katharine's "second mother was fully as good as the first, [and perhaps] better in some ways." Gilman also held progressive views about paternal rights and acknowledged that her ex-husband "had a right to some of [Katharine's] society" and that Katharine "had a right to know and love her father."
After her mother died in 1893, Gilman decided to move back east for the first time in eight years. She contacted Houghton Gilman, her first cousin, whom she had not seen in roughly fifteen years, who was a Wall Street attorney. They began spending time together almost immediately and became romantically involved. While she went on lecture tours, Houghton and Charlotte exchanged letters and spent as much time as they could together before she left. From their wedding in 1900 until 1922, they lived in New York City. In 1922, Gilman moved from New York to Houghton's old homestead in Norwich, Connecticut. Following Houghton's sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, Gilman moved back to Pasadena, California, where her daughter lived.
In January 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer. An advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, Gilman died by suicide on August 17, 1935, by taking an overdose of chloroform. In both her autobiography and suicide note, she wrote that she "chose chloroform over cancer" and she died quickly and quietly.
After moving to Pasadena, Gilman became active in organizing social reform movements. As a delegate, she represented California in 1896 at both the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C., and the International Socialist and Labor Congress in London. In 1890, she was introduced to the Nationalist Clubs movement which worked to "end capitalism's greed and distinctions between classes while promoting a peaceful, ethical, and truly progressive human race." Published in the Nationalist magazine, her poem "Similar Cases" was a satirical review of people who resisted social change, and she received positive feedback from critics for it. Throughout that same year, 1890, she became inspired enough to write fifteen essays, poems, a novella, and the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper".
Her career was launched when she began lecturing on Nationalism and gained the public's eye with her first volume of poetry, In This Our World, published in 1893. As a successful lecturer who relied on giving speeches as a source of income, her fame grew along with her social circle of similar-minded activists and writers of the feminist movement.
Over the course of her career, in addition to publishing poems and fiction, Gilman published six significant books of non-fiction; a contribution which led her to be seen as one of the “women founders” of the discipline of sociology. These works, and additional published journal articles, exposed both gender and class inequality, criticizing it as illegitimate and unfair. She was a member of the American Sociological Association from the time of its founding in 1905 to her death in 1935.