The Equivocal

Legacy of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Anna Perkins was

born squarely within the
Victorian era, on July 3, 1860,
in Hartford, Connecticut,
twelve years after the first
women’s rights convention,
held in Seneca Falls, New
York, and less than a year
before the Civil War broke out.
By the time Gilman died in
1935, she’d seen her country
go to war, women achieve the
vote, and the early years of the Great Depression. She’d also glimpsed more
than a few of the material advances that would come to reshape the lives of
women and families, among them the legalization of condoms, the invention
of the zipper, and the sale of frozen foods.

Gilman was never merely a witness to history’s unfolding. From an early age,
she yearned to mold society to her vision, an impulse she inherited from her
paternal line, the prominent nineteenth-century Beecher clan. Her great-
grandfather, Lyman Beecher, and great-uncle, Henry Ward Beecher, were
influential ministers. Her great-aunts included Harriet Beecher Stowe, author
of the popular 1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Catharine
Beecher, an author and educator who promoted women’s higher education
and founded her own school, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, a leader in the
suffragist movement.

This lineage proved far more impressive than her father’s fitness for
parenthood; he vanished when Gilman and her fourteen-months-older brother
were still infants, leaving his wife to raise the children alone. Over the next
eighteen years, the threesome moved nineteen times, living in boarding
houses and the homes of various family members throughout New England.
The familial generosity ceased in 1873, when Gilman’s mother finally filed
for divorce, an extremely rare decision at the time, of which the Beechers did
not approve.

This unstable upbringing had a profound influence on the eventual adult.

Though by background and appearance a member of the white upper-middle
class, Gilman enjoyed few of its attendant privileges, whether comforts like
new clothing or the less tangible advantages of a formal education. (All told,
she recorded four years among seven different elementary and secondary
schools, leaving school when she was fifteen.)

During early adolescence, she fashioned herself as a stoic, consciously

cultivating personal deprivations and choosing the bracing rewards of
intellectual study and physical exercise over all—other than the joys of
imagination: “I could make a world to suit me,” she recollected thinking in
her autobiography. This creativity extended to the sartorial realm. She
designed and sewed her own clothes, even her own special “species of
brassière,” and at a time when tight, constricting corsets were a staple of
women’s wardrobes, she refused to wear one. At seventeen, she confided to
her diary that she would never marry, because doing so would thwart her
plans to better humanity.

It isn’t difficult to see in this fiercely individualistic young woman the seeds
of a radical. Possibly, the combination of her self-directed reading and lack of
traditional schooling allowed for the habit of unconventional thinking that
characterized her long career. Certainly, witnessing the travails of her visibly
unhappy mother, forced to rely on the charity of extended family, impressed
upon the girl the necessity of financial independence. In 1878, at age
eighteen, she enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and
began earning money as a commercial artist.
In 1879, Gilman fell in love with a young woman her age, Martha Luther. It
was her first significant romantic relationship, and she fervently hoped they
would become life partners. Intense same-sex attachments were common
among women during the nineteenth century, whether adolescent “romantic
friendships,” in which two girls exchanged passionate endearments, or adult
“Boston marriages,” in which two spinsters set up house without the
economic support of a husband.

Eventually, though, Luther called off the relationship and announced her
engagement to a man. Gilman was devastated. In her 1882 journal, she
emphatically swore off “love and happiness” and re-committed herself to
public service, declaring “work” would be her emotional salvation.

Ten days after writing that journal entry, however, Gilman met a charismatic
young painter, Charles Walter Stetson. For two years she refused his repeated
proposals, until finally breaking her anti-marriage vow. On May 2, 1884, she
and Stetson were wed in a small ceremony in Providence, Rhode Island.

Less than a year after the wedding, Gilman gave birth to their daughter,
Katharine, and then succumbed to a postpartum depression, lasting nearly
three years, that became the genesis of her most famous work. In the spring
of 1887, desperate for help, she traveled to Philadelphia to undergo the now-
infamous “rest cure” with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, the era’s venerated nerve
specialist (Edith Wharton was also a patient). His treatment: “Live as
domestic a life as possible,” and “never touch pen, brush, or pencil again as
long as I lived,” Gilman later wrote in an essay. She tried to do as he
prescribed—and then suffered a nervous breakdown.

Yet, before long, she found the strength to reject her doctor’s orders and
make her own diagnosis. The emotional confines of marriage and
motherhood were smothering her, she decided, and she would pursue her own
course of treatment, what she cheekily called her “west cure.” In the summer
of 1888, she persuaded Stetson to agree to a separation, then moved with
Katharine across the country to Pasadena, California, where, after a bumpy
start, she finally embarked on her ambition to become a “world-server” and
began writing and publishing in earnest.

In literary terms, Gilman was never a masterful writer. Unlike her

contemporary Wharton, who created some of America’s greatest fictional
heroines, Gilman wasn’t interested in, or perhaps capable of, orchestrating a
wide cast of characters with complex inner lives, or perfecting a prose style.
Even so, what she brought to the page retains a distinctive place in American
letters: a captivating mix of perspicacity, subversiveness, and humor,
propelled by an admirable taste for experimentation and an inexhaustible
work ethic.

The Yellow Wall-Paper is rightly regarded as Gilman’s best fictional work.

She wrote it in a two-day white heat during the summer of 1890, but it didn’t
appear in The New England Magazine until January 1892. (Her rejection
letter from The Atlantic read, “Dear Madam, I could not forgive myself if I
made others as miserable as I have made myself.”) A chronicle of one
woman’s descent into madness, the story is commonly interpreted as a
feminist critique of Victorian America’s patriarchal medical system. But it is
also a notable example of Gothic fiction, recalling the unreliable narrator of
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” published a half century before,
and anticipating Shirley Jackson’s psychological suspense stories a half-
century later.

The plot begins straightforwardly. A never-named narrator and her physician

husband, John, have retired for the summer with their newborn to a long-
abandoned country house, so she may rest. The narrator is suffering from
what her husband dismisses as a “temporary nervous depression—a slight
hysterical tendency.” Forbidden to work, she is confined to a nursery at the
top of the house, a spacious room with windows on all sides and a “repellant”
yellow wallpaper stripped off in giant patches. “I never saw a worse paper in
my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic
sin,” the narrator confides in the secret diary that comprises the story. More
ominous: “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken
neck.”

Soon, she detects the figure of a woman trapped inside the paper, “creeping”
behind the pattern, with whom she eventually merges completely. The ending
is left hauntingly unresolved: When John faints after discovering his wife
crawling around the perimeter of the room, is the narrator triumphant? Or
does the fact that she continues to “creep over” his body mean she’s now
trapped in a never-ending cycle?

In December 1892, Gilman’s husband filed for divorce. Two years later,
when the divorce was finalized, Gilman relinquished full custody of her
daughter to Stetson, garnering even more public disapprobation. She mined
this turmoil for “The Unnatural Mother,” drafted in 1893 and first published
in an 1895 issue of The Impress, a literary weekly put out by the Pacific
Coast Women’s Press Association, of which she was the editor at the time.
About a young mother who warns the townspeople of a coming flood instead
of tending to the safety of her baby, the story plays on popular conceptions of
maternal feeling; the mother saves the town, dying in the process, but is
posthumously castigated anyhow for risking her child, who survives.
(Intriguingly, the mother’s name, Esther Greenwood, is also that of the
heroine of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. It is
entirely possible that Plath read Gilman, though scholars haven’t determined
if the reference was intentional.)

Once she’d found her stride, Gilman was unstoppable. In 1893, she published
her first poetry collection, In This Our World, to warm reviews. Around this
time, she decided her primary concern to be the “woman question,”
particularly suffrage and economic independence. She also became involved
in the so-called Nationalist movement, a short-lived nineteenth-century
network of socialist groups committed to nationalizing private property (the
name bears no relation to our contemporary understanding of nationalism).
Inspired by Edward Bellamy’s 1888 hugely successful utopian science fiction
novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, the movement’s central principles—
most notably, a belief in progress and an emphasis on communal values—
made a deep mark on Gilman. She incorporated ideas about cooperative
living into her feminism and spent the years between 1895 and 1900
constantly traveling as a public speaker, a woman “at large,” as she liked to
put it.

In 1898, she published her first important nonfiction book, Women and
Economics, which argued for the necessity of female economic independence
to the improvement of marriage and the family. Foreseeing our current debate
over “work-life balance,” she advocated for professionalizing housework and
for building communal living spaces with public kitchens so that women
wouldn’t be permanently stuck alone cooking and cleaning. The book
catapulted Gilman into a yet higher sphere of influence and crowned her the
leading intellectual of the women’s movement.

The turn of the century brought a new chapter in Gilman’s life. In 1900, she
married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman, a Wall Street attorney,
and settled down with him in New York City. Over the next several years,
she published three more nonfiction books: Concerning Children (1900), The
Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), and Human Work (1904). Along with
contributing articles to a wide range of mass-market magazines and
newspapers, as well as academic journals, in 1909 Gilman inaugurated her
most ambitious endeavor to date: her own monthly publication, The
Forerunner.

For more than seven years, she wrote, edited, designed, typeset, and produced
every inch of eighty-six issues, each twenty-eight pages long and going out to
1,500 subscribers. Free to unleash her voice whenever and however she
wanted, without having to constantly navigate the complicated strictures of
the publishing marketplace, she let loose in an inspired torrent of “stories
short and serial, article and essay; drama, verse, satire and sermon; dialogue,
fable and fantasy, comment and review,” as she described in her statement of
purpose. The cover image, her own pen-and-ink illustration, perfectly
captures her politics: an infant of genderless appearance stands atop a globe
flanked by a couple—the woman supports the child with her left arm, the
man supports the woman with his right arm, and with their free hands, they
hold the globe between them, that is, the fate of the family and of the world at
large.

It was in these pages that she first published, over the course of 1915, what is,
besides The Yellow Wall-Paper, her most significant work, the satirical,
utopian science-fiction novel Herland. While most science fiction takes place
in the future, Herland is about an all-female society set in Gilman’s present
day. Two thousand years before the story takes place, a volcanic eruption
blocked off the country’s only point of egress, killing most of the men in the
process; those who remained, murderous slaves attempting to violently seize
power, were obliterated by an uprising of women. Eventually, the survivors,
all female, discovered that via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction) they
could get pregnant and give birth to five girls apiece, who were also
parthenogenetic.

In this way, Herland had created and maintained a thriving population over
the millennia. When they’d reached the risk of overpopulation, they instituted
the practice of choosing biological motherhood; that is, a woman could
decide for herself if she’d give birth to a child or instead channel her
generative energies into designing a new building, for instance, or writing a
novel.

The story begins when three American men on a scientific expedition—

Terry, a male chauvinist playboy; Jeff, a sentimental doctor; and Vandyck, a
sociologist and the feminist-minded narrator—stumble upon this mythical
place they’d never believed to be real. The book’s comedy turns on the ways
in which their sexist presumptions—many, sadly, still recognizable today—
are toppled. Far from the “sublimated summer resort—just Girls and Girls
and Girls” that Terry had imagined Herland to be, they discover instead an
ideal society that is communal, co-operative, and peaceful. Herlanders
maintain a simple vegetarian diet and exercise daily. Their clothes are
uncomplicated, airy, and comfortable; there isn’t a corset, or even a special
brassière, to be found. The means of production are entirely self-sustaining.
Laws are revised every twenty years.

There is a snake in this garden, however—not in the plot, but in Gilman’s

conception of this utopia-in-her-time: a desire for racial purity. For all her
progressiveness when it came to equality for the sexes, Gilman was a
xenophobe, a regrettably common response at the turn of the last century to
the waves of immigrants resettling in urban areas. This prejudice dovetailed
with her simultaneous embrace of eugenics, then a respectable academic field
and a widespread enthusiasm even among, or especially among, social
reformers. Between her passion for science and sociology and her
constitutional faith in the forward march of progress, Gilman was quick to
adopt the idea that some human populations are genetically superior to
others, and that by playing to the strengths inherent to each race, poverty
could be eradicated and society vastly improved.

Moreover, at a time when sex education and effective birth control weren’t
widely available, Gilman saw in eugenics an answer to the scourges of
sexually transmitted diseases (a major public-health issue until penicillin was
found to treat syphilis in 1943) and involuntary motherhood. Feminists and
activists in general were divided over eugenics: Margaret Sanger, Emma
Goldman, and Olive Schreiner all shared Gilman’s views, while Jane
Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence Kelley fought against them.

Viewed one way, the practice in Herland of women’s consciously deciding

whether or not to give birth is a refreshing rejoinder to the age-old
expectation that all women must become mothers. Viewed another way, it
appears perilously similar to the then-widespread use of involuntary eugenic
sterilization as a means for controlling “undesirable” populations. Now
considered a gross abuse of human rights, during the twentieth century
eugenic sterilization was practiced in thirty states, starting in 1907 and lasting
into the 1970s. Although the practice of sterilization does not appear
in Herland, and there is no evidence that Gilman advocated for the practice in
real life, it cannot be overlooked that she believed native-born white people
to be genetically superior to other groups.
 Gilman addressing members of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, June 4, 1916

By the 1930s, eugenic feminism was on the wane; Gilman’s “race

awareness,” as she called it, did not win her many new followers, and she
came to be regarded as far less relevant than she once had been. By the time
she died, in 1935, all her books were out of print, and early posthumous
efforts to keep her reputation alive foundered. It was not until the 1970s,
amid the renewed interest of second-wave feminists, that scholars
rediscovered this forgotten writer. Yet their initial rush of excitement in
doing so was often replaced, as her writings on race came to light, with a
sense of confusion and disappointment. How could it be that this progressive
feminist activist followed such an injurious line of thinking?

And yet, so much of what Gilman fought for has reverberated over the
decades. Her vision of a companionate marriage founded on economic
equality between the sexes, and the need to free women from the burdens of
housework, anticipated many of the issues later taken up by modern
feminism, from American women’s fights in the 1960s for equal employment
and pay to Italy’s 1972 Wages for Housework campaign. Likewise, her
conviction that gender identity is fluid and not fixed foreshadowed third-
wave feminists’ concept of a continuum of gender. The Forerunner might
even be seen as a precursor to the “riot grrrl” practice of self-publishing
zines. Even our most contemporary concerns with the sexual predation of
women in the workplace can be traced back to Gilman’s idea that
revolutionizing marriage would free wives from the conjugal obligation to
serve their husbands’ erotic needs—“sex slavery,” as she called it.

Even Gilman’s manner of death evinced her progressivism, presaging today’s

right-to-die movement. On August 17, 1935, three years after being
diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, she “chose chloroform over cancer,”
as she wrote in her suicide note, before deliberately overdosing herself. At
that time against the law throughout the US, euthanasia is today legal in a
handful of states. In death, as in life, Gilman chose to make her own rules.