Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut but grew up mostly in Providence, Rhode Island. Gilman grew up in poverty after her father abandoned the family when she was just an infant, leaving her and her brother with their harsh, unloving mother who forbade them from reading books. She attended school only until she was 15. At 18, she enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, where she began a relationship with another woman, Martha Luther, who eventually left her for a man, which devastated Gilman. Shortly thereafter, Gilman married a man and had a daughter, and the post-partum depression she experienced afterwards was the basis for her most famous story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She left her husband and moved with her daughter to California, where she entered another serious relationship with a woman. Gilman is widely known for her feminist beliefs, which were considered progressive and unorthodox. She was a delegate for California at the National American Women Suffrage Association as well as the International Socialist and Labor Conference, where she advocated against capitalism. At odds with these progressive commitments, however, Gilman was an outspoken and virulent eugenicist, going so far as having published an article advocating for the reinstatement of slavery. This reality reveals the severe limits to her progressivism and is at odds with how she is remembered broadly as a feminist icon. Gilman was an advocate for assisted suicide, and after being diagnosed with breast cancer, she ultimately died by suicide, which for her was preferable to dying from the cancer.