1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
By: Jennifer Ascencio

2. General Biographical Information
Born in Hartford, Connecticut on July 3, 1860.
She had increasingly become aware of the injustices inflicted on women, and had begun to write poems in which she developed her own views on women’s rights.
She lived her life, for the most part, on the margins of a society whose economic assumptions about and social definitions of women she vigorously repudiated.
Committed suicide in 1935 when she learned that she had inoperable cancer.

3. Personal Life
Her father deserted her family and left for San Francisco shortly after her birth.
Her mother returned to Providence, Rhode Island, where she supported herself and her 2 children; she apparently withheld from them all physical expressions of love. This is why Gilman described her childhood in her autobiography as painful and lonely.
She entered into her marriage to Charles Stetson reluctantly, anticipating the difficulties of reconciling her ambition to be a writer with the demands of being a wife, housekeeper, and mother.
Following the birth of her daughter, she became despondent and marital tensions increased.

4. Personal Life
She was persuaded by her family to go to Philadelphia for treatment for depression. She was then prescribed a “rest cure” consisting of bed rest and limited intellectual activity. She did so for 3 months and was at the edge of madness until she resumed her life as a reluctant wife and mother.
She was convinced her marriage threatened her sanity, so she divorced Stetson and sent her daughter to live with him and her best friend (his new wife). This generated publicity and criticism from the press.
Married her first cousin George Houghton Gilman in They lived in New York City and Norwich, Connecticut until his death in 1934.

5. Professional Information
Gilman worked as a governess, art teacher, and designer of greeting cards during her first marriage.
She later became a leading theoretician, speaker, and writer on women’s issues.

6. The Work
Gilman produced the large body of polemical writings and what we would call self- consciously feminist fiction.
Known more for “The Yellow Wall-paper”.
Women and Economics became an instant classic and is considered her most important non- fiction work.
Herland, Moving the Mountain, and With Her in Ourland; her utopian novels that offer vivid dramatizations of the social ills that result from a competitive economic system.
She argues in her work that women need economic independence and that issue is still relevant today.
She was influenced by the sociologist Lester Ward and the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy.

7. Sources
“Charlotte Perkins Gilman: ” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., Print.
Harrison, Pat. "The Evolution of Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Radcliffe Magazine. Harvard University, n.d. Web. 17 July 2016.