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Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a writer and lecturer who tried to create a cohesive body of historical and social thought that combined feminism and socialism.

Charlotte Perkins was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. She was raised by her mother, Mary A. Fitch Perkins, because her father left his wife and children soon after Charlotte's birth and thereafter provided little support, emotional or financial, to his family. Frederick Beecher Perkins, her father, was the grandson of the noted theologian Lyman Beecher, which made Charlotte's great aunt the famous Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Beecher family was perhaps the most famous family in America, but when Charlotte's father left he took his family connection with him. She and her brother grew up in an unhappy, cheerless home. Mother and children lived on the edge of poverty, moving 19 times in 18 years to 14 different cities.

Charlotte studied art for a time and later earned her living by designing greeting cards, teaching art, and, for a brief time, tutoring children. At the age of 24, after a long period of uncertainty and vacillation, she married Charles Walter Stetson, a handsome and charming local artist. Their only child, Katharine, was born the following year.

From the beginning of the marriage Charlotte Perkins Stetson suffered from depression. She became so seriously depressed that she was persuaded by her husband to consult the well-known Philadelphia neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell, a specialist in women's nervous diseases. His treatment stipulated extended bed rest to be followed by a return to working as a wife and mother. She was to give up all dreams of a career, she was never to write or paint again, and she was never to read for more than two hours a day. She followed his regimen for a time and almost experienced a mental breakdown. Calling upon some inner sense of survival, she rejected both husband and physician and fled to the house of the Channings, friends in Pasadena, California, whose daughter, Grace Ellery Channing, was Charlotte's dearest friend. Charlotte and Walter were eventually divorced, and Walter married Grace Channing. The three remained friends thereafter and jointly raised Katharine.

For a time Charlotte Stetson barely managed to support herself and Katharine, and later her mother, by running a boarding house. During these difficult years she launched her writing and lecturing career. In 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper appeared, a chilling story of a young woman driven to insanity by a loving husband-doctor, who, with the purest motives, imposed Mitchell's rest cure. The next year she published a book of verse, In This Our World. In 1894 she co-edited The Impress, a journal of the Pacific Coast Woman's Association. She was soon earning her living by lecturing to women's clubs and men's clubs, to labor unions and suffrage groups, to church congregations and Socialist organizations.

Soon after Walter Stetson remarried, both parents agreed that their child should live with her father and his new wife. Charlotte Stetson, moderately well known by this time, was vigorously attacked in the press for being "an unnatural mother" and abandoning her child. Unnerved, she fled from her home, and from 1895 to 1900 she led a nomadic existence, ceaselessly lecturing and writing, endlessly travelling across the country. Out of this environment came her most famous book, Women and Economics, which appeared in 1898, was soon translated into seven languages, and won her international recognition. In 1900 she published Concerning Children; in 1903, The Home: Its Work and Influence; in 1904, Human Work; in 1911, Man Made World: Or Our Androcentric Culture; and in 1923, His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. From 1909 to 1915 she edited a monthly magazine, The Forerunner, for which she wrote all the copy. Each year two books were serialized; the full seven-year run of The Forerunner equalled in number of pages 28 full-length books.

In 1900, after a long and carefully examined courtship, Charlotte married George Houghton Gilman, her first cousin. They lived happily until 1934 when Houghton died suddenly. Charlotte Gilman, aware now that she suffered from terminal cancer, moved back to Pasadena to be with her daughter. Grace Channing Stetson, also a widow, joined her there, reuniting the women of the family. In 1935 Gilman completed her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She said good-bye to her family, and, with the chloroform she had been long accumulating, she ended her life. The note she left appears in the last pages of her autobiography.

No grief, pain, misfortune or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one…. I have preferred chloroform to cancer.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman had an enormous reputation in her lifetime, but she is almost unknown today. A serious critic of history and society, she tried to create a cohesive body of thought that combined feminism and socialism. She struggled to define a human social order built upon the values she identified most closely as female values, life-giving and nurturing. She constructed a theoretical world view to explain human behavior, past and present, and to project the outlines of her vision for the future.

The most important fact about the sexes, men and women, is the common humanity we share, not the differences that distinguish us, Gilman said repeatedly. But women are denied autonomy and thus are not provided the environment in which to develop. Women are forced to lead restricted lives, and this serves to retard all human progress. Men, too, suffer from personalities distorted by their cultural habits of dominance and power. A healthy social organism for both men and women, therefore, requires the autonomy of women. She saw herself as engaged in a fierce struggle for the minds of women. She wrote historical treatises, sociological essays, short stories, novels, plays, and poems in an effort to win over women to her view of the past and, more important, to project a vision of the future. In sociological and historical works she analyzed the past from her peculiar humanist-socialist perspective. (Gilman insisted she was not a feminist; rather the world was "masculinist," and it was she who sought to introduce a truly humanized concept.) In her fiction she suggested the kind of world we could have if we worked at it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's life remains as an inspiration to subsequent generations. Her daily living, her ideas, her writing, her lectures are all of a piece. She wrote about the need for women to achieve autonomy, and she struggled in her own life to achieve autonomy. She drew upon the painful and debilitating elements in our own inner and outer experiences as a central focus of her world. In a sense she studied history and sociology, economics and ethics, in order to understand where she came from, why her parents were the way they were, why her life took the form it did, and ultimately how to learn to control her destiny and to manage her life.

**Charlotte Perkins Gilman**
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Born:	July 3 1860(1860--)
Died:	August 17 1935 (aged 75)
Occupation:	Short story and non-fiction writer, novelist, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer.

Life

Gilman was born Charlotte Anna Perkins in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Mary Perkins (formerly Mary Fitch Westcott) and Frederic Beecher Perkins, a librarian and magazine editor, and niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She had a brother Thomas Adiewho was fourteen months older than she. Her father was rarely home, and Gilman grew up with an awareness of her progressive great aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Beecher, both advocates of domestic feminism, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, suffragist and supporter of women’s right to vote.

In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gilman reported that her mother showed affection only when she thought her young daughter was asleep (Living 10-11). Gilman also had two siblings who died in infancy. A physician advised Mary Perkins that she might die if she bore other children. Sometime thereafter, her father moved out, leaving his wife and children on the brink of poverty (Living 5).

Much of Gilman's youth was spent in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1878, the eighteen-year-old enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Gilman supported herself as an artist of trade cards. In 1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson, and their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born the following year. During this time—and throughout her life—she battled depression, the most serious bout coming in the months after Katharine's birth.

In 1888, Gilman separated from her husband--a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth century. The two divorced in 1894. Following the separation, Gilman moved with her daughter to California, where she was active in organizing social reform movements. She began lecturing on Nationalism and gained visibility with her first volume of poetry, In This Our World, published in 1893. In 1894, Gilman sent her daughter East to live with her ex-husband and his second wife, Grace Ellery Channing, who was a close friend of Gilman's. 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" (Living 163). 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 she "had a right to know and love her father" (Living 163).

For a time Gilman lived with Adeline Knapp, a newspaper reporter for the San Francisco Call, who shared her interests in social reform and the Nationalist Club, based on Edward Bellamy's socialist utopia vision. She also became friendly with a number of California writers: Edwin Markham, Ina Coolbrith, Joaquin Miller, and Charles F. Lummis.

Gilman's second marriage to her first cousin, New York attorney George Houghton Gilman, lasted from 1900 until his sudden death in 1934. In 1922, Gilman moved from New York to Houghton's old homestead in Norwich, Connecticut. Following his death, Gilman moved back to Pasadena, California, where her daughter resided.

In 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer. An advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, Gilman committed suicide on August 17 1935 by inhaling chloroform.

Career

Gilman's first book was Gems of Art for the Home and Fireside (1888). Her now-famous short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper," was published in 1892. It was her first volume of poetry, however, In This World (1893), a collection of satirical poems, that first brought her recognition. During the next two decades she gained much of her fame with lectures on women's issues, ethics, labor, human rights, and social reform. She often referred to these themes in her fiction.

In 1894-95 Gilman served as editor of the magazine The Impress, a literary weekly that was published by the Pacific Coast Women’s Press Association. In 1897, she wrote the first draft of Women and Economics, (1898), which was published the following year, propelling Gilman into the international spotlight. In 1903, Gilman addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin, and the next year toured in England, Holland, Germany, Austria, and Hungary.

From 1909 to 1916 Gilman single-handedly wrote and edited her own magazine, The Forerunner, in which much of her fiction appeared. Over seven years and two months the magazine contained eighty-six issues, each twenty-eight pages long. The magazine had nearly 1,500 subscribers and featured such serialized works as What Diantha Did, (1910), The Crux, (1911), Moving the Mountain, (1911), and Herland. Her autobiography The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman appeared posthumously in 1935. Her detective novel Unpunished, left in manuscript at the time of her death, was published in 1997. For two decades Gilman was largely forgotten along with her work. Carl N. Degler is credited with having resurrected interest in Gilman when he reissued Women and Economics in 1966.

Rest Cure Treatment

Gilman married Walter Stetson in 1884, and less than a year later gave birth to their daughter Katharine. Already susceptible to depression, her symptoms were exacerbated by marriage and motherhood. In her memoir, Gilman reported that when she held her baby, she felt pain rather than happiness.^{[citation needed]} In 1885, she accepted an invitation from Grace Channing to spend the winter in Pasadena, but when she returned to the East coast, she again sunk into a deep depression.^{[citation needed]}

In April of 1887, Gilman sought help from the nation's premiere nerve specialist, Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. He diagnosed exhaustion of the nerves and prescribed the Rest Cure, a controversial treatment that Mitchell pioneered. The treatment he prescribed Gilman was called the Rest Treatment; it included: 1. bed rest, 2. isolation from family, 3. overfeeding to increase fat volume, 4. massage and occasional use of electricity on the muscles. To begin, the patient could not even leave her bed, read, write, sew, talk, or feed herself.^{[citation needed]}

After a month, Gilman was sent home with Mitchell’s 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 Gilman came perilously close to a full emotional collapse.

After she left Walter Stetson and returned to California with Katharine, Gilman's depression lifted, and she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with embellishments, to illustrate the impact of the Rest Cure: The story, she said, "was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked”.^[1] She sent a copy of it to Mitchell; he never responded, but in her autobiography, Gilman reported that Mitchell had altered his treatment after the reading the story ^{[citation needed]}, a contention that has never been corroborated.

Social Theories

Gilman called herself a humanist, and believed the domestic environment oppressed women. She argued that male aggressiveness and maternal roles for women were artificial and no longer necessary for survival.^{[citation needed]} "There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver" (from Women and Economics, 1898). Gilman believed economic independence is the only thing that could really bring freedom for women, and make them equal to men.

In January 1896, Gilman attended the 28th Annual Women’s Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C., where Lester Frank Ward, the leading reform Darwinist at the time, hosted a reception on her behalf. Two years later, she published Women and Economics, a theoretical treatise which argued, among other things, that women are subjugated by men, that motherhood should not preclude a woman from working outside the home, and that housekeeping, cooking, and child care, whould be professionalized. “The ideal woman," Gilman wrote, "was not only assigned a social role that locked her into her home, but she was also expected to like it, to be cheerful and gay, smiling and good-humored.”

Gilman became a spokesperson on such topics such as women’s perspectives on work, dress reform, and family. Housework, she argued, should be equally shared by men and women, and that at an early age women should be encouraged to be independent. In many of her major works, including "The Home" (1903), Human Work (1904), and The Man-Made World (1911), Gilman also advocated women working outside of the home.

Critical Reception

While Gilman is most famous for "The Yellow Wall-Paper", a thinly veiled indictment of the Rest Cure, she also published hundreds of poems, works of fiction, non-fiction, dramas, and an autobiography.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) initially met with a mixed reception. One critic wrote to the Boston Transcript: “The story could hardly, it would seem, give pleasure to any reader, and to many whose lives have been touched through the dearest ties by this dread disease, it must bring the keenest pain. To others, whose lives have become a struggle against heredity of mental derangement, such literature contains deadly peril. Should such stories be allowed to pass without severest censure?”^[2]

Although Gilman had gained international fame with the publication of Women and Economics in 1898, by the end of World War I she seemed out of tune with her times. In her autobiography she admitted, "unfortunately my views on the sex question do not appeal to the Freudian complex of today, nor are people satisfied with a presentation of religion as a help in our tremendous work of improving this world."^[3]

Ann J. Lane writes in Herland and Beyond that “Gilman offered perspectives on major issues of gender with which we still grapple; the origins of women’s subjugation, the struggle to achieve both autonomy and intimacy in human relationships; the central role of work as a definition of self; new strategies for rearing and educating future generations to create a humane and nurturing environment.”^[4]

Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.”

“There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.”

“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”

"It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it."

"The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain -- the hardest and most iron-bound as well."

"A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband."

"When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one." (from her suicide note).

Bibliography

Poetry

In This Our World,1st ed. Oakland: McCombs & Vaughn, 1893.

Suffrage Songs and Verses. New York: Charlton Co., 1911.

The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

The Yellow Wallpaper, one of Gilman's most popular works, originally published before her marriage to George Houghton Gilman

Short Stories

[Gilman published 186 short stories in magazines, newspapers, and in her self-published monthly, The Forerunner.] Among her stories, many of which are back in print, are the following:

"The Unexpected." Kate Field's Washington. 21 May, 1890, 335-36.

"The Giant Wistaria." New England Magazine. 4 (June 1891), 480-85.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper." New England Magazine. 5 (Jan. 1892), 647-56.

"Through This." Kate Field's Washington. 13 Sept. 1893, p. 166.

"An Unnatural Mother." Impress. 16 Feb. 1895, 4-5.

"When I Was a Witch." Forerunner. 1 (May 1910), 1-6.

"The Cottagette." Forerunner. 1 (Aug. 1910), 1-5.

"Mrs. Beazley's Deeds." Woman's World. 27 (March 1911), 12-13, 58.

"Turned." Forerunner. 2 (Sept. 1911), 227-32.

"Old Water." Forerunner. 2 (Oct. 1911), 255-59.

"Making a Change." Forerunner. 2 (Dec. 1911), 311-15.

"The Chair of English." Forerunner. 4 (March 1913), 57-61.

"If I Were a Man." Physical Culture. 32 (July 1914), 31-34.

"His Mother." Forerunner. 5 (July 1914), 169-73.

"Dr. Clair's Place." Forerunner. 6 (June 1915), 141-45.

"The Vintage." Forerunner. 7 (Oct. 1916), 253-57.

Novels and Novellas

What Diantha Did. Forerunner. 1909-10.

The Crux. Forerunner. 1911.

Moving the Mountain. Forerunner. 1911.

Mag-Marjorie. Forerunner. 1912.

Benigna Machiavelli. Forerunner. 1914.

Herland. Forerunner. 1915.

With Her in Ourland. Forerunner. 1916.

Unpunished. Eds. Catherine J. Golden and Denise D. Knight. New York: Feminist Press, 1997.

Drama/Dialogues

"The Ceaseless Struggle of Sex: A Dramatic View." Kate Field's Washington. 9 April, 1890, 239-40.

Three Women. Forerunner. 2 (May 1911), 115-23, 134.

Something to Vote For. Forerunner. 2 (June 1911), 143-53.

Non-Fiction

Gilman wrote more than one thousand works of non-fiction, including articles, essays, book reviews, and lectures.

Books

Gems of Art for the Home and Fireside. Providence: J. A. and R. A. Reid, 1888.

Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898.

Concerning Children. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1900.

The Home: Its Work and Influence. New York: McClure, Phillips, & Co., 1903.

Human Work. New York: McClure, Phillips, & Co., 1904.

The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charton Co., 1911.

Our Brains and What Ails Them. Serialized in Forerunner. 1912.

Social Ethics. Serialized in Forerunner. 1914.

His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. New York and London: Century Co., 1923.

Short and Serial Non-Fiction

"Why Women Do Not Reform Their Dress," Woman's Journal, 9 Oct. 1886. p. 338.

"Are Women Better Than Men?" Pacific Monthly. 3 (Jan. 1891): 9-11.

"Masculine, Feminine, and Human," Kate Field's Washington. 6 July 1892, pp.6-7

"The Labor Movement." A Prize Essay Read Before the Trades and Labor Unions of Alameda County, California, 5 Sept. 1892. Oakland: Alameda County Federation of Trades, 1893.

"The Automobile as a Reformer," Saturday Evening Post, 3 June 1899, p. 778.

"Ideals of Child Culture," Child Study for Mothers and Teachers. Ed. Margaret Sangster. Philadelphia: Booklover's Library, 1901.

"Social Darwinism," American Journal of Sociology. 12 (March 1907), 713-14.

"Children's Clothing," Harper's Bazar. 44 (Jan. 1910), 24.

"What is Feminism?" Boston Sunday Herald. 3 Sept. 1916, p. 7.

"The Housekeeper and the Food Problem." Annals of the American Academy. 74 (Nov. 1917), 123-30.

"Concerning Clothes." Independent, 22 June 1918, pp. 478, 483.

"The Socializing of Education." Public, 5 April 1919, pp. 348-39.

"A Woman's Party." Suffragist. 8 (Feb. 1920), 8-9.

"Progress through Birth Control." North American Review, 224 (Dec. 1927), 622-29.

"Divorce and Birth Control." Outlook, 25 Jan. 1928, pp. 130-131.

"Feminism and Social Progress." Problems of Civilization, Ed. Baker Brownell. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1929), pp. 115-142.

"Birth Control, Religion and the Unfit." Nation. 27 Jan. 1932, pp. 109-109.

"The Right to Die." Forum, 94 (Nov. 1935), 297-300.

Selected Lectures

Gilman lectured across the USA. The following is a sampling of newspaper coverage of her lectures:

"Woman Suffrage League." Boston Advertiser, 10 Nov 1897: 8:1. [Re. "The Economic Basis of the Woman Question."]

"Society and the Child." Brooklyn Eagle, 11 Dec 1902: 8:4.

"A New Light on the Woman Question." Woman's Journal, 25 April 1904: 76-77.

"Advocates a 'World City.'" New York Times, 6 Jan 1915: 15:5. [Re. Arbitration of diplomatic disputes by an international agency.]

"The Listener." Boston Transcript, 14 April 1917: 14:1. [Re. Announcement of lecture series.]

"Great Duty for Women After War." Boston Post, 26 Feb 1918: 2:7.

"Mrs. Gilman Urges Hired Mother Idea." New York Times, 23 Sept 1919: 36:1-2.

"Walt Whitman Dinner." New York Times, 1 June 1921: 16:7. [Gilman speaks at annual meeting of Whitman Society in New York.]

"Fiction of America Being Melting Pot Unmasked by Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Dallas Morning News, 15 Feb 1926: 9:7-8 and 15:8.

Diaries, Journals, Biographies, and Letters

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist. Mary A. Hill. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson. Ed. Mary A. Hill. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897-1900. Ed. Mary A. Hill. Lewisburg: Bucknill UP, 1995.

To Herland and Beyond: The Life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 Vols. Ed. Denise D. Knight. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.

Autobiography

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935; NY: Arno Press, 1972; and Harper & Row, 1975.

Further Resources

Berman, Jeffrey. “The Unrestful Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and `The Yellow Wallpaper. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper. Ed. Catherine Golden. New York: Feminist Press, 1992. 211-41.

Carter-Sanborn, Kristin. “Restraining Order: The Imperialist Anti-Violence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Arizona Quarterly 56.2 (Summer 2000): 1-36. Ceplair, Larry, ed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Nonfiction Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

Davis, Cynthia J. and Denise D. Knight. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

Deegan, Mary Jo. “Introduction.” With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Herland. Eds. Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. 1-57.

Eldredge, Charles C. Charles Walter Stetson, Color, and Fantasy. Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, The U of Kansas, 1982.

Ganobcsik-Williams, Lisa. “The Intellectualism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Evolutionary Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Gender.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Eds. Jill Rudd and Val Gough. Iowa City: U of Iowa P , 1999.

Golden, Catherine. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: Feminist P, 1992.

---. “`Written to Drive Nails With’: Recalling the Early Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Eds. Jill Rudd and Val Gough. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999. 243-66.

Gough, Val. “`In the Twinkling of an Eye’: Gilman’s Utopian Imagination.” In A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Eds. Val Gough and Jill Rudd. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1998. 129-43.

Gubar, Susan. “She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work. Ed. Sheryl L. Meyering. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. 191-201.

Hill, Mary Armfield. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Journey From Within.” In A Very Different Story: Studies on the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Eds. Val Gough and Jill Rudd. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1998. 8-23.

Karpinski, Joanne B., “The Economic Conundrum in the Lifewriting of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Catherine J. Golden and Joanne S. Zangrando. U of Delaware P, 2000. 35-46.

Kessler, Carol Farley. “Dreaming Always of Lovely Things Beyond’: Living Toward Herland, Experiential foregrounding. In The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Eds. Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000. 89-103.

Knight, Denise D. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Studies in Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1997.

---. “Introduction.” Herland, `The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and Selected Writings. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Lane, Ann J. “Introduction.” Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 1915. Rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979

---. “The Fictional World of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Ed. Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Lanser, Susan S. “Feminist Criticism, `The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America.” Rpt. “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Eds. Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. 225-256.

Long, Lisa A. “Herland and the Gender of Science.” MLA Approaches to Teaching Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper and Herland. Eds. Denise D. Knight and Cynthia J. David. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. 125-132.

Mitchell, S. Weir, M.D. “Camp Cure.” Nurse and Patient, and Camp Cure. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1877

---. Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked.1887. New York: Arno Press, 1973.

Oliver, Lawrence J. and Gary Scharnhorst. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman v. Ambrose Bierce:The Literary Politics of Gender in Fin-de-Siècle California.” Journal of the West (July 1993): 52-60.

Palmeri, Ann. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Forerunner of a Feminist Social Science.” Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Eds. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983. 97-120.

Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Scharnhorst, Gary, and Denise D. Knight. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Library: A Reconstruction.” Resources for American Literary Studies 23:2 (1997): 181-219.

Stetson, Charles Walter. Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson. Ed. Mary A. Hill. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1985.

Tuttle, Jennifer S. “Rewriting the West Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Owen Wister, and the Sexual Politics of Neurasthenia.” The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Eds. Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000. 103-121.

Wegener, Frederick. “What a Comfort a Woman Doctor Is!’ Medical Women in the Life and Writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer. Eds. Jill Rudd & Val Gough. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1999. 45-73.

Weinbaum, Alys Eve. “Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism.” Feminist Studies 27 (Summer 2001): 271-30.

Listen to

The Yellow Wallpaper, Suspense, CBS radio, 1948

References

^ http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html
^ Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. 344.
^ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1987). The living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: an autobiography. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 0405044593.
^ Golden, Catherine J., and Joanna Zangrando. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark: University of Delaware P, 2000. 211.

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