Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Mary F. Rogers

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) lived a turbulent life during turbulent times for women and men of color, white women, and other oppressed groups in the United States. Her family ties as well as her proliferation of social theory, journalism, and fiction give her a profound prominence among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectuals in the English-speaking world. Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, was related to Henry Ward Beecher, Catherine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin . Among feminist theorists and readers, Gilman's novella The Yellow Wallpaper , [a first-person narrative about confinement for mental instability] is likely as familiar as Harriet Beecher Stowe's work. Broadly based on her own lived experiences, The Yellow Wallpaper helped to legitimize women's breaking silence about emotional and other forms of abuse endured not only at the hands of male partners but also within the strictures of androcentric institutions such One ...

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