Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1 book analyzed
Biography
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a writer, lecturer, and feminist theorist whose most famous work emerged directly from personal trauma. After the birth of her daughter Katharine in 1885, Gilman suffered severe postpartum depression and was treated by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell with his rest cure. The treatment nearly destroyed her. She recovered by leaving her husband, moving to California, resuming her intellectual work, and eventually becoming one of the most prominent feminist thinkers in America. Her 1898 treatise Women and Economics argued that women's economic dependence on men was the root of gender inequality -- an argument the story dramatizes in miniature. She wrote prolifically until her death by suicide in 1935, choosing to end her life on her own terms after a cancer diagnosis.