CREDIT: Frances Benjamin Johnston/Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection (Library of Congress)
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN was a path-breaking feminist, humanist, and socialist whose lectures, novels, short stories, magazine articles, and nonfiction books challenged the dominant ideas about women’s role in society and helped shape the movement for women’s suffrage and women’s rights. By the late 1800s, Gilman was the most important feminist thinker in the United States. She combined economic and sociological writings with fiction and utopian thinking, giving her a wide appeal.
Gilman came from a remarkable lineage. Her great-uncles and great-aunts included the well-known minister Henry Ward Beecher, the noted theologian Edward Beecher, the abolitionist minister and author Charles Beecher, the educator Catharine Beecher, the suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the abolitionist and novelist (most famous for Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Despite this impressive bloodline, Gilman grew up in a poor family in Providence, Rhode Island. Her father abandoned his wife, who had to depend on family charity and was forced to move frequently. As a girl, Gilman wrote stories in her diary that typically involved a young woman who—often through some magical device—overcomes the limits of her life. With an older woman as her guide, she achieves personal salvation and overcomes evil in society. These themes—of independent women surmounting social boundaries, not simply as individuals but as part of a broader social reconstruction—appear in Gilman’s influential writings throughout her life.
Gilman briefly attended college, married a local artist in 1884, and gave birth to her only child the following year. She soon fell into a severe depression, suffering what today we would call a nervous breakdown. In 1888, she moved to California with her daughter and got a divorce. To earn money and pay back her debts, she began writing stories and poems, publishing them in various journals and magazines; she worked for a time as an editor and writer for the Pacific Coast Woman’s Press Association. Her autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1892, described a woman who suffers a mental breakdown after three months of being trapped at home staring at the yellow wallpaper. The story was a powerful statement about the restrictions domestic life placed on women and had a significant influence in women’s circles. Gilman was one of many people inspired by Edward Bellamy and his utopian novels Looking Backward: 2000–1887, published in 1888 and set in a socialist America in the year 2000, and its sequel, Equality, published in 1897. She soon became a popular lecturer, traveling around the country talking to women’s clubs, social groups, and workingmen’s associations, where she not only discussed Bellamy’s radical ideas but also talked about women’s issues. Gilman could not take her daughter with her on the road, so she put the girl in the care of her ex-husband—a decision that was reported in the newspapers and was considered scandalous.
Gilman was probably the most effective debater among suffragettes at the time. At Susan B. Anthony’s invitation, she addressed the 1896 conference of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, DC, and testified before Congress in favor of women’s suffrage.
As a writer and lecturer, she popularized new ideas about women’s equality. Her book Women and Economics: The Economic Factor Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898) garnered international attention. She followed this controversial book with The Home (1903), Human Work (1904), The Man-Made World (1911), a collection of poems, Suffrage Songs and Verses (1911), that included the poem “The Socialist and the Suffragist,” and many other books.
In the debate over gender equality, Gilman’s views were somewhat ambivalent. At times she contended that women and men shared a common “humanity,” but at other times she argued that women’s essential nature was superior to that of men—more nurturing and cooperative.
Gilman argued that maternal skills were not natural and that women needed training to be good mothers. “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.” She skewered what she considered a male-centered culture for oppressing women in many ways—including in its limited views about women’s “beauty” and clothing (such as corsets and high-heel shoes).
Gilman believed that women would be equal to men only when they were economically independent. The unpaid labor that women perform in the home—child rearing, cooking, cleaning, and other activities—was, she believed, a form of oppression. Society had to accept the idea of women, even married women, having careers. She encouraged women to work outside the home and maintained that men and women should share housework. But she went further, arguing that marriage itself had to be modernized to meet new realities. As much as possible, she believed, housekeeping, cooking, and childcare should be done by professionals, not by biological parents. To Gilman, the very idea of “motherhood” was outdated in a modern society. Children, she believed, should be raised in communal nurseries and fed in communal kitchens rather than in individual homes. Girls and boys, she thought, should be raised with the same clothes, toys, and expectations.
Some of Gilman’s fellow feminists tried to put her ideas into action. For example, in 1915, after a lobbying campaign by the Feminist Alliance, New York City’s school system changed its policies and permitted women to continue teaching after they married and even after they had children.
Between 1909 and 1916 Gilman wrote and published The Forerunner, a socialist magazine devoted to women’s emancipation and radical social change. There she published many of her own essays, articles, and stories and serialized seven of her novels. In her utopian novel Herland (1915), the author visits an island community of women organized around the principle of New Motherhood, where cooperation in all spheres of life has replaced male domination, competition, and war. In 1915 she was among the prominent women (led by Jane Addams) who founded the Woman’s Peace Party to protest against World War I.
Gilman played an important role in shaping public opinion, disseminating radical ideas, and encouraging women (and men) to change their thinking about gender roles. She left it to other feminists, such as Alice Stokes Paul, to lead organizations like National Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman’s Party and to organize the demonstrations, hunger strikes, and other tactics that resulted in passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, giving women the right to vote.