CHAPTER FIVE

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Finds Her Voice

IN 1932, Charlotte Perkins Gilman learned she had inoperable breast cancer. She was not afraid of dying, but having watched her own mother endure a long and painful death from the same disease, she dreaded being incapacitated. She quietly began to stockpile chloroform so she could end her life when she chose. The sudden death of her husband in 1934 spurred a decision to leave the East Coast for Pasadena, where her only daughter lived. Knowing that time was short, she splurged on a cross-country airplane ticket on the Lindbergh Line, her “last ‘fling.’ ”¹

On August 17, 1935, having said goodbye to friends and family over the past weeks and months, Gilman went upstairs to her bedroom and peacefully took her own life. “Human life consists in mutual service,” she explained in the note she left behind. “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.” In her case, “I have preferred chloroform to cancer.”²

As far as we know, Gilman did not request that a death mask be made after her passing, but her daughter decided to commission what was in effect one last portrait. In ancient times, death masks were thought to preserve the soul; in the pre-modern and modern eras, death masks became a way to preserve an image of a well-known person. Beethoven, Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry VII, Ulysses S. Grant, and Richard Wagner are among the noted personages for whom death masks survive. Still popular into the twentieth century, but now usually intended as treasured family mementoes, death masks went beyond photography to capture the departed’s final visage in three dimensions. Seeing Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s actual death mask in the vault of the Schlesinger Library is an experience both haunting and profoundly moving.³

Within hours of Gilman’s death, the family physician carefully layered wet plaster bandages on her face and allowed them to dry. The next day, a local sculptor named Sherry Peticolas cast the death mask from that mold. Gilman’s body was then cremated—in her view, “such a clean sweet natural redistribution of things!”—and her ashes were scattered in the San Gabriel mountains. “There was an air of peaceful triumph in her quiet figure,” her daughter recalled. “She had carried out her plan in all details as she had wished.”⁴ Charlotte Perkins Gilman left life very much on her own terms.

IT MAY SEEM odd to preface this story of the leading feminist intellectual of her day with the end of her life, but how Charlotte Perkins Gilman chose to die was perfectly consistent with her philosophy of living, a term she preferred to life because of its connotations of growth and change.⁵ The suffrage movement was very much part of that living, although far from the only component. Gilman is often cast as an indifferent suffragist, but her suffrage career stretched for more than thirty years and involved a wide range of contributions to the cause. Proselytizing for the vote helped Charlotte Perkins Gilman find her voice and gave her a platform. She in turn used her celebrity and keen mind to build popular support for the cause.⁶

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s death mask. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

In some ways, she could claim such public authority as her birthright: after all, she was a proud member of the Beecher clan, whose members, male and female, dominated nineteenth-century intellectual life. But her family circumstances were far more challenging than her venerable lineage would lead one to expect. She was born Charlotte Anna Perkins in Hartford, in 1860. Her parents separated when she was young and she was raised in pinched financial circumstances by her mother, whose life she called “one of the most painfully thwarted I have ever known.” She struggled with depression her entire life and despaired that marriage, women’s conventional lot, would end her hopes for a full and productive life. “I am not the combining sort,” she warned a prospective suitor. “I don’t combine, and I don’t want to.”⁷

Despites those doubts, she married the struggling artist Charles Walter Stetson in 1884. The challenges of that marriage, followed by the birth of their daughter Katharine the next year, caused a breakdown that she described in these wrenching terms: “Here was a charming home; a loving and devoted husband; an exquisite baby, healthy, intelligent, and good; a highly competent mother to run things; a wholly satisfactory servant—and I lay all day on the lounge and cried.” Next came the hospitalization for a rest cure under the supervision of the noted psychologist S. Weir Mitchell, which she later recounted in the haunting semi-autobiographical 1892 story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Stetsons separated in 1888—“It was not a choice between going and staying, but between going, sane, and staying, insane”—and Charlotte and Katharine moved to California. The couple divorced in 1894, and with Charlotte’s blessing, Walter married Grace Channing, her best friend, and Katharine went to live with them. Charlotte’s unconventional approach to the fraught questions of divorce and child custody caused a scandal which would trail her for the rest of her life.⁸

She was determined to put that behind her, as she confided to her diary just after she turned thirty: “[M]ade a wrong marriage—lots of people do. Am heavily damaged, but not dead. May live a long time. It is intellectually conceivable that I may recover strength enough to do some part of my work. I will assume this to be true, and act on it.” Three years later, she set much loftier goals for the rest of her life: “Probably forty years’ time before me. Desired to accomplish in that time—the utmost attainable advance of the human race.”⁹

She rebounded quickly by throwing herself into the vibrant Progressive reform climate in California in the 1890s. In that decade, she produced “a surprising output of work, some of my best,” which laid the foundation for her lecturing and writing career. A gifted public speaker (a trait she attributed to her Beecher heritage), she lectured extensively to the Nationalist Clubs in California inspired by Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward (1888).¹⁰ She also found her voice as a writer: her poem “Similar Cases” was published to great acclaim in 1890, and three years later, it was included in her first volume of poetry, In This Our World. Her schedule kept her constantly on the road, but this “at large” lifestyle of “never having a settled home, but always feeling perfectly at home anywhere” strangely suited her. Unfortunately, the income from her lecturing and writing barely paid the bills, and she often found herself mired in debt.¹¹

In 1898, she published her masterwork, Women and Economics: The Economic Factor between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, which argued for women’s economic independence and critiqued institutions such as the family and marriage for isolating women and preventing their participation in broader (that is, human rather than sex-specific) social developments. Preventing women’s social participation not only stunted their growth, it also acted, in her understanding of hereditarian evolution, to retard the development of the human race as a whole. She was especially caustic about society’s propensity for excessive sex distinction between men and women: “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.” Despite her damning dissection of contemporary gender roles, she concluded Women and Economics on this optimistic note: “When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of social evolution.”¹²

While she was developing the ideas for Women and Economics, she fell in love with her first cousin Houghton Gilman, who worked as a patent lawyer in New York City. Their marriage in 1900 finally allowed her to strike a satisfying balance between her personal life and her public work—precisely the issue she wrote Women and Economics to address. “If this were a novel, now, here’s the happy ending,” she wrote in her autobiography, perhaps a bit too glibly. She always remained much more comfortable living in the public realm than dealing with private emotions.¹³

Gilman’s suffrage activism continued as the new century began: “To help [suffrage] is a clear duty. To oppose it is to stand ridiculous and wrong to future history.” She had long enjoyed a close relationship with Alice Stone Blackwell and the Boston-based Woman’s Journal, and had contributed her first poem to the paper in 1884. From 1904 to 1905, she served as the newspaper’s associate editor, although her ideas proved a bit too broadminded for the readership, and she and Blackwell mutually severed the relationship after a year. One thing the two women continued to share was an abiding concern for the human rights violations in Armenia.¹⁴

Several years later, Gilman teamed up with Harriot Stanton Blatch in the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women in New York City, a cross-class suffrage alliance unified by the ideals of economic independence she had expounded in Women and Economics. Gilman attended the sixtieth anniversary celebration of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1908 and campaigned in 1911 for California’s successful state suffrage referendum. That year, she published a small volume of suffrage songs and verses. But she never lost sight of her vision of suffrage as part of a larger struggle for human progress in which women would play a leading role. As a suffragist once said to her with grudging admiration, “After all I think you will do our cause more good than harm, because what you ask is so much worse than what we ask that they will grant our demands in order to escape yours.”¹⁵

In the midst of her ongoing suffrage advocacy, Gilman continued to publish widely in leading journals, magazines, and newspapers: over two thousand works of non-fiction over the course of her career, in addition to 675 pieces of fiction and almost five hundred poems.¹⁶ But as her experience at the Woman’s Journal showed, she chafed at editors’ attempts to tone down her unconventional and often controversial ideas. Gilman’s desire to have the freedom to say what she wanted without editorial interference led her to take the unusual step of founding her own monthly magazine, the Forerunner, in 1909, and serving as its sole writer, editor, and publisher. “What makes you so lazy?” joked one subscriber. “Why don’t you set the type?”¹⁷

The Forerunner proved the vehicle for some of Gilman’s sharpest suffrage commentary. She especially delighted in exposing the backward, reactionary thinking that dominated antisuffrage ideology, calling out male opponents as “masculist” and sneering at “Women Who Won’t Move Forward.” As the biographer Judith Allen observed, “in her war on the Antis, Gilman rose to her rhetorical best, loyal to and fiercely defensive of her fellow women, certain of the contribution a female electorate could make to Progressive social reforms.”¹⁸

This debunking of antisuffrage misogyny was especially effective in plays like “Something to Vote For” which appeared in the Forerunner in 1911. This fifty-minute parlor theatrical, performed with a small cast of characters and minimal stage requirements, featured victims, villains, unsung heroes, and even a little romance in a plot about a women’s club and a campaign for pure milk. When it was revealed that a local businessman had tried to bribe the milk inspector, the club president discarded her earlier opposition to suffrage and enthusiastically signed on to the cause: “Rich or poor, we are all helpless together unless we wake up to the danger and protect ourselves.… I’m willing to vote now! I’m glad to vote now! I’ve got something to vote for!” Although the mass epiphany was something only a die-hard suffrage propagandist could imagine (“Clubwomen all rise and wave their handkerchiefs, with cries of ‘Aye!’ ‘Aye!’” as the curtain falls), the play’s wide topical sweep made the case that suffrage was intricately bound up in larger questions of Progressive reform. In the end, pure milk and votes for women both win.¹⁹

Gilman later calculated that the amount of material she generated for the Forerunner “equaled four books a year, books of thirty-six thousand words,” a pace she kept up for almost seven years. Many of her best-known novels, including What Diantha Did (1910), The Crux (1911), Moving the Mountain (1911), and Herland (1915) first appeared in its pages. Gilman relished not having to pitch or tailor her ideas to unenlightened or picky editors, but relying primarily on the Forerunner to spread her ideas had the contrary effect of removing her voice from the public debates of her day. One biographer compared it to playing solitaire. Individual subscriptions never came close to covering the cost of this huge undertaking, and Gilman reluctantly shut the magazine down in 1916.²⁰

In the 1910s, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was in the thick of the heady early days of modern feminism. Here is how she defined the term: “Feminism is a term applied to what was previously known as ‘The Woman’s Movement,’ and still earlier, as ‘Women’s Rights.’ That Movement, in its largest sense, consists in the development of human qualities and functions among women; in their entering upon social relationships, instead of remaining, as has been almost universally the case, restricted to the sexual and domestic.” While generally “individual and unconscious,” feminism was also “increasingly conscious and organized.” Gilman was especially excited about the prospects for the future: “The latest and highest form of Feminism has great promise for the world. It postulates womanhood free, strong, clean and conscious of its power and duty.” That definition sounds to modern ears like a close approximation of Gilman’s own philosophy, but she always preferred to call herself a humanist rather than a feminist.²¹

This is where Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the suffrage movement, and the larger history of feminism intersect. Starting with Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and Margaret Fuller, the question of woman’s status and women’s rights had long been debated and discussed. The word feminist was a more modern construction, derived from the French feminisme of the 1880s but not widely deployed in the United States until the second decade of the twentieth century. That decade was also the height of suffrage advocacy, and the two movements were closely intertwined. Those who self-consciously adopted the feminist label often embraced a broader commitment to economic independence and sexual emancipation than suffrage’s more narrow demand for the vote, an issue which functioned as the lowest common denominator around which politically active women could converge. But taking the long view, both suffragists and feminists were marching in the same general direction.²²

This handbill from 1914 poses a question—What is feminism?—that is still being debated today. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the speakers who attempted to answer it for the Cooper Union audience. Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.

The best example of contemporary feminism was a group called Heterodoxy, founded in 1912 by twenty-five charter members, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which met every other Saturday in Greenwich Village. Described as “women who did things and did them openly,” Heterodoxy’s members included self-described modern women such as Inez Haynes Irwin, Zona Gale, Fola La Follette, Crystal Eastman, and Elsie Clews Parsons. All subscribed to Marie Jenney Howe’s vision for the club: “We intend to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.” The club brought together like-minded women, most of whom were a generation younger than Gilman, to talk about the challenges of the liberated lives they envisioned for themselves and, by extension, all women. These were heady discussions.²³

Some of them, such as two panels held at Cooper Union in New York City in 1914, took place in public. “What is Feminism? Come and Find Out” read the handbill. The first program featured twelve speakers, including six men, on the topic “What Feminism Means to Me.” The subject of the second mass meeting was “Breaking into the Human Race.”²⁴ At both events, many of the speakers had ties to Heterodoxy, the suffrage movement, or both, including Marie Jenney Howe, the journalist Rheta Childe Dorr, the labor activist Rose Schneiderman, and the actress Fola LaFollette. Charlotte Perkins Gilman spoke at the second meeting on “The Right to Specialize in Home Industries,” an expansion of her ideas in Women and Economics and its sequel Human Work (1904). The event drew extensive coverage, even in conservative antisuffrage papers like the New York Times, which headlined its article “Feminists Ask Equal Chance: Leaders in Movement Discuss ‘Breaking into the Human Race’ at Cooper Union: Wants Sex Fences Cut Down.”²⁵

That spring, Gilman also offered two subscription lecture series. The first, “The Larger Feminism,” drew audiences of between fifty and two hundred people to its weekly sessions. The second was called “Studies in Masculism.” The writer George Middleton, the husband of Fola LaFollette, left this recollection of the series: “She presented her facts in chiseled prose but, like all feminists I know, with devastating humor. She herself was a mistress of sarcasm, amusing as her lectures were peppered with ridicule and irony.” Not all in the audience were so entranced. Clara Savage Littledale, a journalist at the New York Evening Post and recent Vassar graduate, confided to her diary: “She has a lovely face but a harsh voice and I didn’t like her especially.” A month later at another session, Littledale was still not a fan: “Sore throat, curse, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It made for a very nervy morning.”²⁶

Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not play an active role in the suffrage movement’s final push to victory. By then, her fame was beginning to wane, a process which continued until her death in 1935. Gilman was rediscovered and celebrated in the early days of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s, but she holds a more vexed place in feminist history today. Her ideas about how sexual characteristics could be passed on to future generations have been discredited by genetics, and she has been taken to task for her anti-immigrant, pro-eugenics stance at the end of her life. Even her classic story “The Yellow Wallpaper” has been reinterpreted as a deeply racist text.²⁷

Yet Gilman deserves a place in both the suffrage and feminist pantheons. From the 1890s until the 1920s, she was the most widely known feminist public intellectual of her day—“the high priestess of feminism.”²⁸ She used her public renown to engage audiences in discussions of the most pressing issues of the day, not just those limited to women. Always looking forward, always in motion, she crafted a life that allowed her to share her far-reaching ideas with public audiences across the country and, indeed, around the world.

Once Charlotte Perkins Gilman found her voice, she used it to promote woman suffrage, but like many suffragists, her conception was far broader than just the vote. Her 1893 poem “She Who Is to Come” captures that ideal well. That the poem became such a beloved anthem for several generations of suffragists suggests how broadly shared Gilman’s capacious vision was:

A woman—in so far as she beholdeth

Her one Beloved’s face;

A mother—with a great heart that enfoldeth

The children of the Race;

A body, free and strong, with that high beauty

That comes of perfect use, is built thereof;

A mind where Reason ruleth over Duty,

And Justice reigns with Love;

A self-poised, royal soul, brave, wise, and tender,

No longer blind and dumb;

A Human Being, of an unknown splendor,

Is she who is to come!²⁹