17 August

Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide

1935 Charlotte Perkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut. The Perkinses were a cultivated family rooted in a cultivated community (Harriet Beecher Stowe was a distant relative – see 20 March).

Charlotte was physically vital as an adolescent: visiting a gymnasium twice a week and running a mile every day. She disdained corsets. On leaving school she studied at the Rhode School of Design, leaving without any formal qualification but with the working skills to design greeting cards and tutor young people in art. She intended to pay her way through the world.

In 1884 Charlotte married the artist Charles Walter Stetson. After the birth of their first child, a daughter, she was plunged into postnatal depression.

In 1887 the advice of S. Weir Mitchell, a specialist in ‘women’s disorders’, was called on. A believer in the ‘rest cure’ (i.e. solitary confinement and sensory deprivation), Mitchell prescribed the regime described, horrifically, in Gilman’s most famous story, ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’, in which the ‘cure’ is portrayed as therapeutic, patriarchal sadism.

Charlotte escaped by fleeing to Pasadena, California, from where she divorced her husband. They remained on amicable terms. He married her best friend (for whom, it is speculated, Charlotte’s feelings had been overtly erotic) and took over the care of their child. In California Charlotte (still Stetson and now genuinely ‘cured’) began to write and lecture on feminist subjects.

She was, by nature and intellectual conviction, utopian: believing in the possibility not merely of equality, but gynocracy; a theme pursued in her novel, Herland: A Feminist Utopian Novel (1915), which foresees a woman-dominated world. Androcracy, she firmly believed, could be overset. In 1900 she married a cousin, George Houghton Gilman, an attorney of passive character and seven years younger (Gilman’s sexual interests, in her early Pasadena years, seem to have been principally lesbian). The Gilmans lived contentedly, by all accounts, in southern California, until his death in 1934. Gilman, afflicted with breast cancer and a believer in euthanasia, killed herself (with chloroform that she had methodically stored) a year later, leaving an autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), and a suicide note of Roman stoicism, stating: ‘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.’