American · 1860–1935
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was an American writer, lecturer and social reformer. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she married young, suffered severe depression after the birth of her daughter, and was treated with the rest cure by the physician S. Weir Mitchell. She drew on that experience for her short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892). She later divorced and became a prominent voice in the women's movement. Her nonfiction book Women and Economics (1898) argued that women's economic dependence on men held back both sexes and society. She also wrote the utopian novel Herland (1915), set in a country of women, and edited and published her own magazine, The Forerunner, from 1909 to 1916. After being diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, she died by chloroform in 1935. Her work was largely forgotten until the Feminist Press reissued "The Yellow Wall-Paper" in 1973. It is now widely taught.