Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Biography

Cynthia Davis

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804774192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Charlotte Perkins Gilman offers the definitive account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life. Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860–1935) launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, "The Yellow Wallpaper." She was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to both social progress and human evolution.

By 1900, Gilman had become an international celebrity, but had already faced a scandal over her divorce and "abandonment" of her child. As the years passed, her audience shrunk and grew more hostile, and she increasingly positioned herself in opposition to the society that in an earlier, more idealistic period she had seen as the better part of the self. In her final years, she unflinchingly faced breast cancer, her second husband's sudden death, and finally, her own carefully planned suicide— she "preferred chloroform to cancer" and cared little for a single life when its usefulness was over.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents new insights into the life of a remarkable woman whose public solutions often belied her private anxieties. It aims to recapture the drama and complexity of Gilman's life while presenting a comprehensive scholarly portrait.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1

“I Am Human,” WJ (16 July 1904): 226.

2

L, 284.

3

In private correspondence, Judith A. Allen has suggested that this decision to use “Charlotte” implies not only a condescending familiarity, it also lacks the deference extended to figures like Ward (I do not call him “Lester,” in other words). Ward, however, only went by one surname his whole life as opposed to Charlotte’s three; nor do I have any need in these pages to distinguish Ward from his first and second spouses. So while I take Allen’s point, I still feel “Charlotte” is the least confusing way to refer to her throughout.

4

Howells, qtd. in CPS to GECS, 9 July 1892, GECSP, SL; West, qtd. in CPG to GECS, 26 May 1924, mf-6, SL; Wells, qtd. in Black, “The Woman,” 39; Catt, New York Times (20 August 1935): 44. Thanks to Shelley Fisher Fishkin for helping me to refine my thoughts about the anomalous status of “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”

5

CPS to KSC, 2 May 1933, folder 10, SL; CPS to KSC, 29 June 1929, folder 100, SL.

6

L, 335.

7

“The Commonplace,” Time and the Hour (26 February 1898): 10–11; ITOW, 4–7.

8

CPG, “In the Near Future,” FR 3 (January 1912): 18; L, 73.

9

See my “Introduction,” and DK’s “Gilman’s Breakdown”; the “theorist” is Steele, 122.

10

She calls “life” a verb in HW, 203, and she reiterates this point elsewhere: “Our human-ness,” she argues in The Man-Made World, “ . . . is in what we do and how we do it, rather than in what we are” (FR 1 [November 1909]: 21). She repeats this mantra again in her final published treatise, HR&H, when she maintains that “[w]e should not say ‘life’ as a noun but ‘living’ as an active verb” (98); she also uses the gerund both in the title of her autobiography and in its pages (see, e.g., L, 181); beginning with “well used,” the quotations are from “The New Immortality,” FR 3 (February 1912): 64.

11

“The Vision and the Program,” FR 6 (May 1915): 119.

12

Calhoun, 10. In claiming that she redefines, rather than jettisons, the self, I differ from Mari Jo Buhle, who holds that Charlotte “rejects the whole business of selfhood” (Buhle, Feminism, 48).

13

L, 181.

14

CPG to KSC, 19 May 1934, folder 105, SL; on personality as a “limitation,” see “Personality and God,” FR 2 (August 1911): 204–05; CPS to GHG, 16 September 1898, folder 55, SL.

15

DKD II, 27 July 1893, 545; “social hunger” from Black, “The Woman,” 34–35; Moving the Mountain, FR 2 (November 1911): 304–05; on the value of the personal realm, see “Thoughts & Figgerings,” 26 March 1894, folder 16, SL.

16

On her being a “wreck” and her desire to “leave off being me,” see CPS to GHG, 12 October 1897, folder 46, SL; “Little Cell,” ITOW, 25; CPS to GHG, 17 March 1899, folder 67, SL.

17

On her use of these terms interchangeably, see her “The Influence of Women on Public Life,” Public: A Journal of Democracy 22 (1919): 571–72; “useful . . . goodfornothing” assessment from CPS to GHG, 16 March 1899, folder 67, SL.

18

CPS to GHG, 16 September 1898, folder 55, SL; CPS to GHG, 14 March 1899, folder 66, SL.

19

HW, 134. Charlotte borrowed the term omniism from her fellow activist, the radical millionaire J. Graham Phelps Stokes; she cites Stokes’s March 1903 Wiltshire Magazine article in HW. For more on Stokes’s influence, see Polly Wynn Allen, 123. See also “I Am Human,” WJ 16 (July 1904): 226, and “World Rousers,” FR 6 (May 1915): 132, where she writes, “We! That is the main idea—We!”

20

Humanness, FR 4 (December 1913): 334.

21

For general histories of this period, see works by Ballard C. Campbell, Ekirch, George, Ginger, Herreshoff, and Hofstadter. Hofstadter’s Age discusses Spencer’s dualism. See also Wiebe, 198ff, for a discussion of Washington Gladden.

22

See Menand, x–xii. Thanks to Thomas J. Brown for encouraging me to clarify Charlotte’s significance vis-à-vis the Beechers and the pragmatists; he also helped me refine my argument about the mixed results of Charlotte’s desired synthesis and the “tension between aspiration and reality.”

23

“Our Most Valuable Livestock,” Pacific Rural Press (17 October 1891), oversize folder 1, SL.

24

CPS to GHG, 20 March 1899, enclosure, folder 67, SL; “Eternal Me” was published in Cosmopolitan (27 September 1899): 477.

25

I would like to thank the second, anonymous reader for Stanford University Press for helping me to formulate this point as well as the earlier one about the duration of Charlotte’s fame.

26

“Hyenas,” folder 147, SL. See also “A ‘Psalm of Lives,’” Saturday Review of Literature 26 (November 1927): 358; “thick description” is Geertz’s term.

27

T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from the Rock” (1934), The Complete, 96. Eliot asks, “Where is the Life we have lost in living?”

CHAPTER ONE

1

“Heroism,” ITOW, 14–15; the chapter title is taken from the title of the second chapter of L.

2

“A Forerunner and Prophet,” typescript, folder 243, SL; “Pioneers,” typescript, folder 183, SL.

3

CPG to Mrs. Roantree, 1920, folder 153, SL; SSB, 353.

4

“Mrs. Stetson Tries Matrimony Again,” San Francisco Chronicle (19 June 1900), 80-M112, folder 41, SL; Gale, foreword to L, xxix; Bruère, 204.

5

Qtd. in L, 325.

6

Lewis Gannett, “Books and Things,” clipping, WSCC; LBS, SSB, 46; Rugoff, 70–71.

7

Lyman Beecher, qtd. in SSB, 28; Ca...