Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Imagining a World of Our Own

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born 3 July 1860)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a noted social activist and reformer, a writer and a lecturer, a sociologist and economist. Although she wrote plays and poetry and published major works on economics (Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, 1898), ethics (Social Ethics, 1914), and employment (The Home: Its Work and Influence, 1903, and Human Work, 1904), today she is best remembered for a single short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and for her utopian novel, Herland  (1914). 

Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman),
c. 1900

Charlotte Perkins was the daughter of writer and librarian Frederic Beecher Perkins (who was Harriet Beecher Stowe's nephew) and Mary Fitch Wescott.

While the Beecher connection makes Frederic Perkins worthy of his very own Wikipedia entry, there is little information available about Gilman's mother. Charlotte Perkins Gilman would later write that Mary Fitch Wescott was the "darling of an elderly father and a juvenile mother, petted, cossetted, and indulged," and that she was delicate, "beautiful, well educated, musical, and what was then termed 'spiritual minded'"--in short, she was "femininely attractive in the highest degree."

This pairing did not work well--Perkins abandoned his wife and children, leaving them in poverty. Charlotte seems more or less to have raised herself and to have educated herself, principally from reading (she attended a series of schools, was considered a poor student, and ended her formal education at the age of fifteen).

Notably, however, the abandoned Perkins family spent time with their Beecher relations, including Isabella Beecher Hooker, a key figure in the suffrage movement, Catharine Beecher, who published more than twenty books on education, slavery and abolition, families, and women's roles in society, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Charlotte Perkins married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884, gave birth to her only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, a year later, and separated from Stetson in 1888. In between the birth of her daughter and her separation, Gilman experienced a trauma that would result in "The Yellow Wallpaper."

In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was prescribed a rest cure. The specific nature of the illness from which she was suffering is not at all clear. Describing it some twenty-five years later, Gilman wrote, “For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond.” The twenty-seven-year-old Gilman consulted the physician Silas Weir Mitchell, widely recognized in the United States as the foremost authority on women’s health, and entered his sanitarium in Philadelphia. 

Describing her treatment there, she later wrote, “This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he sent me home with solemn advice to ‘live as domestic a life as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’ as long as I lived.” Gilman says that, like a good patient, she “went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came . . . near the borderline of utter mental ruin. . . .” 

She realized that doing nothing was the cause of her illness, not its cure and so, “using the remnants of intelligence that remained,” she ignored Mitchell’s orders: “I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again—work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite.” Returning to work, she wrote, meant “ultimately recovering some measure of power.” It is this very situation—suffering from the lack of work, with nothing to do all day, spending day after day in an isolated bedroom and night after night lying awake and aware—that we first encounter the unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Cover of an 1899 edition of
"The Yellow Wallpaper"

The second of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s most well known works is the novel Herland. Herland is an ideal female state that has developed parallel to but completely isolated from the “real” world, dominated by men. There is no strife, no bloodshed, no violence, and no “plunder” in Herland, for the simple reason that there are no men.

In this peaceful, harmonious land, there are no male gods either; rather, there is a Maternal Pantheon of female gods and, in particular, Mother Earth. The women live in harmony with their land, eating only the “fruit of motherhood”—eggs and seeds. Nor do the women of Herland need men for reproduction; the continued existence of Herland is due to parthenogenesis, or “virgin creation,” one generation of women giving birth to the next without any need for male assistance whatsoever.

But, after two thousand years of isolation and independence, Herland is suddenly invaded by three men, and what once was an all-female Paradise is changed forever.

Charlotte Perkins married Houghton Gilman in 1900. After his death in 1934, she moved to Pasadena, California, where she had lived after her separation from Stetson in 1888 and where her daughter was then living. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932; on 17 August 1935, she committed suicide, noting in the note she left behind that she "chose chloroform over cancer."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is widely available online, but in different versions. I recommend reading the original publication, from the 1892 New England Magazine (you can access by clicking here*). This text obviously shows the spelling and punctuation of Gilman's original title, "The Yellow Wall-Paper." Less obviously, it preserves her breaks in the text--these sections breaks are sometimes eliminated in reprints, especially those found online, but I think they are essential to the story. Gilman’s brief essay, “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” written and published in the October 1913 issue of her Forerunner magazine, is available by clicking here. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is also available online, accessible through Project Gutenberg, for example. There are several affordable paperback editions, often published with other Gilman texts, especially short stories. I like the very affordable Signet Classic edition edited by Barbara H. Soloman, Herland and Selected Stories. Soloman’s introduction to Gilman’s life and work is excellent, and this Gilman anthology also contains "The Yellow Wallpaper." 

It's important to note, however, that Gilman did not publish Herland as a stand-alone novel, complete in itself. Rather, she published "Herland" serially in twelve installments in The Forerunner, beginning in January 1915. The narrative of Herland is followed immediately, without a break, by "With Her in Ourland: Sequel to 'Herland'" in January 1916. The twelve installments of "Ourland" are completed in December 1916.

The first time "Herland" was published as a "novel" was in 1979--and it appeared separate from its "continuation." This publication history answers the most persistent questions raised by my students in the course of teaching this novel over several years: why would Ellador, the main female protagonist, ever decide to leave the all-female community of Herland? Why would Van have wanted her to leave rather than staying with her in Herland? What did she encounter in "our" world? 

There are various print-on-demand versions of With Her in Ourland available on Amazon, but I recommend the carefully prepared edition of Mary Jo Deegan--it has a great introduction. (You can get a new copy, but there are also used copies available). 

And, one more note: "Herland" was preceded by "Moving the Mountain," published serially in 1911 and in book form, Moving the Mountain, in the same year. While Moving the Mountain shares a utopian vision with Herland and is sometimes referred to as the first novel in Gilman's "trilogy," it has no connection with the characters and world of Gilman's more famous utopian Herland.

*This link connects you to an entire issue of the magazine--"The Yellow-Wall Paper," by Charlotte Perkins Stetson," begins on p. 647.

Judith Sargent Murray and the Equality of the Sexes

Judith Sargent Murray (born 5 May 1751)

Born into a prominent and wealthy Massachusetts family of businessmen, Judith Sargent very early realized the disadvantages women faced in life--her younger brother was given an excellent education, one designed to prepare him for entrance to Harvard, while she did not have the same kind of instruction. Her brother had a private tutor for lessons in geography, history, the classics, science, mathematics, philosophy, and theology; she was taught basic reading and writing, sewing, and household management. As expected of a daughter, she married John Stevens in 1769, when she was eighteen. 

A portrait of Judith Sargent,
then Mrs. Stevens,
by the artist John Singleton Copley,
painted 1770-72

Always teaching herself through reading, she began writing too. She had begun a notebook preserving her correspondence in 1765; in 1773, she began writing personal observations of events she witnessed during the American Revolution, a series of notes she continued until 1783.

But in 1782 she began publishing, first a Catechism for her Universalist faith. This was followed by the publication of her first essay in 1784, "Desultory Thoughts Upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms."

In 1786, John Stevens died; Judith Sargent remarried two years later, in 1788, this time to the Universalist minister John Murray. Two crucial essays, "On the Domestic Education of Children," and her most important work, "On the Equality of the Sexes," were published in 1790. She continued writing until her death in 1820, composing plays, poetry, and essays, all of which were published pseudonymously; she frequently used a female pen name, like "Constantia," the author of her most famous essay, though sometimes she wrote as a man, most famously using the pseudonym "The Gleaner." She also edited and published John Murray's sermons, correspondence, and autobiography.

Judith Sargent Murray's life and work disappeared until 1974, when her essay "On the Equality of the Sexes" was rediscovered and published by Alice Rossi in The Feminist Papers. A wealth of information is now available. There is an excellent biography, Sheila Skemp's First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence, as well as a sampling of her writing, Sharon M. Harris's Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray,

But you might want to start with the Judith Sargent Murray Society's amazing website, by Bonnie Hurd Smith. There you will find a very full biography, a selection from Judith Sargent's correspondence and notebooks, and an archive of Judith Sargent Murray's publications, including "On the Equality of the Sexes." 

Update, 5 May 2021: Unfortunately, Bonnie Hurd Smith's website seems to be no longer online, nor can I find a link for the Judith Sargent Murray Society.The link I’ve included above now takes you to the site as it was preserved on the Wayback Machine. Sargent's "On the Equality of the Sexes" is available here.

(Bonnie Hurd Smith still promotes her Sargent website, though the site itself says "not currently available." I've maintained the info in the hope that it will be back online soon!)

Update, 5 May 2023: The Judith Sargent Murray Society website is still not available, but Bonnie Hurd Smith indicates she is working on it. If you follow the link she provides there, you can read Hurd Smith's essay on Judith Sargent Murray for Oxford Bibliographies. Hurd Smith's personal web page also provides information about what she is doing now. As of December 2024, she is publishing Murray’s letter and essays online. 

Update, 5 May 2026: I’ve removed the link to Bonnie Hurd Smith’s website (above) and, via the InternetArchive’s Wayback Machine, added yet another connection to what used to be there. I have no idea what’s going on, but her book on Judith Sargent Murray, In Her Words: The Evolving Story of Judith Sargent Murray was published in July 2025.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate

Toni Morrison (born 18 February 1931)

Today is Toni Morrison's birthday. Her many honors include a Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), recognition with the French Légion d'honneur (2010), the Pulitzer Prize (1988), and, as noted in the headline of this post, a Nobel Prize in Literature (1993).

Morrison at a 2008 tribute to Chinua Achebe
and his Things Fall Apart

Among her most well-known novels are The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987), and, most recently, Home (2012).

The best way to celebrate Morrison's birthday is, of course, to read one of her novels--she herself recently described her reading (or rereading) of The Bluest Eye on The Colbert Report. It was a wonderful interview--funny and insightful--and you can watch it by clicking here.

You can read Morrison's Nobel lecture and listen to an audio recording of the lecture by clicking here. The Nobel site also includes biographical and bibliographical information, as well as excerpts from her work and a photo gallery.

Update: Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019.

Today is V-Day

Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues, and V-Day

The overwhelming response to productions of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues led in 1998 to the establishment of V-Day: 

On Valentines Day, 1998, Eve, with a group of women in New York City, established V-Day. Set up as a 501(c)(3) and originally staffed by volunteers, the organization's seed money came from a star-studded, sold out benefit performance at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, a show that raised $250,000 in a single evening.

V-Day's mission is simple. It demands that violence against women and girls must end. To do this, once a year, in February, March, and April, Eve allows groups around the world to produce a performance of the play, as well as other works created by V-Day, and use the proceeds for local individual projects and programs that work to end violence against women and girls, often shelters and rape crisis centers. What began as one event in New York City in 1998 today includes over 5,800 V-Day events annually.

Performance is just the beginning. V-Day stages large-scale benefits and produces innovative gatherings, films and campaigns to educate and change social attitudes towards violence against women.*

As the V-Day website says, "The 'V' in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine, and Vagina."** 

Check out the website, and if you can't find a production near you, you can buy the book! (And performances of many of the monologues from a wide variety of productions are posted on YouTube.)

Update, 14 February 2018: Today is V20, the 20th anniversary of V-Day. Along with its companion group, One Billion Rising, "the biggest mass action to end violence against women in human history," the theme of both V-Day and One Billion Rising is "Rise. Resist. Unite."

Have a strong day, resisters!

Update, 14 February 2021: Eve Ensler has recently changed her name to "V."

*The website has changed a great deal over the years--this is the language from the site in 2015, when this post was first published.

**As of 2021, the "V" in "V-Day" stands for "Voices, Victory, Valentine, and Vagina."

Germaine Greer, Feminist Icon

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939)

Today is the birthday of irrepressible feminist powerhouse Germaine Greer. Greer's The Female Eunuch, published in 1970, contributed significantly to the Second Wave feminist movement and remains a crucial work for women today--not least for Greer's claim that women have no idea how much men hate them because women have been taught so effectively to hate themselves.

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them," she begins in a section of the book labelled "Loathing and Disgust." She continues, "Men do not themselves know the depth of their hatred," and her analysis of street harassment, domestic violence, and sexual assault sounds as if it was written yesterday instead of more than forty years ago. It's important to note that Greer does not let women off the hook for their ignorance, self-loathing, and complicity. If you haven't read it--or if you haven't read it in a while--now is the time. 

Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortune of Women Painters and Their Work (1979) is a crucial treatment of the difficulties women artists have faced throughout history--it is a source I've relied on quite frequently here in my postings on women artists. And I particularly like Greer's 2007 biography of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Wife. From the introduction: 

Until our own time, history focussed on man the achiever; the higher the achiever the more likely it was that the woman who slept in his bed would be judged unworthy of his company. Her husband's fans recoiled from the notion that she might have made a significant contribution towards his achievement of greatness. 

She continues, "No one has ever undertaken a systematic review" of the life of Anne Hathaway--or her potential contributions to Shakespeare's life and work--"while every opportunity to caricature and revile her has been exploited to risible lengths." (For more on Anne Hathaway, click here.)

And here is from Greer's 2013 CNN essay, "Guilt Poisons Women":

Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive. Dirt and disorder in the family home is their fault, though they created none of it.

For Greer and her significance, "What Germain Greer and The Female Eunuch Mean to Me," here is an assessment offered by "six influential feminists" on the occasion of her seventy-fifty birthday in 2014.

Greer in 1970,
just after the publication of The Female Eunuch

Zora Neale Hurston: Her Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston (died 28 January 1960)

By the time of her death, much of Zora Neale Hurston's work had been forgotten, including her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). In 1973, the novelist Alice Walker went in search of Hurston's grave; Walker's 1975 article, "Looking for Zora," published in the March 1975 issue of Ms., triggered a a new wave of interest in Hurston and her work.

Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891, the family relocating to Florida when she was a small child. As a young woman, she attended Howard University before transferring to Barnard College. During her time in New York, she became an important part of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1929, she returned to Florida where she continued her writing and also undertook anthropological field research. With support from the Guggenheim Foundation, she expanded her work into Jamaica and Haiti in the 1930; in the 40s she was doing fieldwork in Honduras.

Zora Neale Hurston,
c. 1935-43

Hurston's life is complicated, her literary output notable, her political and anthropological work significant. There are so many online sites, biographies, and new editions of her books that I'll just link you to the homepage of the Zora Neale Hurston Trust, and you can take it from there . . .

(It's not easy to find Alice Walker's 1975 article, originally published in Ms., or at least it's not easy to find it online, but, for the moment, it's available here.)

Update, 28 January 2023: In January 2023, the PBS series, American Experience, broadcast a new documentary, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space. For more information, including a biography, several articles, and digital shorts, click here. (An earlier PBS documentary, Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun, was included in the American Masters series.)

Ms.--A Magazine of Our Own

Ms. Magazine (2 January 1972)

In January of 1972, Ms. published its first stand-alone issue--various sites online note the date of publication for that issue as 2 January, so I'm writing about Ms. today.

The magazine had made its initial appearance as a forty-page insert in the 21 December 1971 issue of New York magazine. As editor Clay Felker described the enterprise, 

Partly out of the notion that success breeds success, and partly for reasons I’ll come to later on, we are now giving our support to another new magazine. The central 40 pages of this issue of New York—a double issue, covering the two-week period from now to the first of the year—consist of a preview issue of Ms., a national magazine edited totally by women, among them Gloria Steinem of our own staff. It is devoted to women—not as role players, but as full human beings.

Women as "full human beings"! Can you imagine?

(You can read the entire editor's letter, "What is Ms. and What Is It Doing in New York" by clicking here.)

The January 1972 issue of Ms. was launched as a "test" issue, but it sold out its initial 300,00 copies in just eight days. The magazine began monthly publication later that year, in July; since 2001, the magazine has been published by the Feminist Majority Foundation.

The cover of the first stand-alone issue of the magazine

Maria Edgeworth and Mothers of the Novel

Maria Edgeworth (born 1 January 1767)

In 1970, when I was an undergraduate, I took a course in the history of the novel; although I no longer remember what its title in the official course catalogue was, the syllabus I received was titled "Fathers of the Novel." We began with the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, and we ended with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. Although I had read both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre while I was still in high school, the study of the novel as a literary genre, as far as my college classroom was concerned, was a zone for men only.

Of course, that doesn't mean I didn't find my way to novels written by women. Several years later, while studying for my Ph.D. exams and increasingly tired of Defoe and Dickens, I found my way to the Gothic extravaganza of Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and to the "non-canonical" novels of Fanny Burney--I loved Burney's novels in particular because they were huge--the paperback copy of Camilla (1796) that I bought in 1975 is 900 pages long! And it is still on my shelf today.

But I didn't have any idea of all that I was missing until I discovered Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen, first published in 1986 and still in print, nearly thirty years later. Spender describes her own process of discovery in the introduction:

     This is not the book I started to write. Half-way through my research, I changed my mind. When I began my work on early women novelists--in the attempt to explore the relationship between women and fiction--I had assumed that women novelists had not really "come into their own" until the entry of Jane Austen, and that the starting point for my work would be somewhere about the middle of the nineteenth century. At that stage, I had no idea that for more than one hundred and fifty years before Jane Austen, women had been writing novels, and that to return to the early days of women's relationship to fiction meant to go back to the seventeenth, and not the nineteenth century. 

Maria Edgeworth, born on 1 January 1767, is just the first of the "mothers of the novel" I will profile in this blog over the coming months. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Edgeworth explored serious social issues in her novels, including class, politics, race, and education, and her work can seem a bit didactic at times. But her novels are also full of sparkling adventures, memorable characters, and real humor.

An 1807 portrait of Maria Edgeworth

Two early novels, Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812), focus specifically on Anglo-Irish issues. The 1817 novel, Harrington, addresses anti-semitism, the novel itself a response to a letter to Edgeworth written by a reader, Rachel Mordecai. 

The Jewish-American Mordecai wondered how Edgeworth, who demonstrated "such justice and liberality" on issues of education, "should on one alone appear to be biased by prejudice." Mordecai had noticed that, whenever a Jewish character appeared in Edgeworth's novels, a "mean, avaricious, and unprincipled" nature was "invariably attached to him." (Mordecai refers specifically to characters in Castle Rackrent, Belinda, published in 1801, and The Absentee.) 

In her response to Mordecai, Edgeworth offers Harrington as "atonement and reparation . . . for the past."

Despite the presence of the Jewish moneylender Solomon in Belinda, this is a wonderful novel with which to start reading Edgeworth. It will allow you to see the unthinking anti-semitism for which Edgeworth will later offer her "atonement." It offers not one but two interracial romantic relationships, insight into the fear of and treatments for breast cancer in the very early nineteenth century, an exploration of jealousy between women, and a lively, often humorous, examination of the perils of the marriage market.

Edgeworth died at the age of eighty-one on 22 May 1849. Her work is readily available in print today. It's also available online in a variety of e-texts. To link to a Google books version of Belinda, click here.

Mary Beard Takes on Internet Trolls

"The Troll Slayer"

The 1 September 2014 New Yorker has a wonderful profile of classicist Mary Beard. The piece, written by Rebecca Mead, is titled "The Troll Slayer," and subtitled "A Cambridge Classicist Takes on Her Sexist Detractors." (For a link to the piece, click here.)

Mary Beard, image from the New Yorker article

The New Yorker profile begins with a reference to Beard's February 2014 London Review of Books lecture at the British Museum, a lecture on the silencing of women's voices in western culture, "'Oh Do Shut Up Dear': The Public Voice of Women." You can get a sense of the presentation from the two clips available at the BBC Radio Four website.

But you can listen to the entire lecture and read the complete text at the London Review of Books website--which offers a free sample access. To listen and/or read, click here.