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Author Information

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

 

Charlotte Anne Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), prominent American feminist, sociologist, writer, poet and lecturer for social reform.

 

Charlotte Anna Perkins was born to Frederick Beecher Perkins and Mary (Westcott) Perkins in Hartford, Connecticut on July 3, 1860. Being exposed to a family of writers and artists in a time of great social activism she became a self-educated prolific reader and writer of short stories and novels that focused on women’s rights and social activism.

 

Her father Frederick Beecher Perkins was a writer and librarian. Harriet Beecher Stowe, her Great Aunt, with whom she spent a great deal of her childhood, wrote the famous Uncle Toms Cabin.

 

Gilman spent two years at Rhode Island School of Design, earned her living designing greeting cards, and in 1884 married Charles Walter Stetson. She gave birth to Katherine Beecher in 1885 and soon after began suffering from bouts of depression, which prompted her to write her most noted short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. By the fall of 1887 Gilman and Stetson had separated and in 1894 had been granted their divorce. In 1900 she married George Houghton Gilman (her first cousin) and remained with him until his death in 1934. Having been diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer she chose euthanasia as a way out and subsequently ended her own life by taking an overdose of chloroform on August 17, 1935.

 

Poetry:

◊In This Our World (1893)

◊Suffrage Songs and Verses (1911)

◊The Latter Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996)

 

Novels & Novellas:

◊What Dianthe Did (1911)

◊The Crux (1911)

◊Moving the Mountain

◊Mag-Marjorie (1912)

◊Won Over (1913)

◊Benigna Machiavelli (1914)

◊Herland (1915)

◊With Her in Our Land

 

Book length Non-Fiction:

◊His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. (1923)

◊Gems of Art for the Home and Fireside (1888)

◊Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898)

◊Concerning Children (1900)

◊The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903)

◊Human Work (1904)

◊The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911)

◊Our Brains and What Ails Them. Serialized in Forerunner (1912)

◊Social Ethics. Serialized in Forerunner (1914)

◊Our Changing Morality. Ed. Freda Kirchway (1930)

 

Autobiography:

◊The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935)

 

and 186 short stories in magazines, newspapers, etc., many in her self-published monthly The Forerunner.

 

This content has been provided by Clantastic Books.