Gilman, Charlotte

Gilman, Charlotte (b. Perkins) (1860–1935) writer, social reformer; born in Hartford, Conn. Despite her ancestry in the well-known Beecher family, she experienced near-poverty after her mother was abandoned by her father, and she was educated irregularly. During a ten-year marriage to Charles Stetson, which ended in divorce (1894), she suffered a mental breakdown, described in thinly veiled fiction in her now classic story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892). Between 1885–1900 she lived mostly in California or New York City, supporting herself by writing and editing, and by lecturing on various social issues; she also traveled to England where she came to know the British Fabian socialists. In 1898 she published what was and is regarded as her major work, Women and Economics (1898), which focused on the need for women to gain economic independence. In 1900 she married George Gilman of New York, and she continued to write, to edit her own magazine, Forerunner (1909–16), and to lecture, usually promoting her own rather advanced feminist views. Afflicted with cancer, she committed suicide in 1935.