Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Biography

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was an American feminist writer, lecturer, and social reformer. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she endured a difficult childhood and a disastrous first marriage that inspired her famous short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), a searing indictment of the rest cure prescribed for women’s mental health. Her nonfiction work Women and Economics (1898) argued that women’s economic dependence on men was the root of gender inequality. Her utopian novel Herland (1915) imagined an all-female society. Gilman was a prolific writer, editor, and activist who challenged Victorian assumptions about women’s roles throughout her career.