GILMAN, Charlotte Perkins

(1860-1935)

   US editor, writer and lecturer, and an important figure in the history of US FEMINISM. Although by no means negligible, her later fiction was clearly dedicated to the promulgation of a copious flow of radical thought. However, her first story, The Yellow Wall Paper (1892 New England Magazine; 1899 chap) as by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was longread as a relatively straightforward tale of horror; it took no substantial task of decoding for later readers to understand that the powerful delusional imagery of the tale reflects the intolerable stress felt by its autobiographical protagonist at being forced to act out the role of a compliant and sequestrated female. CPG divorced her husband in 1894, after having moved to California; she then spent half a decadelecturing before remarrying. The rest of her life was productive. She founded, edited, and wrote almost the entire contents of The Forerunner, an issues-oriented journal which ran 1909-16; here first appeared many of the stories assembled decades later as The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings (coll 1989). This volume does not include the book-lengthfeminist UTOPIA "Moving the Mountain" (1911 The Forerunner), set in 1940 after women have decided that enough is enough and have taken over running the USA on a basis of humane, socialist equality. More famously, Herland (1914 The Forerunner; 1979), along with its sequel "With Her in Ourland"(1916 The Forerunner), depicts an isolated parthenogenetic society 2000 years hence. Three men stumble into this gentle, humorous, wise utopian venue; one idolatrously reveres women, one is a male chauvinist, and the third narrates. In the sequel, a woman from Herland visits the USA, which she finds worthy of very considerable comment. An autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), was published after CPG, aged75, had discovered she had cancer and committed suicide.

   JC

   About the author: To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1990) by Ann J. Lane.

   See also: POLITICS.