Charlotte Perkins Gilman

(1860 - 1935)

Born in Connecticut, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was raised in poverty by her mother—her father had left when she was a baby—who forbade her from reading fiction. Gilman wrote her most famous work, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” while suffering postpartum depression after the birth of her only daughter. She later wrote two utopian novels set in a land where men didn’t exist and several works focusing on how white women—Gilman’s only concern—and the gendered labor they did at home deserved academic and political attention. She died by suicide in 1935, writing in her widely published note that she “preferred chloroform to cancer.”