FEMINIST, SOCIALIST, ARTIST
Gilman defied convention again and again in her life.
After her death, Gilman dropped out of the public consciousness for several decades. Then, when 1970s feminists discovered her, they tended to read her fiction more than her nonfiction. Her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman confined to her bedroom, hallucinating as she stares at the patterns on the wall, became especially popular, as did Herland (1915) and her other utopian novels. Gilman is still known more for “The Yellow Wallpaper” than any other work, but contemporary scholars are taking another look at her, this time in a context that includes all her writing. That context is made possible by the Schlesinger Library, where Gilman’s papers reside and have recently been fully digitized. The Schlesinger is the world’s major repository for Gilman’s papers. Judith A. Allen, a professor of gender studies and history at Indiana University, relied on the Schlesinger in writing The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Sexualities, Histories, Progressivism (University of Chicago, 2009), for which she was awarded a Schlesinger Library research grant in 1992–1993. Allen is much more interested in Gilman’s nonfiction than her fiction. She writes: “In 1898, Women and Economics made her known for the remainder of her feminist career as a sociologist, philosopher, ethicist, and social critic, producing some fiction on the side. By 1998, however, Gilman had become a feminist novelist and poet who produced some nonfiction.”
After divorcing her first husband—a scandalous act in those days—and having a passionate affair with a woman, Gilman found contentment in marriage to her first cousin. In her later years, she enjoyed playing with her grandchildren, Walter and Dorothy Chamberlin (below). Gilman believed in communal child rearing to free mothers from domestic drudgery.
Winter 2011 r a d c l i f f e m a g azine
27