Charlotte
Perkins Gilman
1860 — 1935
The woman who escaped the rest cure, wrote the kitchen out of the house, and carried the century's racism into her utopia.
A Beecher great-niece raised in poverty by a mother who moved nineteen times, she married, bore a daughter, and broke. Weir Mitchell's rest cure ordered her never to touch pen or brush again; she left for California instead and wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in two days. Women and Economics made her famous in a dozen languages for arguing that a wife's dependence on a husband was unknown to any other species. For seven years she wrote every word of her own monthly magazine, Herland included.
She gave her nine-year-old to her ex-husband and was called an unnatural mother. She proposed a compulsory labor army for Black Americans. She chose chloroform over cancer. She will speak to all of it.