CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Portrait courtesy
of The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman was the daughter of Mary Finch Perkins
and Frederick Beecher Perkins, the grandson of Lyman and nephew
of Harriet. Charlotte was born in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut.
Her early years were spent in poverty due to the abandonment by
her father of the family, and she consequently had a limited education,
although she did attend the Rhode Island School of Design. She married
and had one daughter, but the marriage failed and her husband married
her best friend. This did not seem to bother her, and she sent her
daughter to live with the couple, which was unfavorably commented
upon by the press. In order to earn money she began writing short
stories and poetry and lecturing. Her lectures centered on the themes
of women, labor and social organization. In 1898 she published Women
and Economics which argues for the socialization of housework
through the establishment of communal kitchens and day nurseries
in order for women to work outside their homes. In 1900 Charlotte
married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman. She continued
her lecturing and writing and helped found with Jane Addams and
others the Woman's Peace Party. She died in 1935, and is considered
by many as one of the greatest American women.
In Milton Rugoff's biography of the Beecher family he presents
an overview of the nineteenth century Beecher women. "The progress
from Catherine Beecher's early campaign for women's education and
financial independence to Isabella's work for women's rights, and
thence to Charlotte's efforts to live as a liberated woman in the
1890s, is perhaps the most striking example of the persistence in
the Beecher family of committment to a social ideal." (p.593)
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New England Magazine. An illustrated
monthly. (March 1891, August 1891). Charlotte's essay, The
Giant Wisteria first appeared in this issue.
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Hearing of the National American
Woman Suffrage Association. (Washington, D.C., January 28,
1896).
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman Stetson traveled from California to address
the committee on the Judiciary, the United States House of Representatives.
A short biographical sketch appeared in the Cleveland Journal.
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