Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a writer, educator, philosopher, and activist. She was one of many female intellectual leaders around the turn of the century. Do to her radical beliefs Gilman received the most criticism for her writings dealing with feminism. Gilman was an extraordinary woman who throughout her life battled for women’s rights and suffrage in a patriarchal male society of the early 20th century. Through these battles, Gilman developed a controversial conception of womanhood.
Born in 1860, Gilman was self-educated woman with many talents. Some of which included the arts, teaching, and writing. Raised without a father, her mother supported both Charlotte, and her older brother Thomas. They lived in a state of poverty, filth, and isolation and often moved from place to place leading to a lonely bitter life. Then at the age of 24 she married Charles Stetson and assumed the traditional roles of being a wife and mother, only before suffering a nervous breakdown cau...