Charlotte
Perkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on 3rd July, 1860. Her
father, Frederick Perkins, abandoned the family shortly after her
birth and she grew up in poverty and received very little formal education.
In 1884 married the artist, Charles Stetson. A daughter was born the
following year but the marriage was unsuccessful and in 1894 the couple
were divorced.
Perkins moved to California where she began writing stories and articles
for various journals including the New England
Magazine. She also gave lectures on women's
suffrage and trade unions. In 1895 she
settled in Chicago where she lived with
Jane Addams, Ellen
Gates Starr and Julia Lathrop in
Hull House.
Perkins was greatly influenced by the work of Edward
Bellamy and became a socialist. In 1896 she was a delegate to
the International Socialist Congress in London.
While in England she met leading socialists
such as Keir Hardie, Sidney
Webb, Beatrice Webb and George
Bernard Shaw.
In 1898 Perkins published Women and Economics
where she advocated equal work for women. In the book she criticized
men for desiring weak and feeble wives and urged the economic independence
of women. This was followed by other books on social issues such as
Concerning Children (1900), The
Home (1903) and Human Work
(1904).
In 1900 Perkins married her cousin, George H. Gilman. She continued
to campaign for women's rights and in 1909
founded Forerunner, a literary
journal devoted to contemporary social issues.
Perkins also wrote several novels including What
Diantha Did (1910), Herland
(1915) and With Her in Ourland
(1916). These novels illustrated her feminism and in many of her stories
the traditional sex roles are reversed. Herland,
considered to be her most impressive novel, is about a community of
women without men.
On the outbreak of the First World War, Perkins
and a group of women pacifists in the
United States, began talking about the need
to form an organization to help bring it to an end. On the 10th January,
1915, over 3,000 women attended a meeting in the ballroom of the New
Willard Hotel in Washington and formed
the Woman's Peace Party. Jane
Addams was elected chairman and other women involved in the organization
included Mary McDowell, Florence
Kelley, Alice Hamilton, Anna
Howard Shaw, Belle La Follette,
Fanny Garrison Villard, Emily
Balch, Jeanette Rankin, Lillian
Wald, Edith Abbott, Grace
Abbott, Crystal Eastman, Carrie
Chapman Catt, Emily Bach, and Sophonisba
Breckinridge.
Perkins
continued to write and other books published included His
Religion and Hers (1923) and a autobiography, The
Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935).
Suffering
from breast cancer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman committed suicide on
17th August, 1935. She left a note that said: "When all usefulness
is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it
is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in
place of a slow and horrible one. I have preferred chloroform to cancer."
(1)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898)
Many women would continue to prefer the very kinds of
work which they are doing now, in the new and higher methods of execution.
Even cleaning, rightly understood and practised, is a useful, and
therefore honorable profession. It has been amusing heretofore to
see how this least desirable of labors has been so innocently held
to be woman's natural duty. It is woman, the dainty, the beautiful,
the beloved wife and revered mother, who has by common consent been
expected to do the chamber-work and scullery work of the world. All
that is basest and foulest she in the last instance must handle and
remove. Grease, ashes, dust, foul linen, and sooty ironware, - among
these her days must pass. As we socialize our functions, this passes
from her hands into
those of man. The city's cleaning is his work. And even in our houses
the professional cleaner is more and more
frequently a man.
The organization of household
industries will simplify and centralize its cleaning processes, allowing
of many mechanical conveniences and the application of scientific
skill and thoroughness. We shall be cleaner than we ever were before.
There will be less work to do, and far better means of doing it. The
daily needs of a well-plumbed house could be met easily by each individual
in his or her own room or by one who liked to do such work; and the
labor less frequently required would be furnished by an expert, who
would clean one home after another with the swift skill of training
and experience. The home would cease to be to us a workshop or a museum,
and would become far more the personal
expression of its occupants - the place of peace and rest, of love
and privacy - than it can be in its present condition
of arrested industrial development. And woman will fill her
place in those industries with far better results than are now
provided by her ceaseless struggles, her conscientious devotion,
her pathetic ignorance and inefficiency.
Last
updated: 7th August, 2002
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