With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Fiction, Journalism/Non-Fiction
1860 – 1935
Though she considered herself a humanist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was internationally known in her lifetime as a feminist, socialist, and author. In the early twentieth century she was the leading public intellectual of the women’s movement. Now she is best known for her fiction, including ‘the Yellow Wallpaper,’ and ‘Herland.’ Though her most productive years were from the 1890s through the 1910s, in Norwich she continued to write articles on controversial topics such as birth control.
- Biography/Description of Work
When Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a child growing up in Hartford, her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, often left his family for extended periods of time; he ultimately left the family for good and divorced his wife, Mary Fitch Perkins, in 1869. During his absences, young Charlotte would often spend time in the company of her well-known great aunts: Catharine Beecher, the education reformer; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and Isabella Beecher Hooker, a committed suffragist. Like her great-aunts, Perkins grew up to be a fiercely independent woman, committed to social reform and progress. She experienced a difficult first marriage and postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter. She separated from and divorced her husband, who remarried and took custody of her daughter. Recovering her health, Charlotte Perkins moved to California, wrote poetry and fiction, and lectured to support herself. In 1900, Perkins married her cousin, George Houghton Gilman, who was supportive of her ideas and career. She founded ‘The Forerunner’ in 1909, a social reform journal, which she continued to publish until 1916. In 1922, Perkins Gilman returned to Connecticut, living and writing in Norwich until her husband’s sudden death in 1934. In failing health herself, with inoperable breast cancer, she returned to California to be near her daughter. An advocate for the right to die, she took her own life in 1935.
- Sources view
- Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame: http://www.cwhf.org/inductees/writers-journalists/charlotte-perkins-gilman Gilman papers at Radcliffe Institute Schlesinger Library. Lehman, Eric D. and Amy Nawrocki. 2014 Literary Connecticut. Charleston: The History Press.
- Associated Resource(s)