Gilman's Feminist Influences

by Alexis Hatch

            Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a leading American feminist author and poet during a time when the Feminist Movement was in full throttle. Today Gilman has many famous feminist works, but the most popular would have to be her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which displays her own struggle with postpartum depression. Gilman was an inspirational and influential writer, but she herself was influenced by many other prominent figures during the time and in the Feminist Movement. One extremely big influence on Gilman was her great-aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was an American abolitionist and author that used her writings to influence social change for an anti-slavery America. Interactions with Stowe is what lead to Gilman’s concern about social injustice and the hardship of women’s lives at a very early age (Charters 461). Being related to such a major figure of the time is a significant relationship that heavily influenced Gilman. Along with being related, Stowe’s works influence Gilman to become a writer and poet of the Feminist Movement as well. Other influences of the time were the fellow feminist authors that were fighting her same battle, one in particular Bertha Pappenhem:

Gilman was not the only woman who suffered from hysteria for many years before      becoming an important feminist writer and crusader, Bertha Pappenhem, the co-founder and twenty-year president of the Judischer Frauenbund (the German Jewish Woman’s League) and writer of numerous feminist works, was also a hysteric, and a famous one at that. (Herndl 52)

The passage above mentions Hysteria the emotional disorder that both Gilman and Pappenhem were both diagnosed with during their lives. Pappenhem’s uncanny similarities to Gilman are what make her such a significant influence for Gilman and her works; both feminist authors and both diagnosed with Hysteria. Although during the time women diagnosed with Hysteria were considered emotionally unstable and were recommended to not do anything at all, both Gilman and Pappenhem dismissed this recommendation and continued to be major figures in the Feminist Movement with their writings. Pappenhem was not the only feminist Gilman can be linked to: "Blackwell was a founder, with his wife, Lucy Stone, of the suffragist periodical the Woman’s Journal. He his wife and their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, were close friends of Gilman, who stayed in their home in 1896,1897, and 1898, as well as in 1899—the year he reviewed “The Yellow Wallpaper” for the Woman’s Journal" (Golden 467). This quote is touching on the fact that Gilman was a close friend with two very significant figures in the Feminist Movement, and that also had founded one of the popular women’s journals Woman’s Journal. The relationship Gilman had with both Blackwell and Stone not only helped fuel her feminist opinions by being around other feminists so often, but also allowed her to get her works published in a popular medium more easily. Knowing that Gilman has is connected and influenced by other prominent figures of the time is significant because it tells her readers a little more about her cultural and historical background that lead to her being the writer we know her as today.

As a reader, did hearing these findings, that Gilman was connected to many influential writers of the time, change or alter your opinion about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and/or her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” at all?

Works Cited

Charters, Ann. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman." The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short             Fiction. New York: St. Martin's, 1983. 461. Print.

Golden Catherine, Hedges Elaine, Dock Julie Bates. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman” PMLA, Vol. 111, No. 3 (May, 1996), pp. 467-468

Herndl, Diane Price. "The Writing Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna O., And  'Hysterical' Writing." NWSA Journal 1.1 (1988): 52.Academic Search Complete. Web. 7 Mar. 2012.