"Crazy"

Have you ever felt untethered, confused, frustrated and perhaps a little depressed - if there is such a thing as a little depression? Many women I know have. I have. You feel lost. You may have had no one to turn to, and if you did, how could you possibly put into words what you were feeling or going through? I think it is something that many women of my generation can identify with. Children born that you adore but you are exhausted. There is no end to the daily struggles! On several occasions, I thought about running away. There were articles back in the 70s in women’s magazines (yes, I read them) that talked about the large number of housewives who just disappeared of their own volition. That was the period in my life that I read The Yellow Wallpaper. To this day, I can not adequately express how this book impacted me. What I can say is it validated me and my struggles in a way that nothing else ever had. It was a monumental expression of what I often felt - “crazy”, misunderstood, and unsupported. I will never forget how I felt after reading it. Here is the story of the woman who wrote it. 

Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860. Her family was the prominent Beecher family. Growing up, Charlotte’s father, Frederick, often left his family for long periods of time and ultimately left his family for good, divorcing her mother when Charlotte was only nine years old. She had three siblings, but only one survived childhood. During these long and ultimately permanent absences, Charlotte spent time with her well-known aunts, Catharine Beecher, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Catharine was an education reformer, Isabella was a suffragist, and Harriet was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Like her aunts, Charlotte grew up to be a fiercely independent woman, deeply committed to social reform. 

In 1873, poverty forced the family to move to Providence, R.I., because of extreme poverty. Because of the poverty, Charlotte’s schooling was very limited, and she was mainly self-taught, but she had an insatiable hunger for learning. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design for a few year working a variety of jobs to support herself. 

In 1884, at 24, Charlotte married Charles Walter Stetson. They had one daughter, Katherine Beecher, the following year. After Katherine’s birth, Charlotte suffered severe postpartum depression. She received Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s famous Victorian cure: complete bed rest and severely restricted intellectual activity. No books. No writing. No work. Just silence, submission, and domesticity until she was “well” again. She was almost destroyed by the treatment. The more Charlotte rested, the worse she became. The silence didn’t heal her—it suffocated her. The isolation didn’t restore her—it pushed her toward the edge of sanity.  

The cure designed to make her a proper wife and mother was systematically erasing who she was. So Charlotte did something radical: she stopped. She left the rest cure. She left her marriage, divorced her husband and moved to California. She picked up her pen. And she wrote! In 1892, she published “The Yellow Wallpaper” in the New England Magazine — a short story that would haunt readers for over a century. It tells the story of a woman confined to a room by her physician husband, forbidden to work or write, told that rest will cure her “nervous condition.” As the weeks pass, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper in her room. She sees a woman trapped behind the pattern, creeping and crawling, desperately trying to escape. By the story’s end, the narrator has torn down the wallpaper and is crawling around the room herself, finally “free”. Critics called it disturbing. Physicians complained it was dangerous. Some libraries refused to stock it. The medical establishment reacted with outrage. They were supposed to be. Because the story wasn’t just fiction—it was testimony. Charlotte had taken her own experience of medical gaslighting and turned it into a weapon. She showed exactly how the “care” prescribed for women was actually control. Charlotte also received a flood of positive responses from women who had had similar experiences. 

Later in her life, she learned that Dr. Mitchell, although he never responded directly to her, modified his cure as a result of reading her story.

In 1900, Charlotte married Houghton Gilman, a Wall Street attorney. They lived happily together on Houghton’s old homestead in Norwich, Connecticut until his sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934. Charlotte subsequently moved back to California to live with her daughter. 

Thought her life, Charlotte continued to write and lecture on a wide variety of women’s topics, most notably the belief that women must be economically independent, work outside the home, and employ their natural abilities and intelligence to benefit not only themselves but also society, devoid of patriarchal control. In 1993, the Siena Research Institute designated Charlotte Perkins Gilman as the sixth most influential woman of her time. She was inducted into the National Woman’s Hall of Fame in 1994.