Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860–1935)Gilman was an American writer who published a huge range of work across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including sociology, literature, political science, economics, and women's studies. Her best-known volume is The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), written after her nervous breakdown in 1885. It can be taken as a semi-autobiographical record of psychiatric treatment and the descent into ‘madness’, but can also be interpreted as a metaphorical account of women's situation generally, and particularly that of married women in a patriarchal society. Her more specifically sociological work addressed the culturally repressed status of women and how this impeded full intellectual development.
Like Harriet Martineau in her earlier works, and also some contemporary radical feminists, Gilman suggests an analogy between women's social situation and slavery. She...
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