Julien S. Murphy. Biography

JULIEN S. MURPHY. BIOGRAPHY

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American social philosopher at the turn of the century, a socialist and a feminist, a visionary. She was known both for her far-reaching philosophy of humanity and her radical reforms. The eminent sociologist, Lester Ward, said she was “the only person, who, to my knowledge, has clearly brought out this cosmological perspective, not merely in things human, but in the vast reaches of organic evolution.”1 Commonly seen as an optimist reformer, she saw herself as a philosopher.

I worked for various reforms, as Socrates went to war when Athens needed his services, but we do not remember him as a soldier. My business was to find out what ailed society, and how most easily and naturally to improve it.2

For society to advance, it needed to be recast without the domesti-cation of women. Throughout fifty years of writing and lecturing, Gilman developed sharp critiques of the central institutions of modern society: the home, motherhood, the family, work, and religion. Through her work, she hoped to edge the world toward, not a “man-made culture,” but a culture of free human beings with a sense of purpose, and an ethic for the advancement of humanity. Her vision would prove unrelenting. Her reputation as an intellectual leader in America pursuing radical changes in the social structure of society, continues into our present day, her social philosophy still radical and original.

I.  BIOGRAPHY

Gilman’s prolific career as a philosopher and political activist continued the legacy of women in the Beecher family. Gilman was born in 1860

A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Wait he, 51-68.

© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

to Mary Westcott and the renowned librarian, Frederick Beecher Perkins. Her great-grandfather, Lyman Beecher, was famous for his preaching and for his daughters, Charlotte’s great aunts, Isabella Beecher Hooker, abolitionist and suffragist, Catherine Ward Beecher (see Volume 3 of this series), founder of the Hartford Female Seminary and co-author of Principles of Domestic Science (1870) with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe was particularly a source of great inspiration, demonstrating how fiction might affect politics and was cited by Charlotte in her major work. Charlotte’s second husband, Houghton Gilman, was also a Beecher, son of Charlotte’s aunt, Katherine Beecher Perkins Gilman. It is through the Beecher family that Charlotte saw her own abilities for leadership and intellectual development.

Despite the Beecher lineage, Charlotte and her brother were raised in poverty by her mother who earned small amounts of money as a teacher of young children. Her father left the family when she was seven, providing negligible child-support and maintaining infrequent corre-spondence with her. Her mother’s life, Gilman would write in her autobiography, “was one of the most painfully thwarted I have ever known.”3 She became “a deserted wife... forced to move nineteen times in eighteen years, fourteen of them from one city to another.”4 After a long thorough musical education, developing unusual talent, her mother sold her piano when Charlotte was two to pay the butcher’s bill, and never owned another. She hated debt, yet debts accumulated forcing her to frequently move the family.

Gilman’s own life was one of struggle against the social system she would critique. Her childhood, despite her passionate desire to develop herself, offered her little assistance. She was not given more than four years of formal education as a child. Her efforts at self-education were fruitful primarily because she was a voracious reader with tremendous self-determination. She read biology, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and especially history and evolution. While her father sent her brother to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charlotte received only two years of advanced education studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her formal education was insufficient for one who, as early as seventeen, decided to help humanity by studying history and theory.

Gilman married twice. First, in 1884 to artist Charles Walter Stetson with whom she had her only child, Katherine Beecher Stowe, and her first nervous breakdown, fictionalized in The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). In 1894 she divorced Stetson. By that time, she had already become a 

public figure through her poems and lectures for the Nationalist Movement. Her divorce from Charles was a social scandal, outdone only by her continued friendship with him and his second wife, Grace Channing, her life-long friend and soon the primary mother of Charlotte’s daughter, Katherine. Gilman received much criticism for giving up her child while lecturing about Nationalist views of child-rearing which held that the best teaching for children could be given not merely by the parents but by the social community.

Gilman’s second marriage to New York patent lawyer Houghton Gilman in 1900 apparently was peaceful and happy, lasting thirty-four years. Her autobiography, interestingly enough, hardly mentions Houghton, demonstrating her own vision that her philosophical career would eclipse romantic relationships.

Her politics and activism began as early as age twenty-one when, out of her belief for women’s physical fitness and strength, she founded the first women’s gym in Providence. She became heavily involved in the Nationalist Movement in her early years. The Nationalists were inspired by Edward Bellamy’s novel, Looking Backward (1888), which presented a socialist America in the twenty-first century. Nationalists advocated the disappearance of social classes and the collective owner-ship of land and industry. Gilman was an influential lecturer and Nationalist poet for many years. She also was a socialist, and a member of the Fabian Society, which included such English socialists as G. B. Shaw. She was not a member of the Socialist Party for she rejected Marxist political methods and the Marxist concepts of economic deter-minism and class struggle. She supported the Labor Movement throughout her life, fighting for reduced hours, increased wages, and improved working conditions. As a feminist, her politics were radical. She supported suffrage but believed that economic independence was needed as well as the vote, claiming,

Women whose industrial position is that of a house-servant, or who do no work at all, who are fed and clothed, and given pocket- money by men, do not reach freedom and equality by the use of the ballot.5

She worked for the vote while lecturing on radical social reforms and insisting on economic independence for women. One suffrage leader told her, “I think you will do our cause more good than harm, because what you ask is so much worse than what we ask that they will grant our 

demands to escape yours.”6 While radical on women’s issues, she was conservative on sexual issues, a member of the Social Purity Society.

Gilman’s philosophical life was filled with an immense passion for social reform through a prolific writing and speaking career. Her creativity was overwhelming. She wrote six books of philosophy in twenty-five years: Women and Economicst Human Work, The Home, Concerning Children, His Religion and Hers, and The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture. She also wrote over four hundred poems, many short stories, five novels including Herland, essays for newspapers and magazines, and edited two magazines, the IMPRESS (1893-1895), and her own magazine, the Forerunner (1909-1916). She started the Forerunner when her work became harder and harder to publish, saying, “if the editors and publishers will not bring out my work, I will!”7 She ran the Forerunner from 1909-1916, writing an estimated 21,000 words per month or the equivalent of 28 books. By 1930, all of her philosophical books were out of print. Yet, she continued to write until her death in 1935, producing a detective story, Unpublished; her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and a manuscript, “A Study in Ethics”.

Her income from her books, which sold widely and were translated into several languages, was meager. She never held an academic position. The academic journal most receptive to her work was not a philosophy journal, but rather The American Journal of Sociology. She earned her money by selling articles and poems to magazines and preaching to churches and social groups. Her life was lived at the edges of poverty. She routinely suffered from exhaustion, and, despite her optimism, melancholia and depression. Her pace was phenomenal, considering her paradoxical cycles of optimism and depression. For instance, her first book was written in seventeen days: “3500 words I wrote this morning, in three hours,” she wrote in her diary.8 Periods of speedy writing and high productivity were counter-balanced by periods of total inertia and depression. Her health was weak, yet she travelled extensively, lecturing across the United States and abroad. Her socialist and feminist politics brought her to the International Socialist and Labor Congress in London in 1894, lecturing in England, Holland, Germany, Austria and Hungary in 1905, and the International Women’s Suffrage Congress in Budapest in 1913. She visited Hull House at the invitation of Jane Addams and may have met John Dewey there. Her friends included the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first woman physician, and Antoinette 

Brown Blackwell, American’s first woman minister, also a philosopher. (See Volume 3 of this series.)

Gilman’s life was guided by her philosophical views, believing in convention only when it was useful, taking the freedom to write and lecture, to divorce as well as to remarry, to give up her daughter without guilt, to write, collapse, and write again. She ended her life by chloroform inhalation in 1935 at the age of seventy-five after a three and a half year fight with breast cancer. Her suicide note said, “I prefer chloroform to cancer.”9 Her life and her death were marked by vibrant courage, tremendous hard work and diligence, and abundant creativity.