By placing Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the company of her contemporaries, this collection seeks to correct misunderstandings of the feminist writer and lecturer as an isolated radical. Gilman's highly public and combative stances as a critic and social activist brought her into contact and conflict with many of the major thinkers and writers of the period. Gilman wrote on subjects as wide ranging as birth control, eugenics, race, women's rights and suffrage, psychology, Marxism, and literary aesthetics. Her many contributions to social, intellectual, and literary life at the turn of the 20th century raised the bar for future discourse, but at great personal and professional cost. -- From publisher's description.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a Woman's Place in America probes how depictions of space, confinement, and liberation establish both the difficulty and necessity of female empowerment. Turning Victorian notions of propriety and a woman's place on its ear, this essay collection studies Gilman's writings and the manner in which they push back against societal norms and reject male-dominated confines of space. The contributors present readings of some of Gilman's most significant works. By examining the settings in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Herland, for example, the volume analyzes Gilman's construction of place, her representations of male dominance and female subjugation, and her analysis of the rules and obligations that women feel in conforming to their assigned place: the home. Additionally, this volume delineates female resistance to this conformity. Contributors highlight how Gilman's narrators often choose resistance over obedient captivity, breaking free of the spaces imposed upon them in order to seek or create their own habitats. Through biographical interpretations of Gilman's work that focus on the author's own renouncement of her "natural" role of wife and mother, contributors trace her relocation to the American West in an attempt to appropriate the masculinized spaces of work and social organization. --

A biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935): Beecher-descendent, zealous reformer, exhilarating lecturer, prolific writer, scandalous divorcee, "unnatural mother," international celebrity, and life-long controversialist.

She has just given birth to their child. He labels her postpartum depression as »hysteria.« He rents the attic in an old country house. Here, she is to rest alone – forbidden to leave her room. Instead of improving, she starts hallucinating, imagining herself crawling with other women behind the room's yellow wallpaper. And secretly, she records her experiences. The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892] is the short but intense, Gothic horror story, written as a diary, about a woman in an attic – imprisoned in her gender; by the story. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist novella was long overlooked in American literary history. Nowadays, it is counted among the classics. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935), born in Hartford, Connecticut, was an American feminist theorist, sociologist, novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. Her writings are precursors to many later feminist theories. With her radical life attitude, Perkins Gilman has been an inspiration for many generations of feminists in the USA. Her most famous work is the short story The Yellow Wall-Paper [1892], written when she suffered from postpartum psychosis.

" ... The first comprehensive assessment of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's richly complex feminism."--Back cover.

"""The Yellow Wallpaper"" is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, due to its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century.Narrated in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a ""temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency"", a diagnosis common to women during that period"