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Charlotte, her brother, and her mother lacked regular
income and lived with relatives, moving frequently.
When Charlotte was fifteen she tracked down her
father at the Boston Public Library, where he worked as a
librarian, and kissed him.“He put me away from him and
said I must not do that sort of thing there,” she recalled.
“What I do know is that my childhood had no father,”
she wrote.
Charlotte’s relationship with her mother was not
much better. Shattered by her husband’s abandonment,
she refused to cuddle Charlotte as an infant lest the
child become dependent on affection. They never
were close.
At the time of the incident at the library, Charlotte
and her mother lived in a cooperative run by a spiritualist,
a woman who claimed to communicate with spirits. One
day Charlotte saw her taking grapes that were meant for
the whole group. The woman accused Charlotte of think-
ing evil thoughts about her. Charlotte’s mother insisted
that Charlotte apologize for her thoughts; Charlotte
refused.“And what are you going to do about it?” she
taunted. Her mother hit her. At that moment, “I was
born,” Charlotte recalled.“Neither she, nor any one,
could makeme do anything.”
Charlotte devised a stern regimen to ensure
her future independence. Every day she ran a mile
and educated herself by drawing, reading, and
writing. Never would she depend on anyone—
especially a man.“I am not domestic and I don’t
want to be,” she told a female confidante.
Her resolve weakened when she was
courted by an aspiring young writer, though
not an especially talented one. They married
and the baby soon followed. Charlotte’s bouts
of depression became more frequent and inca-
pacitating. Finally she agreed to consult with
neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, the nation’s fore-
most expert on neurasthenia, a disease that
especially afflicted well-to-do young women. Its
chief symptoms were depression, listlessness,
and invalidism.
Mitchell believed that women’s nervous systems
were attuned to childbearing and childrearing. Women
who pursued education and careers would exhaust their
nervous energy and become neurasthenic. Charlotte’s condi-
tion, Mitchell assured her, resulted from her intellectual
labors. His prescription was simple:Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with
you all the time. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have
but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch
pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live.AMERICAN LIVES
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Stetson, shortly after her marriage, wrote, “You
were called to serve humanity, and you cannot serve yourself. No
good as a wife, no good as a mother, no good at anything. And you
did it yourself!”I
n 1885, severe depression gripped twenty-five-year-old
Charlotte Perkins Stetson. “Every morning the same
helpless waking,” she confided in her journal.“Retreat
impossible, escape impossible.” She had married the
previous year and had just given birth to a daughter. But the
infant gave her no pleasure.“I would hold her close—that
lovely child!—and instead of love and happiness, feel only
pain. The tears ran down my breast.” Over the next few years,
her depression worsened. She feared she was approaching
“the edge of insanity.”
Charlotte’s life had not been easy. Shortly after she was
born, her father abandoned the family. He visited every
couple of years, and occasionally sent a check, but