Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Writer

1860-07-03 – 1935-08-17

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American writer, social theorist, and feminist thinker best known for The Yellow Wallpaper. Her work examined gender, economic independence, and social reform.

Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Herland
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The Yellow Wallpaper
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Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
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John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
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I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.
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Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
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I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...
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You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.
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They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they? Mrs MacAvelly suggested. Why should we? answered her friend. We don't make 'em– nor God– nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?
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[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
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And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.
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Its time we woke up,— pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. —Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but who's to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and what's more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes - and shoes - which of us wants to dance with her?
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Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.
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the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed
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It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide— plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
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In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy. Woman in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother. We looked for nervousness— there was none. For terror, perhaps— there was none. For uneasiness, for curiosity, for excitement— and all we saw was what might have been a vigilance committee of women doctors, as cool as cucumbers, and evidently meaning to take us to task for being there.
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it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of organism, the individual or social body requires use of all of our powers in four areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and social
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Woman in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.
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There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
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Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.
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As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.
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Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.
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