Charlotte Perkins Gilman A Biography [Paperback]

Charlotte Perkins Gilmanoffers the definitive account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life. Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (18601935) launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, The Yellow Wallpaper. She was hailed as the brains of the US women's movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to both social progress and human evolution.By 1900, Gilman had become an international celebrity, but had already faced a scandal over her divorce and abandonment of her child. As the years passed, her audience shrunk and grew more hostile, and she increasingly positioned herself in opposition to the society that in an earlier, more idealistic period she had seen as the better part of the self. In her final years, she unflinchingly faced breast cancer, her second husband's sudden death, and finally, her own carefully planned suicide she preferred chloroform to cancer and cared little for a single life when its usefulness was over.Charlotte Perkins Gilmanpresents new insights into the life of a remarkable woman whose public solutions often belied her private anxieties. It aims to recapture the drama and complexity of Gilman's life while presenting a comprehensive scholarly portrait. Thanks to Cynthia J. Davis, scholars, students, and general readers finally have a definitive, authoritative, and comprehensive biography of the often enigmatic Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This much anticipated study of Gilman is, in a word, superb . . . [I]t is in the lesser known documents and materials that Davis has found the stuff great biographies are made of. Her meticulously researched volume brings both substance to and new revelations about Gilman's life in a manner that is captilƒB