A Thought Provoking Woman

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935) was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story The Yellow Wallpaper which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis."

"After moving to Pasadena, Charlotte became active in organizing social reform movements. As a delegate, she represented California in 1896 at both the Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C. and the International Socialist and Labor Congress which was held in England. In 1890, she was introduced to Nationalism, a movement which worked to "end capitalism's greed and distinctions between classes while promoting a peaceful, ethical, and truly progressive human race." Published in the Nationalist magazine, her poem, Similar Cases was a satirical review of people who resisted social change and she received positive feedback from critics for it. Throughout that same year, 1890, she became inspired enough to write fifteen essays, poems, a novella, and the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Her career was launched when she began lecturing on Nationalism and gained the public's eye with her first volume of poetry, In This Our World, published in 1893. As a successful lecturer who relied on giving speeches as a source of income, her fame grew along with her social circle of similar-minded activists and writers of the feminist movement."

Other quotations:

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

“There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.”

“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”

"It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it."

"The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain -- the hardest and most iron-bound as well."

"A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband."

                                                                                                                                                   ~ César ~