SPEAKER_00: This bonus episode is brought to you by NURTEC ODT Remedipant 75 mg orally disintegrating tablets.
Before we get started, a warning. This episode contains mentions of suicide.
Hello. From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica.
This month we're talking about women of science fiction.
These women inspire us to imagine impossible worlds, alien creatures, and fantastical inventions, revealing our deepest fears and hopes for the future.
Today's Womanican made her mark with a haunting short story, just one piece of her immense
body of work.
She dedicated her life to imagining utopias, starting with the real struggles of women in her era. But her attempts at ideal futures belied her own prejudices.
Let's talk about Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
In 1890, Charlotte received a letter from H.E. Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
Surely, Charlotte thought, this had to be about the short story she'd recently submitted for publication. It was perhaps her best work yet, all about her time as a new mother.
The editor must have read it.
She tore the letter open.
Well, he'd certainly read the story.
Dear, madam, the letter began, Mr. Howells has handed me this story.
I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself.
Charlotte shrugged and tossed it to the side.
She later wrote, this was funny. The story was meant to be dreadful and succeeded.
She'd find a new place to submit her story.
Charlotte was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860.
Her roots as an activist and writer stemmed from her family.
On her father's side, she was related to the renowned preacher Lyman Beecher and to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
In 1884, Charlotte married artist Charles Stetson.
Their daughter, Catherine, was born soon after.
Charlotte hadn't been very happy with married life before Catherine's birth, but afterwards, things were different.
Worse.
Charlotte was dejected, irritable, prone to mood swings. She was tired.
These symptoms wouldn't go away, and to make matters worse, nobody seemed to understand what it was she was going through.
Charlotte was miserable.
She'd later say she came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Charlotte was suffering from what we'd now call postpartum depression, a common occurrence in the days, months, and even years post birth.
The marriage didn't last. When she could, Charlotte packed up herself and Catherine and hopped on a train to California. Once there, she set pen to paper.
The most harrowing months of her life would become her most famous work.
The resulting short story was called The Yellow Wallpaper. It told the story of a woman in Charlotte's situation, diagnosed by a male doctor as having the woman's disease of nervous trouble.
The story's protagonist is forced into bed, deprived of any stimulation.
She becomes obsessed with the patterns in The Yellow Wallpaper lining her sick room.
It starts to speak to her.
She descends into madness.
The rest cure creates the very psychosis it was supposed to treat.
Though The Atlantic Monthly originally passed on the story, it was later published in New England Magazine in 1892.
It inspired many letters to the editor on the subject, calling it graphic, accusing
it of holding the reader in morbid fascination to the end.
One letter asked if such literature should be permitted in print.
Rest assured, Charlotte continued to get her work out in print.
She wrote throughout her life, even as it took her across the country and through many new stages.
She divorced Charles in 1894 after a lengthy and public legal battle.
For years, she lived with a fellow writer, Adeline Knapp, one of several women she had
romantic relationships with in her life.
For a time, Charlotte and Adeline lived in Oakland and ran a boarding house, supplementing their income while the two women wrote.
But Charlotte could never escape the domestic obligations she loathed.
At one point, she was raising her daughter, taking care of her sick mother, tending to her boarding house residence, all while battling recurrent depressive episodes.
When Catherine was nine years old, Charlotte sent her back to Rhode Island to live with Charles.
Tabloids caught wind of the story and painted her as a heartless woman who abandoned her child.
Still, Charlotte continued forward with her writing and activism. She turned her attention to women's suffrage.
She began by writing articles and poems for progressive papers.
Eventually, she founded, edited, and wrote the entirety of her own journal, called The Forerunner.
She was prolific, melding poems, short stories, and essays into one enormous, issues-oriented magazine.
But the solutions she proposed for society's ills were far from equitable.
She wrote about marriage as a "...sexoeconomic bargain," explaining that the woman needs financial freedom and creative outlets to truly exist as a full being, otherwise she is degraded and her children inherit that degradation.
And women, which for Charlotte only meant white women, needed liberation in order to exercise their breeding power.
A significant amount of Charlotte's work endorsed eugenics and nativism, the idea that
people born in the U.S. should receive certain privileges over those born outside of the country.
She also advocated for racial purity and strict border policies.
In an installment of The Forerunner, Charlotte wrote a story about a female-led utopia, a place with no conflict, no sadness, possible only through an entirely homogeneous society.
When she was in her 70s, Charlotte found out she had cancer.
Determined to go out on her own terms, she set to writing an autobiography.
Then, on August 17, 1935, she died by suicide.
She left behind thousands of pages of writing and a reminder that those who design utopias in solitude imagine futures for the few.
All month we're talking about women in science fiction. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram, at Womanica Podcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!
