July 3, 1860 [Hartford, Connecticut]–1935 [Pasadena, California]
Gilman was a renowned feminist writer, perhaps best known for her autobiographical account of postpartum depression, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in 1899 and the utopian novel Herland (1915). Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut. During her infancy, her father left the family. Her mother was not able to support the family, so Gilman and her brother were often in the company her father’s aunts, notably the suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Much of her youth was spent in Providence, Rhode Island. She married artist Charles Walter Stetson in 1884 with whom she bore a daughter, Katherine; she separated from him 1888 at which point she moved to Pasadena, California with her daughter. Her first volume of poetry, In This Our World — a series of satiric jabs at the patriarchy — was published in 1893 to much acclaim. Gilman’s mother died in the same year, at which point Gilman moved back east, moving back to Pasadena in 1934 (after her diagnosis of incurable breast cancer) to be nearer to her daughter. An advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, Gilman committed suicide on August 17, 1935.
