Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Adulthood

Adulthood

In 1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson after initially declining his proposal because a gut feeling told her it was not the right thing for her. Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born the following year. Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered a very serious bout of post-partum depression in the months after Katharine's birth. This was an age in which women were seen as "hysterical" and "nervous" beings; thus, when a woman claimed to be seriously ill after giving birth, her claims were sometimes dismissed as being invalid.

In 1888, Charlotte separated from her husband — a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth century, but one that was necessary for the improvement of her mental health. The two legally divorced in 1894. Following the separation, Charlotte moved with her daughter to Pasadena, California, where she became active in several feminist and reformist organizations such as The Pacific Coast Woman's Press Association, the Woman's Alliance, the Economic Club, the Ebell Society, the Parents Association, and the State Council of Women, in addition to writing and editing the Bulletin, a journal put out by one of the earlier-mentioned organizations.

In 1894, Gilman sent her daughter west to live with her former husband and his second wife, Grace Ellery Channing, who was a close friend of Gilman's. Gilman reported in her memoir that she was happy for the couple, since Katharine's "second mother was fully as good as the first, better in some ways." Gilman also held progressive views about paternal rights and acknowledged that her ex-husband "had a right to some of society" and that Katharine "had a right to know and love her father."

After her mother died in 1893 Charlotte decided to move back east for the first time in eight years. She contacted Houghton Gilman, her first cousin, whom she had not seen in roughly fifteen years, who was a Wall Street attorney. They began spending a significant amount of time together almost immediately and became romantically involved. While she would go on lecture tours, Houghton and Charlotte would exchange letters and spend as much time as they could together before she left. In her diaries, she describes him as being "pleasurable" and it is clear that she was deeply interested in him. From their wedding in 1900 until 1922, they lived in New York City. Their marriage was nothing like Charlotte and Walter's. In 1922, Gilman moved from New York to Houghton's old homestead in Norwich, Connecticut. Following Houghton's sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, Gilman moved back to Pasadena, California, where her daughter resided.

In January 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer. An advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, Gilman committed suicide on August 17, 1935 by taking an overdose of chloroform. In both her autobiography and suicide note, she wrote that she "chose chloroform over cancer" and she died quickly and quietly.