The Man-Made World

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American writer, lecturer, social critic, and feminist thinker whose work helped shape modern discussions of women's labour, domestic life, economic dependence, mental health, gender roles, and social reform. Born in 1860, Gilman became one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her nonfiction study Women and Economics argued that women's social and economic dependence was not natural but produced by social arrangements, domestic convention, and restricted access to meaningful public work. Her fiction often gave imaginative form to those arguments.Gilman is best known today for The Yellow Wallpaper, one of the most important American short stories about women's confinement, medical authority, and mental distress, but Herland is equally central to her legacy. First published in The Forerunner, the magazine she wrote and edited, the novel uses utopian fiction to test assumptions about gender, motherhood, education, work, violence, and civilisation. Her writing remains important to readers of feminist literature, American realism and reform fiction, early science fiction, utopian literature, women's studies, and recovered classics by women writers.