On this day in ...... 1860 (150 years ago today), a daughter was born to a couple in Hartford, Connecticut. The husband left when the girl was an infant, and she and her mother and brother, impoverished, often found themselves living with paternal aunts, among them the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe. At 18 the girl, who'd received a combination of formal and self-education, enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. A few years later she married, gave birth to her only child, and suffered post-partum, an event that led to her writing of The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), a short story
constructed as journal entries by a "hysterical" woman locked away by her husband. The author later separated from and eventually divorced her husband. She remarried, to a 1st cousin, in 1900, and took the name of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (above left). (photo credit) An author, human rights advocate, social reformer, suffragist, and feminist, she died by suicide in 1935, a few years after learning she had terminal breast cancer.(Prior July 3 posts are here, here, and here.)
