Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.” (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

Over a century before scientists connected the “feel good” mental state that comes after heavy exercise to an endorphin rush, Providence’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) understood this connection. Gilman, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, was an important women’s rights advocate and a prolific writer. Her childhood passions were physical exercise (hiking, sleighing, rowing, running) and reading philosophy. In the fall of 1881, she persuaded a local teacher to open the Providence Ladies Sanitary Gymnasium in the Butler Exchange Building, the first women’s gym in the state. For three years, she considered herself the Gymnasium’s chief performer. “I could easily have been an acrobat,” she wrote later, “having good nervous coordination, strength, courage and excellent balancing power.”

In 1884, Gilman married fellow artist Charles Walter Stetson and gave birth to her only child a year later. Following the birth, she suffered from severe depression. She consulted the noted neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, who recommended his “rest cure” of complete bed rest in a dark room and limited intellectual activity. Gilman credits this experience with driving her “near the borderline of utter mental ruin.” Desperate, she removed herself from Mitchell’s care and resumed her physical fitness regimen to cure herself. Her illness was the inspiration for her most famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a depressed woman whose husband imprisons her in a darkened room and who sees women crawling out from behind swirly yellow wallpaper. The full text of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is at http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/bl_gilman_yw.htm.

Through the remainder of her life, Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocated for women to build strong bodies as a prerequisite to assuming an equal, non-passive role in society.

TOBY ROSSNER (tobyross@cox.net) was the director of media services at the Bureau of Jewish Education from 1978 to 2002.