Thursday February 11,2016
Societal and Historical Connections

    Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written during a time of great change. In the early to mid nineteenth century, "domestic ideology" positioned American middle class women as the spiritual and moral leaders of their home. Such "separate spheres" ideals suggested that a women's place was in the private domain of the home, where she should carry out her prescribed roles of wife and mother. Men, on the other hand, would rule the public domain through work, politics, and economics. By the middle of the century, this way of thinking began to change as the seeds of early women's rights were planted. By the end of the 1800's, feminists were gaining momentum in favor of change. The concept of "The New Women," for example, began to circulate in the 1890's - 1910's as women pushed for broader roles outside their home roles outside their home roles that could draw on women's intelligence and non domestic skills and talents. 

      Gilman advocated revised roles for women, whom, Gilman believed, should be on much more equal economic, social, and political footing with men. In her famous work of nonfiction "Women and Economics" (1898) Gilman argued "women should strive and be able to work outside the home ." Gilman also believed "women should be financially independent from men and women even should share domestic work." 

       First appearing in the New England Magazine in January 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper," according to many literary critics, is a narrative study of Gilman's own depression and nervousness. Gilman, like the narrator of her story, sought medical help from the famous neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell prescribed his famous "Rest Cure," which restricted women from anything that labored and taxed their minds and bodies. More than just a psychological study of postpartum depression, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" offers a compelling study of Gilman's own feminism and roles for women in the 1890's and 1910's.