Feminist Perspectives on Mental Health and Marriage in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

Abstract

An important writer who highlighted the topic of women and rooms is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a journalist and a feminist intellectual in her time. Mainly, she had an interest in political and social justice, but the inferior status that women had inside the marital relationship was the central objective of her writing. In various works, Gilman claimed that women’s requirement to remain in the context of marriage deprived them of the opportunity to explore their full creative and intellectual potential, while also depriving society of women with skills suitable for public and professional life. She argued that the traditional family hierarchy was something that did not make any family member content - neither the husband, who was transformed into a master, nor the wife, who had become an unpaid domestic worker, and certainly not the children, who were subordinated to both of their parents. She also had a strong opinion on women’s economic freedom, firmly believing that it could be beneficial to society itself. By promoting those ideas, Gilman was a predecessor of Virginia Woolf’s concepts and thoughts in A Room of One’s Own.