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Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

Charlotte Perkins Gilman ; also Charlotte Perkins Stetson , was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.

✵ 3. July 1860 – 17. August 1935
Charlotte Perkins Gilman photo

Works

The Yellow Wall Paper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
His Religion and Hers
His Religion and Hers
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Herland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wall Paper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
His Religion and Hers
His Religion and Hers
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Herland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: 40 quotes1 like

Famous Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: Women and Economics (1898), Ch. 8.

“I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes about the world

“Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings

“This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place… and the world waits while she powders her nose.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book His Religion and Hers

His Religion and Hers, (1923).

“A million million worlds that move in peace;
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.
They sleep beneath the sod
And trust in God.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Common Inference.
In this Our World : Poems (1898)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes about life

“The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty…. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: Women and Economics (1898), Ch. 13.

“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper

“For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia — and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.
Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again — work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite — ultimately recovering some measure of power.
Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" in The Forerunner (October 1913) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html

Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

“There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)
Source: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories

“But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper

“Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper

“When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“It does not do to trust people too much.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper

“Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper

“A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader

“Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: The Man-Made World

“Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book Herland

Source: Herland

“The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, (1935).

“Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: Women and Economics (1898), Ch. 10.

“Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)

“I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)

“Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
"You ignominious idiot,
Those wings are made to fly!"”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Conservative.
In this Our World : Poems (1898)

“The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: Women and Economics (1898), Ch. 1.

“I do not want to be a fly,
I want to be a worm!”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A Conservative.
In this Our World : Poems (1898)

“You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)

“This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)

“To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Source: Women and Economics (1898), Ch. 8.

“Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Ch. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=94EEAAAAYAAJ&amp;q=%22achieve+and+attain+young+girls+plan+for+whom+they+will+achieve+and+attain%22&amp;pg=PA87#v=onepage <br class="br">Women and Economics (1898)

“Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" in The Forerunner (October 1913).

“It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)

“The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman book The Yellow Wall Paper

The Yellow Wallpaper (1891)

“Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
"Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper" in The Forerunner (October 1913).

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