Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, a great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and came to prominence as a lecturer and writer on women's economic independence, most fully argued in Women and Economics (1898). Her best-known story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892), grew out of her own experience of the "rest cure" prescribed for postpartum depression; Herland (1915), a utopian novel imagining a society of women living without men, was serialized in The Forerunner, the magazine she wrote and published single-handedly from 1909 to 1916. Diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, she died by suicide in Pasadena, California, in 1935, having long argued in print for the right to choose one's own death rather than endure a terminal illness to its end.