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The Malady & The Cure.
THE MALADY: BEING A
RESTLESS WRITER,BRILLIANT THINKER&ARDENT FEMINIST
THE REMEDY: THE REST CURE
THE PROCEDURE: ISOLATION. CEASE ALL THOUGHT. STOP ALL WRITING.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a brilliant thinker, a ‘utopian’, a feminist, a writer and a philosopher who was punished for being ‘ahead of her time’.
She was raised in an environment laden with dysfunction and eventually married, had a child, and suffered from postpartum depression. This chain of events contributed to her experiencing an emotional and psychological suffocation.
The remedy prescribed? The Rest Cure.
Experiencing this ‘remedy’ drove her to write THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER, a piece of literature that exposed the horrors of ‘the rest cure’ and helped to define the subgenre of feminist psychological horror.
“Gilman believed that cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing should be done by professionals, not family members. She advocated for dress reform for women, partly as a way to promote physical fitness. She argued that women needed economic independence, not just suffrage, to achieve true equality with men.”
from Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Schlesinger Library Collection, Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”
A book that belongs on every feminist shelf.
