Extreme poverty, however, forced the family to move to Providence, R.I., in 1873. Like her great-aunts, Perkins grew up to be a fiercely independent woman, committed to social reform and progress. During his absences, young Charlotte would often spend time in the company of her well-known great aunts: Catharine Beecher, the education reformer Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Isabella Beecher Hooker, a committed suffragist. When Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a child growing up in Hartford, her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, often left his family for extended periods of time he ultimately left the family for good and divorced his wife, Mary Fitch Perkins, in 1869. A prolific writer, Gilman left behind a body of work that included books, essays, short stories and magazine articles that challenged the prevailing attitudes of her day by asserting women’s equality and the need for their economic independence. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a member of Connecticut’s prominent Beecher family, was a committed reformer, intellectual and feminist whose contributions to 20th-century thought resulted in her designation in 1993 by the Siena Research Institute as the sixth most influential woman of her time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |