Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a lecturer, economist, and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of her generation — and the author of one of the most unsettling short stories in American literature. After the birth of her daughter she suffered a severe depression, for which the era's leading nerve specialist prescribed the "rest cure": no work, no writing, as little intellectual life as possible.
The treatment nearly destroyed her, and she turned the experience into "The Yellow Wallpaper" — part ghost story, part case study, entirely indictment. Gilman went on to write Women and Economics and to edit her own magazine, The Forerunner, writing nearly all of it herself. She always insisted the story wasn't literature but advocacy; it has survived as both.
