In 1885, severe depression gripped twenty-five-year-old Charlotte Perkins Stetson. "Every morning the same helpless waking," she confided in her journal."Retreat impossible, escape impossible."She had married the previous year and had just given birth to a daughter. But the infant gave her no pleasure."! would hold her close—that lovely child!—and instead of love and happiness, feel only pain. The tears ran down my breast."Over the next few years, her depression worsened. She feared she was approaching "the edge of insanity."
Charlotte's life had not been easy. Shortly after she was born, her father abandoned the family. He visited every couple of years, and occasionally sent a check, but 24
Charlotte, her brother, and her mother lacked regular income and lived with relatives, moving frequently.
When Charlotte was fifteen she tracked down her father at the Boston Public Library, where he worked as a librarian, and kissed him."He put me away from him and said! must not do that sort of thing there,"she recalled. "What! do know is that my childhood had no father," she wrote.
Charlotte's relationship with her mother was not much better. Shattered by her husband's abandonment, she refused to cuddle Charlotte as an infant lest the child become dependent on affection. They never were close.
At the time of the incident at the library, Charlotte and her mother lived in a cooperative run by a spiritualist, a woman who claimed to communicate with spirits. One day Charlotte saw her taking grapes that were meant for the whole group. The woman accused Charlotte of thinking evil thoughts about her. Charlotte's mother insisted that Charlotte apologize for her thoughts; Charlotte refused."And what are you going to do about it?" she taunted. Her mother hit her. At that moment,"! was born," Charlotte recalled."Neither she, nor any one, could make me do anything."
Charlotte devised a stern regimen to ensure her future independence. Every day she ran a mile and educated herself by drawing, reading, and writing. Never would she depend on anyone— especially a man."! am not domestic and! don't want to be,"she told a female confidante.
Her resolve weakened when she was courted by an aspiring young writer, though not an especially talented one. They married and the baby soon followed. Charlotte's bouts of depression became more frequent and incapacitating. Finally she agreed to consult with neurologist S. Weir Mitchell, the nation's foremost expert on neurasthenia, a disease that especially afflicted well-to-do young women. Its chief symptoms were depression, listlessness, and invalidism.
Mitchell believed that women's nervous systems were attuned to childbearing and childrearing. Women who pursued education and careers would exhaust their nervous energy and become neurasthenic. Charlotte's condition, Mitchell assured her, resulted from her intellectual labors. His prescription was simple:
Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours'intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live.
John Singer Sargent painted this imposing portrait of S. Weir Mitchell (1903). Mitchell, who devised "the rest cure” for neurasthenics, wrote several successful novels.
For a time, Charlotte accepted his regimen."I went home, followed those directions rigidly for months, and came perilously close to losing my mind,” she noted. Then she decided to "cast off Dr. Mitchell bodily”and "do exactly as I pleased.” She separated from her husband, took her child to Pasadena, California, and wrote essays, editorials, and fiction.
In 1890 she finished "The Yellow Wallpaper,”a story about a young wife who, suffering from depression, was confined by her doctor-husband to bed in an upstairs room, with servants tending to her every need. As she endlessly stared at her surroundings, the designs on the wallpaper changed shape; a figure appeared and wandered in and out of her consciousness. The wallpaper then grew bars that locked her, and the shadowy figure, into the room. Unable to escape through the bars, the woman chewed at the bed, fleeing ultimately into madness. The story was well-received as a literary horror story reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe.
Having at last purged Mitchell from her psyche, Charlotte wrote incessantly and supported herself by giving lectures. She developed close and even intimate relationships with several women. When she sent her daughter to live with her father, newspapers denounced her for neglecting woman's proper function. Then she fell in love with Houghton Gilman, who accepted her refusal to embrace
Domesticity."I must not focus on 'home duties'and entangle myself with them,”she told him. They married in 1900.
Charlotte's first book, Women and Economics (1898), was a work of extraordinary creativity. A thoroughgoing Social Darwinist, Charlotte explained that while women once were indispensable providers, they had become economically dependent on men who performed important and lucrative work; women's dependence obliged them to exaggerate their sexuality and domesticity so as to attract the men who would provide for them. Marriage was founded on women's economic subjugation. Marx was wrong: Gender, not class, was the fundamental social distinction. The most important revolution would promote women's independence by allowing them to work outside the home.
In this and subsequent books and articles, Charlotte Perkins Gilman insisted that the domestic ideal had deprived society of women's creativity and ideas. Her own life was a case in point. With only four years of education, none after the age of fifteen, she achieved economic independence through her own heroic effort. Lacking alternative child-care arrangements, she sent her young child to live with her father so that she could pursue her life and work as an intellectual. The decision would psychologically scar both her and her daughter, but her work anticipated many of the themes of modern feminism.
Holmes went on to a long and brilliant judicial career, during which he repeatedly stressed the right of the people, through their elected representatives, to deal with contemporary problems in any reasonable way, unfettered by outmoded conceptions of the proper limits of government authority. Like the societies they regulated, laws should evolve as times and conditions changed, he said.
This way of reasoning caused no sudden reversal of judicial practice. Holmes’s most notable opinions as a judge tended to be dissents. But his philosophy reflected the advanced thinking of the late nineteenth century, and his influence grew with every decade of the twentieth.
The new approach to knowledge did not always advance the cause of liberal reform. Historians in the graduate schools became intensely interested in studying the origins and evolution of political institutions. They concluded, after much “scientific” study of old charters and law codes, that the roots of democracy were to be found in the customs of the ancient tribes of northern Europe. This theory of the “Teutonic origins” of democracy, which has since been thoroughly discredited, fitted well with the prejudices of people of British stock, and it provided ammunition for those who favored restricting immigration and for those who argued that blacks were inferior beings.
Out of this work, however, came an essentially democratic concept, the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, still another scholar trained at Johns Hopkins. Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) argued that the frontier experience, through which every section of the country had passed, had affected the thinking of the people and the shape of American institutions. The isolation of the frontier and the need during each successive westward advance to create civilization anew, Turner wrote, account for the individualism of Americans and the democratic character of their society. Nearly everything unique in our culture could be traced to the existence of the frontier, he claimed.
Turner, and still more his many disciples, made too much of his basic insights. Life on the frontier was not as democratic as Turner believed, and it certainly does not “explain” American development as completely as he said it did. Nevertheless, his work showed how important it was to investigate the evolution of institutions, and it encouraged historians to study social and economic, as well as purely political, subjects. If the claims of the new historians to objectivity and definitiveness were absurdly overstated, their emphasis on thoroughness, exactitude, and impartiality did much to raise standards in the profession. Perhaps the finest product of the new scientific school, a happy combination of meticulous scholarship and literary artistry, was Henry Adams’s nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison.
•••-[Read the Document Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893) at Www. myhistorylab. com
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