Unique to this title are:

• A historical introduction
• A study of the themes present in The Yellow Wallpaper, Herland, and The Crux

You may of course skip all of it and go straight to the main title if you do not want any spoilers and come back later to the beginning.

Charlotte Perkins was born in 1860 in Connecticut. When she was a child, her father abandoned his wife and children, and she spent the rest of her childhood in poverty. Since her mother was not able to support the family, her aunts played a big part in her upbringing.

Her schooling was erratic, and she attended seven different schools in just four years, finishing when she was 15. To prevent her children from getting hurt as she had been, her mother forbade them to make strong friendships or read fiction. Despite that, Gilman spent a lot of time in the local library studying ancient civilizations on her own.

In her best-known work, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman writes about different kinds of oppression that women were exposed to at the time. Women were patronized and treated as mentally weak and fragile. They were believed to be prone to many “nervous conditions” and particularly hysteria.

Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which exists an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination.

The Crux tells the story of a group of New England women who move west to start a boardinghouse for men in Colorado. It is an important early feminist work that brings forward complicated issues of gender, citizenship, eugenics, and frontier nationalism.

Enjoy this timeless classic collection!