"The yellow wallpaper" Charlotte Perkins.

This is a really important book of the end of 19th century about feminism and an inspiration for me about leading our own life.

For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia-and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded that there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to 'live as domestic a life as possible,' to 'have but two hours' intelligent life a day,' and 'never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived.' This was in 1887…
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wall-paper," 1913


It is sad how history has separated women to artistic paths and I think this book reveal women struggle for a change on it.

This is the first lesson of an article about the book:
http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/charlotte-perkins-gilmans-yellow-wall-papermdashthe-new-woman

 Wash day.

"The concept of "The New Woman," for example, began to circulate in the 1890s–1910s as women pushed for broader roles outside their home-roles that could draw on women's intelligence and non-domestic skills and talents.

Gilman advocated revised roles for women, whom, Gilman believed, should be on much more equal economic, social, and political footing with men. In her famous work of nonfiction Women and Economics(1898), Gilman argued that women should strive-and be able-to work outside the home. Gilman also believed that women should be financially independent from men, and she promoted the then-radical idea that men and women even should share domestic work.

First appearing in the New England Magazine in January 1892, "The Yellow Wall-paper," according to many literary critics, is a narrative study of Gilman's own depression and "nervousness." Gilman, like the narrator of her story, sought medical help from the famous neurologist S. Weir Mitchell. Mitchell prescribed his famous "rest cure," which restricted women from anything that labored and taxed their minds (e.g., thinking, reading, writing) and bodies. More than just a psychological study of postpartum depression, Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" offers a compelling study of Gilman's own feminism and of roles for women in the 1890s and 1910s."

Second lesson:

http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/charlotte-perkins-gilmans-yellow-wall-paper-writing-women