Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman was born on July 3, 1860 and died on August 17, 1935. Also known as Charlotte Perkins Stetson, her first married name, was an American humanist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Mary Perkins (formerly Mary Fitch Westcott) and Frederic Beecher Perkins. She had only one brother, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months older, because a physician advised Mary Perkins that she might die if she bore other children. During Charlotte's infancy, her father moved out and abandoned his wife and children, and the remainder of her childhood was spent in poverty.
Since their mother was unable to support the family on her own, the Perkinses were often in the presence of her father's aunts, namely Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; and Catharine Beecher, educationalist.
Her schooling was erratic: she attended seven different schools, for a cumulative total of just four years, ending when she was fifteen. Her mother was not affectionate with her children. To keep them from getting hurt as she had been, she forbade her children from making strong friendships or reading fiction. In her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gilman wrote that her mother showed affection only when she thought her young daughter was asleep. Although she lived a childhood of isolated, impoverished loneliness, she unknowingly prepared herself for the life that lay ahead by frequently visiting the public library and studying ancient civilizations on her own. Additionally, her father's love for literature influenced her, and years later he contacted her with a list of books he felt would be worthwhile for her to read.
Much of Gilman's youth was spent in Providence, Rhode Island. What friends she had were mainly male, and she was unashamed, for her time, to call herself a "tomboy".
Her natural intelligence and breadth of knowledge always impressed her teachers, who were nonetheless disappointed in her because she was a poor student. Her favorite subject was "natural philosophy", especially what later would become known as physics. In 1878, the eighteen-year-old enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design with the monetary help of her absent father, and subsequently supported herself as an artist of trade cards. She was a tutor, and encouraged others to expand their artistic creativity. She was also a painter.
During her time at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gilman met Martha Luther in about 1879 and was believed to be in a romantic relationship with Luther. Letters between the two women chronicles their lives from 1883 to 1889 and contains over 50 letters, including correspondence, illustrations and manuscripts. They pursued their relationship until Luther called it off in order to marry a man in 1881. Gilman was devastated and detested romance and love until she met her first husband.
In 1884, she married the artist Charles Walter Stetson, after initially declining his proposal because a gut feeling told her it was not the right thing for her. Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born the following year on March 23, 1885. Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered a very serious bout of post-partum depression. This was an age in which women were seen as "hysterical" and "nervous" beings; thus, when a woman claimed to be seriously ill after giving birth, her claims were sometimes dismissed.
Gilman moved to Southern California with her daughter Katherine and lived with friend Grace Ellery Channing. In 1888, Charlotte separated from her husband – a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth century. They officially divorced in 1894. After their divorce, Stetson married Channing. During the year she left her husband, Charlotte met Adeline Knapp, called "Delle". Cynthia J. Davis describes how the two women had a serious relationship. She writes that Gilman "believed that in Delle she had found a way to combine loving and living, and that with a woman as life mate she might more easily uphold that combination than she would in a conventional heterosexual marriage." The relationship ultimately came to an end. Following the separation from her husband, Charlotte moved with her daughter to Pasadena, California, where she became active in several feminist and reformist organizations such as the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association, the Woman's Alliance, the Economic Club, the Ebell Society (named after Adrian John Ebell), the Parents Association, and the State Council of Women, in addition to writing and editing the Bulletin, a journal put out by one of the earlier-mentioned organizations.
In 1894, Gilman sent her daughter east to live with her former husband and his second wife, her friend Grace Ellery Channing. Gilman reported in her memoir that she was happy for the couple, since Katharine's "second mother was fully as good as the first, [and perhaps] better in some ways." Gilman also held progressive views about paternal rights and acknowledged that her ex-husband "had a right to some of [Katharine's] society" and that Katharine "had a right to know and love her father."
After her mother died in 1893, Gilman decided to move back east for the first time in eight years. She contacted Houghton Gilman, her first cousin, whom she had not seen in roughly fifteen years, who was a Wall Street attorney. They began spending a significant amount of time together almost immediately and became romantically involved. While she would go on lecture tours, Houghton and Charlotte would exchange letters and spend as much time as they could together before she left. In her diaries, she describes him as being "pleasurable" and it is clear that she was deeply interested in him. From their wedding in 1900 until 1922, they lived in New York City. Their marriage was nothing like her first one. In 1922, Gilman moved from New York to Houghton's old homestead in Norwich, Connecticut. Following Houghton's sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, Gilman moved back to Pasadena, California, where her daughter lived.
In January 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer. An advocate of euthanasia for the terminally ill, Gilman died by suicide on August 17, 1935, by taking an overdose of chloroform. In both her autobiography and suicide note, she wrote that she "chose chloroform over cancer" and she died quickly and quietly.
At one point, Gilman supported herself by selling soap door to door. After moving to Pasadena, Gilman became active in organizing social reform movements. As a delegate, she represented California in 1896 at both the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C., and the International Socialist and Labor Congress in London. In 1890, she was introduced to Nationalist Clubs movement which worked to "end capitalism's greed and distinctions between classes while promoting a peaceful, ethical, and truly progressive human race." Published in the Nationalist magazine, her poem "Similar Cases" was a satirical review of people who resisted social change, and she received positive feedback from critics for it. Throughout that same year, 1890, she became inspired enough to write fifteen essays, poems, a novella, and the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Her career was launched when she began lecturing on Nationalism and gained the public's eye with her first volume of poetry, In This Our World, published in 1893. As a successful lecturer who relied on giving speeches as a source of income, her fame grew along with her social circle of similar-minded activists and writers of the feminist movement.
Perkins-Gilman married Charles Stetson in 1884, and less than a year later gave birth to their daughter Katharine. Already susceptible to depression, her symptoms were exacerbated by marriage and motherhood. A good proportion of her diary entries from the time she gave birth to her daughter until several years later describe the oncoming depression that she was to face.
On April 18, 1887, Gilman wrote in her diary that she was very sick with "some brain disease" which brought suffering that cannot be felt by anybody else, to the point that her "mind has given way". To begin, the patient could not even leave her bed, read, write, sew, talk, or feed herself.
After nine weeks, Gilman was sent home with Mitchell's instructions, "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." She tried for a few months to follow Mitchell's advice, but her depression deepened, and Gilman came perilously close to a full emotional collapse. Her remaining sanity was on the line and she began to display suicidal behavior that involved talk of pistols and chloroform, as recorded in her husband's diaries. By early summer the couple had decided that a divorce was necessary for her to regain sanity without affecting the lives of her husband and daughter.
During the summer of 1888, Charlotte and Katharine spent time in Bristol, Rhode Island, away from Walter, and it was there where her depression began to lift. She writes of herself noticing positive changes in her attitude. She returned to Providence in September. She sold property that had been left to her in Connecticut, and went with a friend, Grace Channing, to Pasadena where the recovery of her depression can be seen through the transformation of her intellectual life.
Gilman called herself a humanist and believed the domestic environment oppressed women through the patriarchal beliefs upheld by society. Gilman embraced the theory of reform Darwinism and argued that Darwin's theories of evolution presented only the male as the given in the process of human evolution, thus overlooking the origins of the female brain in society that rationally chose the best suited mate that they could find.
Gilman argued that male aggressiveness and maternal roles for women were artificial and no longer necessary for survival in post-prehistoric times. She wrote, "There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver."
Her main argument was that sex and domestic economics went hand in hand; for a woman to survive, she was reliant on her sexual assets to please her husband so that he would financially support his family. From childhood, young girls are forced into a social constraint that prepares them for motherhood by the toys that are marketed to them and the clothes designed for them. She argued that there should be no difference in the clothes that little girls and boys wear, the toys they play with, or the activities they do, and described tomboys as perfect humans who ran around and used their bodies freely and healthily.
Gilman argued that women's contributions to civilization, throughout history, have been halted because of an androcentric culture. She believed that womankind was the underdeveloped half of humanity, and improvement was necessary to prevent the deterioration of the human race. Gilman believed economic independence is the only thing that could really bring freedom for women and make them equal to men. In 1898 she published Women and Economics, a theoretical treatise which argued, among other things, that women are subjugated by men, that motherhood should not preclude a woman from working outside the home, and that housekeeping, cooking, and child care, would be professionalized "The ideal woman," Gilman wrote, "was not only assigned a social role that locked her into her home, but she was also expected to like it, to be cheerful and gay, smiling and good-humored." When the sexual-economic relationship ceases to exist, life on the domestic front would certainly improve, as frustration in relationships often stems from the lack of social contact that the domestic wife has with the outside world.
Gilman became a spokesperson on topics such as women's perspectives on work, dress reform, and family. Housework, she argued, should be equally shared by men and women, and that at an early age women should be encouraged to be independent. In many of her major works, including "The Home" (1903), Human Work (1904), and The Man-Made World (1911), Gilman also advocated women working outside of the home.
Gilman argued that the home should be socially redefined. The home should shift from being an "economic entity" where a married couple live together because of the economic benefit or necessity, to a place where groups of men and groups of women can share in a "peaceful and permanent expression of personal life."
Gilman believed having a comfortable and healthy lifestyle should not be restricted to married couples; all humans need a home that provides these amenities. She suggested that a communal type of housing open to both males and females, consisting of rooms, rooms of suites and houses, should be constructed. This would allow individuals to live singly and still have companionship and the comforts of a home. Both males and females would be totally economically independent in these living arrangements allowing for marriage to occur without either the male or the female's economic status having to change.
The structural arrangement of the home is also redefined by Gilman. She removes the kitchen from the home, leaving rooms to be arranged and extended in any form and freeing women from the provision of meals in the home. The home would become a true personal expression of the individual living in it.
Ultimately the restructuring of the home and manner of living will allow individuals, especially women, to become an "integral part of the social structure, in close, direct, permanent connection with the needs and uses of society." That would be a dramatic change for women, who generally considered themselves restricted by family life built upon their economic dependence on men.
Gilman's feministic approach can be found in many of her works. In "What Diantha Did", one character in this story, Diantha, breaks through the traditional expectation of women, showing Gilman's desires for what a woman would be able to do in real-life society. Throughout the story, Gilman portrays Diantha as a character who strikes through the image of businesses in the U.S., who challenges gender norms and roles, and who believed that women could provide the solution to the corruption in big business in society. Gilman chooses to have Diantha choose a career that is stereotypically not one a woman would have because in doing so, she is showing that the salaries and wages of traditional women's jobs are unfair. Diantha's choice to run a business allows her to come out of the shadows and join society. Gilman's works, especially her work with "What Diantha Did", are a call for change, a battle cry that would cause panic in men and power in women. Gilman used her work as a platform for a call to change, as a way to reach women and have them begin the movement toward freedom.
With regard to African Americans, Gilman wrote in the American Journal of Sociology: "We have to consider the unavoidable presence of a large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior, whose present status is to us a social injury."
Gilman further suggested that: "The problem, is this: Given: in the same country, Race A, progressed in social evolution, say, to Status 10; and Race B, progressed in social evolution, say, to Status 4 ... Given: that Race B, in its present condition, does not develop fast enough to suit Race A. Question: How can Race A best and most quickly promote the development of Race B?" Gilman's solution was that all blacks beneath "a certain grade of citizenship"—those who were not "decent, self-supporting, [and] progressive"—"should be taken hold of by the state."
This proposed system, which Gilman called "enlistment" rather than "enslavement" would require the enforced labor of black Americans, "men, women and children". Gilman believed that those enlisted should receive a wage, but only after the cost of the labor program was met.
Gilman also believed old stock Americans of British colonial descent were giving up their country to immigrants who, she said, were diluting the nation's reproductive purity. When asked about her stance on the matter during a trip to London she famously quipped "I am an Anglo-Saxon before everything." However, in an effort to gain votes for all women, she spoke out against the literacy requirements for the right to vote at the national American Women's Suffrage Association convention which took place in 1903 in New Orleans
Literary critic Susan S. Lanser has suggested that "The Yellow Wallpaper" should be interpreted by focusing on Gilman's beliefs about race. Other literary critics have built on Lanser's work to understand Gilman's ideas in relation to her other work and to turn-of-the-century culture more broadly.
Gilman's feminist works often included stances and arguments for reforming the use of domesticated animals. In Herland, Gilman's utopian society excludes all domesticated animals, including livestock. Additionally, in Moving the Mountain Gilman addresses the ills of animal domestication related to inbreeding. In "When I Was a Witch", the narrator witnesses and intervenes in instances of animal use as she travels through New York, liberating work horses, cats, and lapdogs by rendering them "comfortably dead". One literary scholar connected the regression of the female narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" to the parallel status of domesticated felines. She wrote in a letter to the Saturday Evening Post that the automobile would eliminate the cruelty to horses used to pull carriages and cars.
There are 90 reports of the lectures that Gilman gave in The United States and Europe.
Poetry collections: In This Our World,1st ed. Oakland: McCombs & Vaughn, 1893. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. 2nd ed.; San Francisco: Press of James H. Barry, 1895; Suffrage Songs and Verses. New York: Charlton Co., 1911. Microfilm. New Haven: Research Publications, 1977, History of Women #6558; The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996.
Short stories: Gilman published 186 short stories in magazines, newspapers, and many were published in her self-published monthly, The Forerunner. Many literary critics have ignored these short stories. The Yellow Wall-Paper is part of many publications.
Drama/dialogues: The majority of Gilman's dramas are inaccessible as they are only available from the originals. Some were printed/reprinted in Forerunner, however: "Dame Nature Interviewed on the Woman Question as It Looks to Her" Kate Field's Washington (1890); "The Twilight." Impress (1894); "Story Studies", Impress, (1894); "The Story Guessers", Impress, (1894); "Three Women." Forerunner (1911); "Something to Vote For", Forerunner 2 (1911); "The Ceaseless Struggle of Sex: A Dramatic View." Kate Field's Washington (1890).
Non-fiction: Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898.
His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers. NY and London: Century Co., 1923; London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924; Westport: Hyperion Press, 1976
Gems of Art for the Home and Fireside. Providence: J. A. and R. A. Reid, 1888
Concerning Children. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1900
The Home: Its Work and Influence. New York: McClure, Phillips, & Co., 1903
Human Work. New York: McClure, Phillips, & Co., 1904
The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Charton Co., 1911
Our Brains and What Ails Them. Serialized in Forerunner. 1912
Social Ethics. Serialized in Forerunner. 1914
Our Changing Morality. Ed. Freda Kirchway. NY: Boni, 1930
She is the author of several short non-fiction, publishing them in many magazines and newspapers.
Self-publications: The Forerunner. Seven volumes, 1909; Microfiche. NY: Greenwood, 1968.
Diaries, journals, biographies, and letters: Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist. Mary A. Hill. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980; A Journey from Within: The Love Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1897–1900. Ed. Mary A. Hill. Lewisburg: Bucknill UP, 1995; The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 Vols. Ed. Denise D. Knight. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
Autobiography: The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1935; NY: Arno Press, 1972; and Harper & Row, 1975.
Other works:
Gilman's first book was Art Gems for the Home and Fireside (1888); however, it was her first volume of poetry, In This Our World (1893), a collection of satirical poems, that first brought her recognition. During the next two decades she gained much of her fame with lectures on women's issues, ethics, labor, human rights, and social reform. Her lecture tours took her across the United States. She often referred to these themes in her fiction.
In 1894–95 Gilman served as editor of the magazine The Impress, a literary weekly that was published by the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association (formerly the Bulletin). For the twenty weeks the magazine was printed, she was consumed in the satisfying accomplishment of contributing its poems, editorials, and other articles. The short-lived paper's printing came to an end as a result of a social bias against her lifestyle which included being an unconventional mother and a woman who had divorced a man. After a four-month-long lecture tour that ended in April 1897, Gilman began to think more deeply about sexual relationships and economics in American life, eventually completing the first draft of Women and Economics (1898). This book discussed the role of women in the home, arguing for changes in the practices of child-raising and housekeeping to alleviate pressures from women and potentially allow them to expand their work to the public sphere. The book was published in the following year and propelled Gilman into the international spotlight. In 1903, she addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin. The next year, she toured in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Hungary.
In 1903 she wrote one of her most critically acclaimed books, The Home: Its Work and Influence, which expanded upon Women and Economics, proposing that women are oppressed in their home and that the environment in which they live needs to be modified in order to be healthy for their mental states. In between traveling and writing, her career as a literary figure was secured. From 1909 to 1916 Gilman single-handedly wrote and edited her own magazine, The Forerunner, in which much of her fiction appeared. By presenting material in her magazine that would "stimulate thought", "arouse hope, courage and impatience", and "express ideas which need a special medium", she aimed to go against the mainstream media which was overly sensational. Over seven years and two months the magazine produced eighty-six issues, each twenty eight pages long. The magazine had nearly 1,500 subscribers and featured such serialized works as "What Diantha Did" (1910), The Crux (1911), Moving the Mountain (1911), and Herland. The Forerunner has been cited as being "perhaps the greatest literary accomplishment of her long career". After its seven years, she wrote hundreds of articles that were submitted to the Louisville Herald, The Baltimore Sun, and the Buffalo Evening News. Her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which she began to write in 1925, appeared posthumously in 1935.
Novels and novellas: What Diantha Did. Forerunner. 1909; The Crux. Forerunner. 1911; Moving the Mountain. Forerunner. 1911; Mag-Marjorie. Forerunner. 1912; Won Over Forerunner. 1913; Benigna Machiavelli Forerunner. 1914; Herland. Forerunner. 1915; With Her in Ourland. Forerunner. 1916; Unpunished. Ed. Catherine J. Golden and Denise D. Knight. New York: Feminist Press, 1997.
Popular works
"Herland". Gilman created a world in many of her stories with a feminist point of view. Herland is a good example of Gilman focusing her work on how women are not just stay-at-home mothers they are expected to be; they are also people who have dreams, who are able to travel and work just as men do, and whose goals include a society where women are just as important as men. The world-building that is executed by Gilman, as well as the characters in these two stories and others, embody the change that was needed in the early 1900s in a way that is now commonly seen as feminism. Gilman uses world-building in Herland to demonstrate the equality that she longed to see. The women of Herland are the providers. This makes them appear to be the dominant sex, taking over the gender roles that are typically given to men. Elizabeth Keyser notes, "In Herland the supposedly superior sex becomes the inferior or disadvantaged ..." In this society, Gilman makes it to where women are focused on having leadership within the community, fulfilling roles that are stereotypically seen as being male roles, and running an entire community without the same attitudes that men have concerning their work and the community. However, the attitude men carried concerning women were degrading, especially by progressive women, like Gilman. Using Herland, Gilman challenged this stereotype, and made the society of Herland a type of paradise. Gilman uses this story to confirm the stereotypically devalued qualities of women are valuable, show strength, and shatters traditional utopian structure for future works. Essentially, Gilman creates Herland's society to have women hold all the power, showing more equality in this world, alluding to changes she wanted to see in her lifetime.
"The Yellow Wallpaper". One of Gilman's most popular works, originally published in 1892, before her marriage to George Houghton Gilman. In 1890, Gilman wrote her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which is now the all-time best selling book of the Feminist Press. She wrote it on June 6 and 7, 1890, in her home of Pasadena, and it was printed a year and a half later in the January 1892 issue of The New England Magazine. Since its original printing, it has been anthologized in numerous collections of women's literature, American literature, and textbooks, though not always in its original form. For instance, many textbooks omit the phrase "in marriage" from a very important line in the beginning of story: "John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage." The reason for this omission is a mystery, as Gilman's views on marriage are made clear throughout the story. The story is about a woman who suffers from mental illness after three months of being closeted in a room by her husband for the sake of her health. She becomes obsessed with the room's revolting yellow wallpaper. Gilman wrote this story to change people's minds about the role of women in society, illustrating how women's lack of autonomy is detrimental to their mental, emotional, and even physical wellbeing. This story was inspired by her treatment from her first husband. The narrator in the story must do as her husband (who is also her doctor) demands, although the treatment he prescribes contrasts directly with what she truly needs—mental stimulation and the freedom to escape the monotony of the room to which she is confined. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was essentially a response to the doctor (Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell) who had tried to cure her of her depression through a "rest cure". She sent him a copy of the story. "The Yellow Wallpaper" was initially met with a mixed reception. One anonymous letter submitted to the Boston Transcript read, "The story could hardly, it would seem, give pleasure to any reader, and to many whose lives have been touched through the dearest ties by this dread disease, it must bring the keenest pain. To others, whose lives have become a struggle against heredity of mental derangement, such literature contains deadly peril. Should such stories be allowed to pass without severest censure?" Positive reviewers describe it as impressive because it is the most suggestive and graphic account of why women who live monotonous lives are susceptible to mental illness. Although Gilman had gained international fame with the publication of Women and Economics in 1898, by the end of World War I, she seemed out of tune with her times. In her autobiography she admitted that "unfortunately my views on the sex question do not appeal to the Freudian complex of today, nor are people satisfied with a presentation of religion as a help in our tremendous work of improving this world."
Hansen, L. Taylor
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hansen_l_taylor
Harris, Clare Winger
Clare Winger Harris (January 18, 1891 – October 26, 1968) was an early science fiction writer whose short stories were published during the 1920s. She is credited as the first woman to publish stories under her own name in science fiction magazines. Her stories often dealt with characters on the "borders of humanity" such as cyborgs.
Harris began publishing magazine stories in 1926, and soon became well liked by readers. She sold a total of eleven stories, which were collected in 1947 as Away From the Here and Now. Her gender was a surprise to Hugo Gernsback, the editor who first bought her work, as she was the first American woman to publish science fiction stories under her own name. Her stories, which often feature strong female characters, have been occasionally reprinted and have received some positive critical response, including a recognition of her pioneering role as a woman writer in a male-dominated field.
Clare Winger was born on January 18, 1891, in Freeport, Illinois and later attended Smith College in Massachusetts. Her father, Frank Stover Winger, was an electrical engineer who also had an interest in science-fiction writing; in 1917, he published a novel called The Wizard of the Island; or, The Vindication of Prof. Waldinger. Her mother, May Stover, was the daughter of D.C. Stover, founder of the Stover Manufacturing and Engine Company. (Frank was also related to the Stover family on his mother's side, hence his middle name.) Unusually for the era, after their children were born and raised, Frank and May divorced.
In 1912, Clare married Frank Clyde Harris. Her husband was an architect and engineer who served in World War I and was chief engineer with the Loudon Machinery Company in Iowa and one of the organizers of the American Monorail Company of Cleveland, Ohio.
Harris gave birth to three sons (Clyde Winger, born 1915; Donald Stover, born 1916; and Lynn Thackrey, born 1918). She and her family lived in Iowa in 1925 according to a state census; sometime before 1930, the family moved to Lakewood, Ohio. Her career as a writer spanned the years 1923 to 1933, during her tenures in both these locations.
Harris ceased writing stories after 1933. She was still living in Lakewood in 1935, and according to an interview with her grandson, she and Frank "stayed together until their kids were fully grown." Clare and Frank's youngest son turned 18 in 1936, and by 1940, U.S. census records show Clare W. Harris as divorced and living in Pasadena, California, where she lived the rest of her life. She privately published a collection of her stories in 1947, but otherwise little is known of the final decades of her life. She died on October 26, 1968, in Pasadena.
Harris debuted as a writer in 1923 with a novel, a piece of historical fiction entitled Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece. The rest of her work would be very different, as it consisted entirely of short stories in the realm of science fiction.
Harris published her first short story, "The Runaway World," in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales. In December of that year, she submitted a story for a contest being run by Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback. Harris's story, "The Fate of the Poseidonia" (a space opera about Martians who steal earth's water), placed third. She soon became one of Gernsback's most popular writers.
Harris eventually published 11 short stories in pulp magazines, most of them in Amazing Stories (although she also published in other places such as Science Wonder Quarterly). She wrote her most acclaimed works during the 1920s; in 1930, she stopped writing to raise and educate her children. Her absence from the pulps was noted—a fan wrote in to Amazing Stories in late 1930 to ask, “What happened to Clare Winger Harris? I’ve missed her . . .” However, she did publish one story in 1933—titled "The Vibrometer," it appeared in a mimeographed pamphlet called Science Fiction. The editors, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were high school students in Cleveland at the time.
In 1947, all of Harris's short stories except "The Vibrometer" were collected under the title Away from the Here and Now; a 2019 collection, The Artificial Man and Other Stories, also includes "The Vibrometer." Her stories have also been reprinted in anthologies such as Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the 20th Century (with a critical essay), Sci-Fi Womanthology, Amazing Science Fiction Anthology: The Wonder Years 1926-1935, and Gosh Wow! Sense of Wonder Science Fiction.
Harris also wrote one of the first attempts to classify science fiction when, in the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, she listed 16 basic science fiction themes, including "interplanetary space travel," "adventures on other worlds," and "the creation of synthetic life."
Critical view and influence
When Gernsback published Harris's first short story in Amazing Stories, he praised her writing while also expressing amazement that a woman could write good science fiction: "That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientifiction writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive." For many years Harris claimed to have been the first woman science-fiction writer in the United States, although later research proved this to be untrue, as Gertrude Barrows Bennett, writing under the pseudonym Francis Stevens, was publishing science fiction stories as early as 1917. Note that the true identity of "Francis Stevens" was not known publicly until 1952, long after the writing careers of both Harris and Bennett were over.
More recently, Harris is often credited with the narrower distinction of being the first American woman to publish stories in science fiction magazines under her own name. Nevertheless, this must be qualified as well: as a teenager, Bennett, born Gertrude Mabel Barrows, published one story as G.M. Barrows (i.e., her own name) in a 1904 edition of Argosy magazine. Argosy, however, was not strictly speaking a science fiction magazine, as it ran stories from a number of genres.
Even though Harris published only a handful of stories, almost all of them have been reprinted over the years. Of these, "The Miracle of the Lily" has been reprinted the most and praised by many critics, with Richard Lupoff saying the story would have "won the Hugo Award for best short story, if the award had existed then." Lupoff also wrote that " while today's reader may find her prose creaky and old-fashioned, the stories positively teem with still-fresh and provocative ideas."
"The Fate of the Poseidonia" has also been reprinted a number of times and is credited as an early example of a science fiction story with a heroic female lead character. Other of Harris's stories are also noted for featuring strong female characters, such as Sylvia, the airplane pilot and mechanic in "The Ape Cycle" (1930). Harris also wrote one story utilizing a female point of view (in 1928's "The Fifth Dimension").
Because Harris was the first American woman published in science fiction magazines under her own name, and because of her embrace of female characters and themes, she has been recognized in recent years as a pioneer of women's and feminist science fiction.
Her work was featured at the Pasadena History Museum in 2018, as part of an exhibit titled "Dreaming the Universe: The Intersection of Science, Fiction, & Southern California."
Bibliography
Novel: Persephone of Eleusis: A Romance of Ancient Greece (1923)
Collections? Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1947); The Artificial Man and Other Stories (Belt Publishing, February 2019).
Short stories: "A Runaway World" (Weird Tales, July 1926); "The Fate of the Poseidonia" (Amazing Stories, June 1927); "A Certain Soldier" (Weird Tales, November 1927); "The Fifth Dimension" (Amazing Stories, December 1928); "The Menace From Mars" (Amazing Stories, October 1928); "The Miracle of the Lily" (Amazing Stories, April 1928); "The Artificial Man" (Science Wonder Quarterly, Fall 1929); "A Baby on Neptune" with Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (Amazing Stories, December 1929); "The Diabolical Drug" (Amazing Stories, May 1929); "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1929); "The Ape Cycle" (Science Wonder Quarterly, Spring 1930); (Included in The Artificial Man and Other Stories); "The Vibrometer" (Science Fiction #5, 1933, edited by Jerry Siegel).
Essays: Letter (Amazing Stories, May 1929): A Very Interesting Letter from One of Our Authors; Letter (Air Wonder Stories, September 1929): On why Air Wonder Stories may not make a good venue for her fiction; Letter (Weird Tales, March 1930): Expression of appreciation for the style of Henry de Vere Stacpoole's The Blue Lagoon (novel); Letter (Wonder Stories, August 1931): Possible Science Fiction Plots.
https://fancyclopedia.org/Clare_Winger_Harris
Henderson, Zenna
Zenna Chlarson Henderson (November 1, 1917 – May 11, 1983) was an elementary school teacher and science fiction and fantasy author. Her first story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. Her work is cited as pre-feminist, often featuring middle-aged women, children, and their relationships, but with stereotyped gender roles. Many of her stories center around humanoid aliens called "The People", who have special powers. Henderson was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her novelette Captivity. Science fiction authors Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, Connie Willis, Dale Bailey, and Kathy Tyers have cited her as an influence on their work.
Zena Chlarson (she began using the spelling "Zenna" in the early 1950s) was born in 1917 in Tucson, Arizona, the daughter of Louis Rudolph Chlarson and Emily Vernell Rowley. She was the oldest of five children. She began reading science fiction at age 12 from magazines such as Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories, and fantasy from Weird Tales. She cited Heinlein, Bradbury, Clement, and Asimov as her favorite science fiction writers.
She received a bachelor of arts in education from Arizona State College in 1940, and taught school, primarily in the Tucson area, mainly first grade. She also taught in a "semi-ghost mining town," at Fort Huachuca, in France and Connecticut, as well as in a Japanese internment camp in Sacaton, Arizona, during World War II. She married Richard Harry Henderson in 1943, but they were divorced in 1951. In 1955 she received her MA, also from Arizona State College, and continued to teach elementary school.
Henderson was one of the first 203 female science fiction authors to publish in American science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1960. She never used a male pseudonym. In an essay on the increase in women authors of science fiction in 1950, Sam Merwin mentioned her as an up-and-coming woman SF writer. Her first story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. Her work has been referred to as feminist, but perhaps more accurately is cited as pre-feminist. Some feminist critics disliked the gender stereotypes present in her fiction, though her work depicts middle-aged and old women as well as women's relationships. In an analysis of "Subcommittee," Farah Mendlesohn examines how Henderson uses stereotypical gender roles to emphasize how feminine communication is conducive to peacemaking. In "Subcommittee," the wife of a general, Serena, befriends an alien mother and her child. Through their sharing of "women's things" like cooking and knitting, Serena finds out that the aliens need salt to continue their species. After hearing that peace negotiations are deteriorating, Serena interrupts a meeting with her revelation and a proposed solution. Unlike other popular science fiction at the time, which often centered around war with aliens, "Subcommittee" focuses on conflict resolution. The characters' gender roles enabled the ending plot twist, but were not the focus of speculation.
Henderson was born and baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Though she never renounced her membership, after her marriage, she was no longer a churchgoing Latter-day Saint. In the standard reference Contemporary Authors, she identified as Methodist, and according to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Volume 2, she was a member of Catalina United Methodist Church in Tucson. During her later years, she attended an independent charismatic fellowship. Her work contains many Christian themes and Biblical names. Many of her stories include The People, aliens who have traveled to Earth, which is their promised land. The People also invoke God as "the Power, the Presence and the Name."
Zenna Henderson died of cancer in 1983 in Tucson, Arizona, and was buried in the St. David Cemetery in St. David, Arizona.
Works
Most of Henderson's stories emphasize the theme of being different and the dangers therein. They often feature children or young people. Most are part of her series concerning the history of "The People", humanoid beings from a faraway planet who are forced to emigrate to Earth when their home world is destroyed by a natural disaster. Scattered mostly throughout the American Southwest during their landing before 1900, they are set apart by their desire to preserve their home culture, including their religious and spiritual beliefs. Their unusual abilities include telepathy, telekinesis, prophecy, and healing, which they call the "Signs and Persuasions". The People suppress their unusual abilities as they attempt to integrate into human life. The stories describe groups of The People, as well as lonely isolated individuals, most often as they attempt to find communities and remain distinct in a world that does not understand them. This aspect of individuality was a common theme in most of Henderson's writing. New York Times reviewer Basil Davenport described the stories as "haunting". Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove noted that "As a sentimental portrait of the alien [the series] out-Simaks Simak." In a book on early women science fiction writers, Eric Davin noted that all of her stories focus on "the search for community and communication," a theme that many women's science fiction stories from the time share. Henderson's years as a school teacher helped her to write believable child characters.
Beginning with "Ararat" (1952), Henderson's The People stories appeared in magazines and anthologies, as well as the novelized Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (1966). Other volumes include The People Collection (1991) and Ingathering: The Complete People Stories (1995).
A common conflict in Henderson's stories is when a child has unusual powers that a school teacher discovers through observation. In "The Last Step," a children's teacher in a future Martian colony takes various petty measures to interrupt a children's game on the grounds that they take it too seriously, unaware that the "game" is in fact using sympathetic magic to save the colony from an upcoming hostile invasion. In "The Believing Child", a young daughter of a migrant worker believes so strongly in an imaginary magic word that its powers come true; she then uses her newfound powers to take revenge on her abusive classmates. Compared to these are more frequent, gentler tales like "The Anything Box," in which a teacher learns that an unhappy little girl has discovered a box in which she can see her heart's desire. After struggling with her desire to steal the Anything Box for herself, the teacher must instruct the girl on how to use it safely without becoming "lost" in it.
Henderson mentions mental illness in several tales, including obsessive-compulsive disorder in "Swept and Garnished", and agoraphobia in "Incident After". In "One of Them", a woman's latent telepathic powers cause her to lose her identity as she unwittingly probes the minds of her co-workers. In "You Know What, Teacher?" a young girl confides in her teacher of her father's philandering, and of her mother's plan for revenge.
Adaptations in other media
Henderson's story "Pottage" was made into the 1972 ABC-TV Movie, The People, featuring William Shatner, Kim Darby, and Diane Varsi, and concerning the story of a group of humanoid extraterrestrials who live in an isolated rural community on Earth. It was the directorial debut for John Korty and was produced by his sometime partner Francis Ford Coppola. It has been released on VHS format by Prism Entertainment and DVD format by American Zoetrope.
Henderson's story "Hush" was adapted as an episode of the George A. Romero TV series Tales from the Darkside. The episode first aired in 1988.
Awards
Henderson was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her novelette "Captivity". Her books were long out of print until the 1995 release of Ingathering: The Complete People Stories, published by the New England Science Fiction Association Press. Ingathering was a second place finalist in the 1996 Locus Award for Best Collection.
Bibliography
Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961), The Anything Box (1965), The People: No Different Flesh (1967), Holding Wonder (1971), The People Collection (1991), Ingathering: The Complete People Stories (1995), Believing: The Other Stories of Zenna Henderson (2020).
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