This statement by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is the epigraph for Part II Chapter 4 Persevere: 1900-1906: Work, each of you, with all your heart.
Some years ago, I included Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s well-known short story The Yellow Wallpaper and her classic nonfiction book Women and Economics in a course, Feminist Perspectives in Literature, that I taught at Teachers College, Columbia University. Gilman, a feminist, sociologist, lecturer, author, and prominent suffragist also wrote trenchant, witty suffrage poems. In The
Vote, I tell the story of Susan B. Anthony’s meeting with Eugene V. Debs, the renowned labor leader and socialist, and Gilman’s poem “The Socialist and the Suffragists.” In another of her poems, “The Anti-Suffragists,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman described six types of anti-suffrage women in “The Anti-Suffragists.” Here is the excerpt from my book: Fashionable women in luxurious homes . . . . Successful women who have won their way . . . . Religious women of the feebler sort . . . . Ignorant women—college bred sometimes . . . And selfish women—pigs in petticoats . . . . And, more’s the pity, some good women too . . . .These tell us they have all the rights they want.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman is just one of the many fascinating known and little known women I write about in The Vote: Women’s Fierce Fight. The top image is the cover of Suffrage Songs and Verses by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The bottom image is Gilman standing on the back seat of an automobile, giving a suffrage speech. (Click on images to enlarge them.)