Women of the Gilded Age
by Hunter Meredith
The late nineteenth century was a time for turbulent social movements in the United States. Rapid changes in the religious scene came along with Protestant churches booming in size in the wake of the Civil War. Charles Darwin’s controversial On the Origin of Species reached a popular status, and sparked ferocious debate over biblical origins.
Womens’ roles began to fall under scrutiny as well. Several activist groups were infuriated that the fifteenth amendment (which extended voting rights to non-white citizens and former slaves) did not include voting rights for women. With many women struggling to find employment opportunities outside of the home, the suffrage movement roared back onto the scene.
Up to this point, women were largely viewed as frail, domestic creatures that weren’t capable of functioning or surviving alone in a male-dominated world. They were kept down by their fathers or husbands, and scarcely taken seriously as intellectuals. They were stereotyped as being emotionally unstable, and as such many legitimate medical and mental problems suffered by them were written off rather insultingly as women’s “hysteria.”
It was at around this time that prominent female writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman began to make themselves known, challenging the preconceptions about their intellectual inferiority. Her most well-known short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” captures the damaging effects (shown in the photographs above) of underestimating women, as a mentally damaged woman’s problems are written off. She is prescribed the rest cure, and isolated from the rest of the world with no mental stimuli in an attempt to cure her hysteria. Instead, she slowly goes insane.
by Hunter Meredith
The late nineteenth century was a time for turbulent social movements in the United States. Rapid changes in the religious scene came along with Protestant churches booming in size in the wake of the Civil War. Charles Darwin’s controversial On the Origin of Species reached a popular status, and sparked ferocious debate over biblical origins.
Womens’ roles began to fall under scrutiny as well. Several activist groups were infuriated that the fifteenth amendment (which extended voting rights to non-white citizens and former slaves) did not include voting rights for women. With many women struggling to find employment opportunities outside of the home, the suffrage movement roared back onto the scene.
Up to this point, women were largely viewed as frail, domestic creatures that weren’t capable of functioning or surviving alone in a male-dominated world. They were kept down by their fathers or husbands, and scarcely taken seriously as intellectuals. They were stereotyped as being emotionally unstable, and as such many legitimate medical and mental problems suffered by them were written off rather insultingly as women’s “hysteria.”
It was at around this time that prominent female writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman began to make themselves known, challenging the preconceptions about their intellectual inferiority. Her most well-known short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” captures the damaging effects (shown in the photographs above) of underestimating women, as a mentally damaged woman’s problems are written off. She is prescribed the rest cure, and isolated from the rest of the world with no mental stimuli in an attempt to cure her hysteria. Instead, she slowly goes insane.