Stetson and Women's Rights

Charlotte Perkins Stetson, also known as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was a fiction writer, but also a social activist for women in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Her nonfiction social theory works include Women and Economics, The Home: Its Work and Influence, and Does a Man Support His Wife? She also founded and contributed to a women's magazine titled, The Forerunner. In a middle-class American society which promoted separate spheres for men and women, the public for men and the domestic for women, Stetson alternately advocated financial independence for women and encouraged people to consider an individual not in terms of gender characteristics, but common human qualities.