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12 - Social Suffering, Gender, and Women's Depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Jeanne Marecek
Edited by
Corey L. M. Keyes  and
Sherryl H. Goodman
Jeanne Marecek
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Corey L. M. Keyes
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
Sherryl H. Goodman
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
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Summary

There is nothing the matter with one but a temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency — what is one to do? (p. 10)

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says that if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself — before him, at least, and that makes me very tired. (p. 11)

But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. (p. 14)

I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. (p. 19)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1899/1973

These lines are from The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story composed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at the turn of the 19th century. Gilman was no stranger to social suffering. The story was, as Elaine Hedges puts it, “wrenched out of her own life” (1973, p. 37). Gilman was an outspoken leader and theorist of the feminist movement of the late 1800s, regarded by some as its leading American intellectual. Gilman's focus was primarily on women's economic dependency in marriage, which she regarded as the linchpin of female subordination (Gilman, 1898).

Type
Chapter
Information
Women and Depression
A Handbook for the Social, Behavioral, and Biomedical Sciences
 , pp. 283 - 308
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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