Editing Charlotte Perkins Gilman (section)

==Adulthood==
In 1884, she married the artist [[Charles Walter Stetson]], after initially declining his proposal because her intuition told her it was not the right thing for her.<ref>Gilman, ''Autobiography'', 82.</ref> Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson (1885–1979),<ref>{{cite web|title=Katharine Beecher Stetson|website=MacDowell studios (macdowell.org)|url=https://www.macdowell.org/artists/katharine-stetson}}</ref> was born the following year on March 23, 1885. Charlotte Perkins Gilman suffered a serious bout of [[postpartum 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.<ref>Gilman, ''Autobiography'', 90.</ref>
[[File:Informal portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her daughter, Katherine Beecher Stetson, outdoors, ca. 1897. (16911145300).jpg|left|thumb|Gilman (right) with her daughter, Katherine Beecher Stetson, ca. 1897]]
Gilman moved to Southern California with her daughter Katherine and lived with friend [[Grace Ellery Channing]]. In 1888, Charlotte [[Legal separation|separated]] from her husband&mdash;a rare occurrence in the late nineteenth century. They officially divorced in 1894. After their divorce, Stetson married Channing.<ref name="Channing FA">{{cite web|title=Channing, Grace Ellery, 1862–1937. Papers of Grace Ellery Channing, 1806–1973: A Finding Aid|url=https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/7092|website=Harvard University Library|access-date=March 24, 2018}}</ref><ref name="Knight, Diaries, 408">Knight, ''Diaries'', 408.</ref> 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.<ref name="Davis">{{cite journal |last1=Davis |first1=Cynthia |title=Love and Economics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on "The Woman Question" |journal=ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly) |date=December 2005 |volume=19 |issue=4 |pages=242–248 |url=https://www.raleighcharterhs.org/faculty/acallanan/YWP_love%20and%20economics.pdf |access-date=November 25, 2018 |archive-date=August 9, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170809024345/http://www.raleighcharterhs.org/faculty/acallanan/YWP_love%20and%20economics.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref name="Harrison">{{cite web |last1=Harrison |first1=Pat |title=The Evolution of Charlotte Perkins Gilman |url=https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news/radcliffe-magazine/evolution-charlotte-perkins-gilman |website=Radcliffe Magazine |publisher=Harvard University |access-date=November 25, 2018 |date=July 3, 2013 |archive-date=November 25, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181125073931/https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news/radcliffe-magazine/evolution-charlotte-perkins-gilman |url-status=dead }}</ref> Following the separation from her husband, Gilman moved with her daughter to Pasadena, California, where she became active in [[Feminism in the United States|feminist]] and [[Reformism|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 published by one of the earlier-mentioned organizations.<ref>Knight, ''Diaries'', 525.</ref>

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."<ref>Knight, ''Diaries'', 163.</ref> 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."<ref name="Knight, Diaries">Knight, ''Diaries''.</ref>

[[File:Charlotte Perkins Gilman by Frances Benjamin Johnston.jpg|thumb|upright|Charlotte Perkins Gilman<br>Photograph by [[Frances Benjamin Johnston]] (c. 1900)|left]]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 time together almost immediately and became romantically involved. While she went on [[lecture tour]]s, Houghton and Charlotte exchanged letters and spent 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.<ref>Knight, ''Diaries'', 648–666.</ref> From their wedding in 1900 until 1922, they lived in New York City. Their marriage was very different from 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 [[Intracerebral hemorrhage|cerebral hemorrhage]] in 1934, Gilman moved back to Pasadena, California, where her daughter lived.<ref name="Knight, Diaries, 813">Knight, ''Diaries'', p. 813.</ref>

In January 1932, Gilman was diagnosed with incurable [[breast cancer]].<ref>Polly Wynn Allen, Building Domestic Liberty, 54.</ref> 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.<ref name="Knight, Diaries, 813" />