Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Madness, Motherhood

Madness, Motherhood and Marriage:

Women in the Institution of Womanhood The twentieth century held monumental changes in rights for women: women earned the right to vote in 1920, in 1963, the Equal Pay Act allowed women to earn the same amount as men for the same job, and in 1975 the Sexual Discrimination Act made discrimination against women illegal in education and employment. Despite these changed women were still often viewed as the “protected sex” (Woolf 40). Held at this disadvantage, the expectations of womanhood remained unreasonable. Society condemned women to two roles: wife and mother. Any woman outside of these roles were often thought of as spinsters or mentally unstable. Madness often found its way into the minds of many women,

She ends up tearing most of the yellow wallpaper away, going mad in the process. The narrator’s madness has two root causes. The first is she is subject to the institution of motherhood, and the limitations put on women by a male-dominated society. She writes, “personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman 10). What is a woman to do when she is at the mercy of men in the twentieth century? A woman like the narrator does as she is told. This is the second cause of her madness: her own role in her treatment. She is partially responsible for giving in to her obsession with the woman in the wallpaper. Instead of fighting a treatment she knows will not work for her, she submits to the will of her husband. It is valid to argue that she didn’t have much of a choice, as fighting the treatment would have likely landed her in an asylum or locked in her room permanently. However, even without rights or support, internal will plays a role in the curing or worsening of a mental