Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
Author, Sociologist, Economist, Social Reformer
Subjected to rest cure for neurasthenia
Divorces and gives up daughter (to better mother)
Commits suicide with cancer diagnosis
"Where the two sexes obtain their food under different conditions, and where that difference consists in one of them being fed by the other, then the feeding sex becomes the environment of the fed. Man, in supporting woman, has become her economic environment. Under natural selection, every creature is modified to its environment, developing perforce the qualities needed to obtain its livelihood under that environment....When the mate becomes also the master, when economic necessity is added to sex-attraction, we have the two great evolutionary forces acting together to the same end; namely, to develop sex-distinction in the human female."
