Weird Island is back! In the first episode in over a year and a half, we’ll uncover the story of a gym for women in 1880s Providence, begun by feminist philosopher, lecturer and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Weird Island is back! In the first episode in over a year and a half, we’ll uncover the story of a gym for women in 1880s Providence, begun by feminist philosopher, lecturer and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
I remember the first time I read the Yellow Wallpaper. I was in middle school, which feels young. I think I read the short story around Halloween–after all, it’s genuinely creepy. It was tucked inside a thick anthology of American Literature that I still owned until about a year ago, when–in the midst of a move–I decided I no longer needed my collection of heavy textbooks, given it’s been a decade since I’ve been in school.
The story is a short one, just over 6,000 words long, delivered as a series of journal entries written by a young woman as she receives treatment for what her husband describes as a “temporary nervous depression,” that maybe would be diagnosed as postpartum depression today. Confined to a “rest cure” in the upstairs nursery of a colonial mansion rented for the summer, the woman becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper that adorns the nursery walls.
“I never saw a worse paper in my life.” She writes, upon arrival in the house. “One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”
At first, the wallpaper disturbs and upsets her with its gaudy design. She sees things in it: shapes, eyes, people. “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down,” she writes.
But as her treatment, her confinement, wears on–as it seems the rest and inactivity are making things worse instead of better–she begins to identify a woman who appears trapped within the design, “stooping down and creeping about behind the pattern.” And the pattern itself transforms from a “florid arabesque” into bars that keep the woman captive. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody would climb through that pattern - it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!”
As the end of the summer and the conclusion of the woman’s “rest cure” approach, she begins to seriously entertain the idea of freeing the woman from the wallpaper.. Until one night, she tries. “As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.” And in the final moments, it seems as if the narrator hasn’t just freed the woman from the patterns that trapped her–she has morphed into the woman who was trapped. The story ends as the narrator’s husband comes into the room and she calls out to him, “I’ve got out at last.. In spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” Shocked by his wife’s madness, the man faints, and the narrator muses to herself the haunting final words, “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”
The story is unnerving, chilling.. And back in middle school, I think I may have read it as a horror story when in reality, it is something more than that. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, drew inspiration from her own experience with the “rest cure,” a Victorian era medical treatment (typically prescribed to women) that involved extended bed rest and isolation to treat nervous disorders. The story is clearly critical of the methodology, which Gilman believed did more harm than good. But it is also critical of the hidden patterns that exist within society at large–cultural expectations about gender and domesticity. The wallpaper represents a mold into which women are supposed to fit–one that the narrator struggles against.
This story was all I knew of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I assumed she might have been a Victorian era novelist, in the vein of the Bronte sisters or George Eliot. Though the story stuck with me, the author didn’t. Until recently, when I stumbled across an article written by Jane Lancaster for Small State, Big History titled: As Near to Flying as One Gets Outside a Circus: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Providence Ladies’ Sanitary Gymnasium.
It turns out that Gilman lived in Providence from 1873 to 1888. And during that time, she developed into this highly motivated and unusual young woman–one who was clearly struggling against the mold of what she was expected to be. And during that time, she brought a group of women together in a space just for them–a ladies gymnasium, likely the first one in Providence, at a time when even gyms for men were not all that common. And as a woman who loves lifting weights, I was immediately drawn to this story. And wanted to know more about the gym, how it came to be, and how it reflected Gilman’s broader vision of female empowerment and freedom.
I’m Sara and you’re listening to Weird Island. And if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you know that it’s been a while! For my first episode in over a year and half I wanted to tell you about Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Providence Ladies’ Sanitary Gymnasium.
The year was 1881. A rather serious young woman, only 21 years old, slim with a proud, upright posture, wearing a simple dress and common sense shoes stepped up onto a low table, the sound of her movements reverberating through the spacious, largely empty hall. Reaching out, she firmly grasped, in one hand, a stirrup shaped, leather covered steel ring that hung from the ceiling above. Steeling herself with a breath, she stared down the four other rings that dangled in a line the length of the room. She would make it down and back, swinging from ring to ring. Failure wasn’t something she seriously considered. Releasing her breath, she pulled back on the ring she grasped in her fist and launched herself from the table’s edge, arcing in one long movement towards the second ring. She reached, caught hold, and then gave a strong pull back on the first one, to create momentum for her next swing. Then as her body swayed forward again, she carefully let go of the first ring and swung onto the next. She did this again and again, down the length of the rings and back, her focused expression giving way to an exuberant smile, her skirts whooshing behind her on a breeze she alone had created. Charlotte was flying.
Charlotte Anna Perkins, born July 3, 1860 in Hartford, CT, had always been “passionately addicted to fresh air”(199). She remembered walking the ridge-pole of a barn she briefly lived in in Rehoboth, MA - if only to “alarm people driving by.”(64). In the simple task of walking railroad rails, she said she “kept on steadily over a hundred of them.”(64). Charlotte couldn’t be kept still.
Maybe because her childhood was one of constant movement, constant change. When she was very young, her father left. And her mother was forced to pack up her two children and relocate them, over and over and over again. As Charlotte recalled, she, her brother and her mother moved 19 times in 18 years. They lived wherever they could for a while–with grandparents on both sides, with aunts, with family friends, even in boarding houses. And in the fall of 1873, when Charlotte was 13, the family moved into a little house on Vernon Street in Providence.
In the 1870s (and ‘80s and ‘90s), Providence was experiencing unmatched wealth and growth. The city was home to some of the world’s largest factories (specializing in things like tools, files, screws, engines and silverware) and the population swelled. Civic improvements were being made to accommodate the growing workforce–schools were built, a sewer system and municipal water system were established, and new public parks were opened in response to a rapidly industrializing way of life. Providence was a place experiencing a transformation, and Charlotte was ready for this new world.
Though her formal education was sporadic, Charlotte was a prolific reader inspired by her absent father. “He was an occasional visitor,” she wrote. “A writer of infrequent but always amusing letters with deliciously funny drawings, a sender of books, catalogs of books, lists of books to read, and also a purchaser of books with money sadly needed by his family.”(5) Frederic Beecher Perkins was not just a reader of books, but a then-famous librarian (existing the same spheres as the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System). He was also a member of the prominent Beecher family. His grandfather, Lyman Beecher, was a famous Presbyterian minister. His aunts included Isabella Beecher Hooker, a suffragist; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Catharine Beecher, an educator and author.
So though Charlotte may not have had resources, she had no shortage of inspiration and an unusual level of motivation. Called to what she described as “the Beecher urge to social service,” a young Charlotte wrote a letter to her father saying that she wished to help humanity, and to do so, she must understand history. He sent her a list of books, and she set herself on a path.
“Sixteen, with a life to build. My mother’s profound religious tendency and implacable sense of duty; my father’s intellectual appetite; a will power, well developed, from both; a passion of my own for scientific knowledge, for real laws of life; an insatiable demand for perfection in everything, and that proven process of mine for acquiring habits–instead of “standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet,” I plunged in and swam.”(44)
In her reading and learning, “humanity was always the major interest,”(37). But humanity has never been easy to understand, and Charlotte found herself in a world that was changing. “It was a period of large beginnings in many lines,”(61) she recalled. Particularly for women. Though the prevailing notion of women of that era was that of the “charmer before marriage and the cook afterward,”(62) as she put it, more opportunities were opening up for women like her. “Strong-minded girls were going to college under criticism and ridicule,”(61) women began to appear in stores and offices. And Charlotte was particularly compelled by a shift towards “higher physical culture.” Throughout much of history, dedicated exercise wasn’t a priority for most people. Daily life provided physical activity. But as industrialization transformed society, life became more sedentary and the need for intentional exercise emerged. First in Europe, then in the United States, gyms focused on gymnastics and weightlifting began to open and college athletics took root. And by the 1860s, even women were encouraged to practice calisthenics. After attending a lecture on hygiene and dress reform in her teens, Charlotte developed a life-long interest in physical culture. “In this line of improvement, I was highly ambitious.”(64) she wrote.
At first, she would turn her chores into challenges. She recalled how, in tending to the stove, she would take a pail of coal in either hand and run up two flights of stairs, singing all the way. She would rotate a yard stick from behind her back over her head and pass it in front of her body, stepping through it, just to test her flexibility. She would lift a full water-pail in one hand up to the level of her ear. The best chore for building strength, she felt, was scrubbing the floor–which developed strong back and arm muscles. “With right early training, I could easily have been an acrobat, having good nervous coordination, strength, courage, and excellent balancing power,”(64) she boasted.
In 1878, Charlotte enrolled in classes at the newly opened Rhode Island School of Design–which, by the way, was begun by (and largely for) women. At the time, the school was located “on the top floor of a five-story building on Westminster Street,”(46) about a mile away from the apartment Charlotte then occupied with her mother on Manning Street. Each morning, she turned her walk to school into exercise. “In the coldest weather, I’d start off so briskly that before long I’d have my mittens off and coat unbuttoned, smiling triumphantly at chillier people.”(64) And once there, she would skip the elevator in favor of the stairs. At first, she took the stairs slowly. But she progressively increased her pace until, about a month into attending the school, she was “running up the whole four flights two steps at a time and beating the elevator,” to her immense satisfaction.(46)
Charlotte wasn’t one to take a casual interest in anything–in the evenings, she immersed herself in the latest ideas on physical culture. And again, she was likely inspired by her father’s family. Her great-aunt Catherine Beecher was a thought-leader on physical health and fitness as a means for expanding women’s influence in domestic spheres. In 1856, she had written a book called “Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families,” which aimed to make the idea of calisthenics easy for anyone, including women and children, to understand. Calisthenics exercises were generally thought to be gentle and graceful, improving womens’ health without compromising their femininity.
Charlotte also purchased a hot new book called “How to Get Strong and How to Stay So,” in which the author, William Blaikie, preached daily physical exercise for all ages and both sexes. He was of the opinion that physical fitness for women was “the key to sanity and mental power; to self-respect and high purpose; to sound health and vigorous enduring health..” and Charlotte followed “Blaikie every night with the greatest assiduity.”
Inspired to push herself more, Charlotte decided she wanted to attend a gym for women, one where young ladies could learn higher gymnastics, and quote “wear abbreviated garments and elevate the massive dumbbell at our leisure.”(66). Finding that there was no gym for women in Providence, she took matters into her own hands.
Charlotte approached Dr. J. P. Brooks, who had taught a calisthenics course at Miss Shaw’s Young Ladies’ School–which Charlotte had briefly attended in her early teens. Brooks was running a gym offering “movement cure and health lift” at 37 South Main Street and she asked him why he didn’t have a gym for women. Brooks responded that he doubted enough ladies would be interested, but Charlotte disagreed. She believed she could round up a solid group of women, and asked how many he would need. Thirty, he estimated. He would need about 30 interested women before he’d consider opening a gym for them. And so Charlotte set out, visiting every girl she knew, and many she didn’t, and she gathered a nice set of young women from many of Rhode Island’s best known families–Rathbones, Pitmans, Channings and Hazards. “Not thirty, indeed, but enough to encourage him to begin.”(66), as she recalled.
Brooks rented a space on the 5th floor of the brand-new Butler Exchange Building (which once stood where the Superman building is today) and he purchased equipment based on the recommendations of Dudley Allen Sargent, a pioneer in physical education and director of the Hemenway Gymnasium at Harvard. Brooks let Charlotte decorate the gym with a border she painted along the wall. And in late 1881, the Sanitary Gymnasium for Ladies and Children was opened to the public.
Charlotte ran a mile every day, and went to the gym at least twice a week. “My special efforts were not toward anything spectacular, but directed to the building up of a sound physique.” “I could vault and jump, go up a knotted rope, walk on my hands under a ladder, kick as high as my head, and revel in the flying rings. But the best of all were the traveling rings… That is as near flying as one gets, outside of a circus. I could do it four times in those days.”(67)
Charlotte devised five little rules of health, which she aimed to live by: “Good air and plenty of it, good exercise and plenty of it, good food and plenty of it, good sleep and plenty of it, good clothing and as little as possible.”(67) Dissatisfied with the clothing trends of her time, she wore common sense shoes and did away with corsets. She even innovated clothing more appropriate for working out, including a side-garter suspender to which skirts could be buttoned and a bra that was supportive, allowed for better movement and didn’t restrict breathing. These weren’t the leggings and sports bras of today, but an improvement over what was available at the time.
For three years, Charlotte enjoyed not only the physical benefits of the gym, but also the social and emotional benefits. She met a lot of nice girls. They would laugh and exercise and even occasionally dance together in the sunlit halls of the gym. She looked back on this time in her life and described a strong, motivated young woman, fully realized. “My health was splendid, I never tired, with a steady cheerfulness which external discomforts or mishaps could not dim... As to looks, if I had been sex-conscious and dressed the part, I think I should have been called beautiful. But one does not call a philosophic steam-engine beautiful.”(71).
This gym, Charlotte’s enjoyment of it, her pride in her strength over her beauty–these things were all so far ahead of their time. Even today, women in sports and fitness are not free from expectations and judgments, particularly when it comes to achieving a certain aesthetic. But I know from my own experience that shifting the focus from appearance to ability can be liberating and empowering. And Gilman’s gym offered women the opportunity not only to get healthier, but to experience a sense of power and autonomy over their own bodies that they maybe never experienced before. When I started researching, I thought that this was a story about a woman who found her power in the gym and then took that power and projected it out into the world to affect change. And it was. But it was also more complicated than that.
Because the realities of Victorian life and expectations would go on to challenge and test the strength Charlotte had built.
In January 1882, shortly after the gym opened, Charlotte met a young man, a painter, named Charles Walter Stetson. Walter admired Charlotte’s strength and athleticism, her unflagging energy. Very promptly, he asked her to marry him. “Very promptly, I declined,” she wrote. Charlotte had already decided she wasn’t cut out to be a Victorian housewife. In a letter to a friend, she stated, “I have decided I’m not domestic and I don’t want to be–I can work now to some purpose, wait with some patience, guard my health and strength with an end in view.” But Walter’s proposal put her determination to resist a conventional future to the test.
She began to consider if saying “yes” might be “the right thing to do.” After all, it was the thing the world expected of her. She told Walter that while she didn’t want to marry him, she might in time, and he could come see her for a year while she figured things out. He agreed to those terms.
One turned into two agonizing, indecision-filled years: “On the one hand, I knew it was normal and right in general, and held that a woman should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world also. On the other, I felt strongly that for me, it was not right, that the nature of the life before me forbade it, that I ought to forego the more intimate personal happiness for complete devotion to my work.” Charlotte’s mood darkened as the pressures of conventionality weighed on her. Believing she could combat the anxiety through exercise, she doubled down on her fitness efforts. And, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to marriage. Heading into the year of her wedding, she wrote: “I mean this year to try hard for somewhat of my former force and courage. As I remember it was got by practice.”(84)
The two married on May 4, 1884. Moving into a three room apartment on Wayland Avenue, overlooking the broad basin of the Seekonk River, Charlotte adopted her own understanding of what it meant to be a housewife. She refused to follow a rigid schedule of housework, which she saw as a sign of submission. But found joy in learning to cook–experimenting with ingredients like it was a science. Though, on paper, she saw no reason to be unhappy, something felt off. “The steady cheerfulness, the strong tireless spirit sank away. A sort of gray fog drifted across my mind, a cloud that grew and darkened.” She largely gave up her visits to the gym, only returning in bursts of effort to lift her mood. In one diary entry, she wrote: “Still feel poorly, but depart at six for the gymnasium, speedily make friends, and.. Find myself happy to the verge of idiocy at being there again.” (Radical Feminist, Hill p143).
Before long, Charlotte found out she was pregnant. And she and Walter were relieved, hoping that perhaps it had been the pregnancy that had caused her illness and exhaustion all along. Things would, in fact, change when the baby arrived, but instead of getting better, they got worse. Charlotte found herself plunged deeper into consuming postpartum depression.
Unable to care for her infant daughter, she relied on her mother, who moved into their home. Her husband tried to support her in every way he could. There was a trip out west and a now-immortalized visit to consult with Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who prescribed his then-famous “rest cure.” Charlotte was put on bedrest and kept there, deprived of physical activity, intellectual and creative pursuits, and social contact–everything she held most important. The treatment felt like imprisonment. Afterward, she was sent home with the mandate to “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have [her] child with [her] all the time. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch a pen, brush, or pencil as long as [she] lived.”(96). Many critics today view Dr. Mitchell’s ideas as grounded in the belief that, if modern girls stopped wanting things–education, the right to vote, and work–they would become happier. Domesticity would be their salvation, not their undoing, he believed. But Charlotte refused to be “cured” of her aspirations.
In the fall of 1887, Walter and Charlotte agreed to separate. Both felt it was the right thing to do, for Charlotte, for their daughter, and for Walter. The marriage had been a mistake. Charlotte then left Rhode Island and moved to Pasadena, CA, where her professional life began. There, she put her work first–as she had hoped to in her youth. She wrote articles and poems and sold them to publications. She started lecturing on issues related to gender inequality, social structures and mental health. She advocated for socialism, though she believed it was mishandled by Marx. She believed in economic independence for women, critiqued the traditional family structure, and emphasized the importance of women’s physical health and intellectual freedom. During her lifetime, she became a major intellectual force–known not as a writer of literature (as I had once mistakenly believed), but as a philosopher, economist and theorist. Though she worked for Equal Suffrage when opportunity offered, she didn’t consider herself a reformer or a suffragist–believing a woman’s right to meaningful work was even more important than her right to vote. Her ideas on gender were so progressive, one suffragist leader told her, “After all I think you will do our cause more good than harm, because what you ask is so much worse than what we ask that they will grant our demands in order to escape yours.”(198)
Her lectures turned her into a wanderer for years of her life. She traveled “back and forth and up and down, from California to Maine, from Michigan to Texas, from Georgia to Oregon, twice to England.”(181). During her lifetime, she produced an incredible body of work. But she also struggled with ongoing depression and mental exhaustion, self-doubt, and guilt.
In the years following the breakup of her marriage and family, she described feeling “like a drowned thing, drifting along under the water and sometimes bobbing to the surface.”(108). Her diary tracked page after page of down moods: “Below zero weariness,” she writes in one. “Tired,” in another. Followed by “very tired,” the next day, and “awfully tired,” after that. In her autobiography, she incorporates so many repetitive diary entries that she herself calls the record “tedious.” “But I wish to have it clearly understood that the spurts of energy and accomplishment have been fragmentary compared with the helplessness and distress; they show however, and the misery doesn’t”(238).
Gilman’s life was messy and complicated, full of contradictions and blind spots. She envisioned a new woman, one who was “honester, braver, stronger, more healthful and skillful and able and free, more human in all ways,” as she put it. And at the same time, she struggled with the realities of becoming that woman. She experienced poverty, dependence, and existential pain. She faltered in her grasp of humanity. Her ideas about gender were progressive, but her thoughts on race and immigration–especially as she aged–were not. She faced judgment throughout her life, both for her ideas and the way she chose to live and parent.
But she also found happiness. She remarried and described her second marriage as her happy ending. She returned to fitness throughout her life–briefly joining a women’s basketball team and playing alongside her daughter, Katherine. She ran and swam. She even found opportunities to test her strength on the traveling rings again at age 65, and she flew all the way down the rings and back again, just as she had in her youth.
When the 19th amendment was passed, demand for her work faded and for many years, her name fell into obscurity. Then, in the 1970s, Gilman’s work was rediscovered and championed by the burgeoning feminist movement, which simplified her and shaped how she’s remembered today.
This episode made me feel things I wasn’t expecting. I was excited to learn about the gym Gilman started in Providence. Here was a woman who clearly recognized the importance of physical strength, not just for the body, but as a path to empowerment and independence.
But reading Gilman’s autobiography was like peeking behind the curtain to see the hardest moments of a very productive and progressive woman’s life. Gilman was a highly motivated woman who defied the mold of what society expected of her, but that same drive brought a lot of personal struggles and a lot of self-doubt. Her confidence and strength were constantly tested by social pressures, mental health battles, and the challenges of trying to live a life on her own terms.
As a motivated person who frequently struggles with self-doubt, fatigue and discouragement, it was both heartbreaking and humanizing to see how someone so groundbreaking on paper could face such profound struggles behind the scenes. It’s a reminder that even the strongest, most forward-thinking individuals can feel vulnerable and unsure, and that complexity makes her story all the more powerful.
Thank you so much for listening. If this is the first episode you’ve listened to, and you want to hear more, there is a pretty substantial catalog of past episodes for you to check out! But if this isn’t your first episode, and you’ve been patiently waiting for a year and a half for me to release new content–well, I just wanted to say a huge thank you for being here and for always supporting the podcast. I really appreciate everyone who has reached out and checked in, and I am excited to be back. This past year and a half has been filled with changes–I got married, changed my name, bought a house, worked on another project for a while. And I’ve both missed the podcast and struggled to start back up again. But I’m working on new episodes for the first time in a long time, with the goal of releasing one a month. It’s a little slower than my old cadence, but stealing a quote I learned in the gym, actually: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” I’d rather be consistently and slowly moving forward at a pace I can maintain. So, I’ll be back in a month with a new episode. Hope to see you then.
This episode was written and researched by me, Sara Corben Harwood. Thank you so much for listening, and a special thank you to Jane Lancaster, for introducing me to this story through her piece on the website Small State, Big History. If you liked this episode, I would love it if you could share it with your family or friends, or you can send me a note at Weird Rhode Island at Gmail.com or on IG at Weird Island Podcast. See you next time as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island.