The Yellow Wallpaper* - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I've mentioned Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as one of the books that had the most influence on me in college in terms of my feminist identity and the idea that all women need their own space (and their own money) in order to create and define their own worlds. The Yellow Wallpaper, for me, was the perfect illustration of what would happen if you failed to heed Woolf's advice. This very short story, which I re-read while eating my lunch yesterday, is the fictional diary of an unnamed married woman. She has been taken by her doctor husband to a country manor of some sort to rest and alleviate the symptoms of her undefined disease (no doubt seen as hysteria, but more accurately an acute depression). As her husband pats her on the head and tells her nothing is wrong, the author fixates on the decaying yellow wallpaper of her makeshift prison. She is a woman who has absolutely nothing to do - it's unclear whether she has children, but she lives in a world where her only job is to be the perfect wife. It seems like it would be so easy and wonderful, but what she really wants to do is write - but her husband and doctors discourage it in favor of the "rest-cure treatment" (lying around and doing absolutely nothing). The Yellow Wallpaper was written at the end of the 19th century, but in the past 30 years it has been studied as a textbook psychological portrayal of a woman suffering from a mental breakdown. Gilman, in real life, suffered from bouts of depression, but struggled mightily on behalf of women everywhere as an advocate of the equal division of household labor between spouses, and of women working outside the home - for reasons greater than financial necessity. When I think of how hard women (and many men) work today for these same ideals, I find it tremendous that she was fighting the good fight over a century ago. The Yellow Wallpaper is brutally depressing, but it is a tremendous argument in favor of the need to find something that you love to do - no matter how small - and claiming it all for yourself.

(* - listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die)