01/09/2026
This week's book spotlight: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This is a super short and easy read, and the book is currently less than $3 on Amazon, if you are unable to find it at a used bookstore or at the library.
Written in 1892, this book was periodically assigned in high school and college literature courses, although I had only heard about it recently through a conversation about women's health on Reddit. Based on the author's own experience with mental health, which we now know was from post-partum depression, the extremely short story (read it in less than an hour) gets you "good and mad" at how little we have progressed in both mental health care and patriarchy decision-making power over women. Yes, I am feminist, but everyone should be, as feminism isn't about men-hating or "choosing the bear" but about understanding and educating others about the lack of equity that just doesn't make sense and, in every sense, is irresponsible of "mankind" when there are more women globally than men, yet women's health accounts for a fraction of health research, particularly when it comes to specialized care, like hormonal imbalance.
That aside, the book draws attention to the catch-all diagnosis of "hysteria" in women and the treatment protocol of "rest and air", which in itself may not sound bad - perhaps a little vacation - but that isn't what it was at all. If "hysteria" didn't land you in an institution, you often ended up in a little house in the country, sometimes locked away in a room, isolated from friends and family, and in this case, from your newborn child, because "hysteria" meant you posed a danger. Unfortunately, this isolation, akin to solitary confinement, contributed to deeper psychosis, most of which was never there in the first place, leading to a nervous breakdown.
Men, particularly one's own husband (as in this story), brother, or father, were able to sign away their wives/sisters/mothers to institutions without any official diagnosis, citing only "tendencies toward hysteria" or "speaking out" or "acting out" and after a swift conversation with an institutional doctor and a few pseudo medical tests, off one went to a ward. This made me think of the recent documentary, The Pastor's Wife (Netflix) in which the pastor was also able to "commit" his, then fiance" to a mental ward, too, even before they were married, and even against the wishes of her family (I personally do not understand the legality of that - they were not married at the time), and then again after marriage, based on only the husband's observations of her behavior.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, whether a metaphoric example of what happened back in the late 1800s (through today) or based on Charlotte's actual experiences, physician family members were also able to be the wife's physician and pharmacist, often prescribing and administering cocktails of lithium and allsorts, to further control behavior.
The more interesting conversations around The Yellow Wallpaper come through dialog sites like Reddit and Good Reads, where folks discuss some of the metaphors or symbolism in the story, including whether or not the story concludes in the wife's su***de, the murder of her husband, or the driven psychosis of isolation, but one thing is clear and that this is still happening today.
It is also my understanding that The Yellow Wallpaper has been turned into a movie, which of course, I now need to find and watch. But in the meantime, take a read of this short novel and share your thoughts and feedback.
https://a.co/d/04ewnz0p
The Yellow Wallpaper
