The Forerunner.: Volumes I-VII.

New York: The Charlton Company for C. P. Gilman,, 1909-16. Inscribed by Gilman to her "most-essential co-worker" The complete run of The Forerunner, three volumes inscribed by the author to her husband George Houghton Gilman, her "most-Essential Co-Worker in this Production". The journal was the couple's first joint venture, published by "Charlton": a portmanteau of their names. Volumes I, II, and VI are inscribed by Gilman on the front free endpapers as follows: Vol. I, "To my dear husband; and most-Essential Co-Worker in this Production with grateful love - Charlotte Perkins Gilman / Dec. 1910"; Vol. II, "Special for a Husband - from a loving wife. Call it Xmas 1910"; and Vol. VI, "For The Husband, still helping it along - from C.P.G."; Vol. III has her ownership inscription: "C. P. Gilman, 627 W. 136. New York City". Gilman was previously unhappily married to the artist Charles Walter Stetson, who enforced a "rest cure" on her while she was suffering from postpartum depression, depriving her of reading, writing, painting, and any mental or physical stimulation. Her haunting short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is based on this experience of confinement. Gilman's daughter, and only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, became a well-regarded artist and sculptor with close ties to other American suffrage activists. At the age of 24, she designed the front cover for The Forerunner, and later she inherited this set, inscribing the front free endpaper of Vol. I, "To Walter Stetson Chamberlain - my dear son - these seven volumes written by my mother (including advertisements) with lovely design by Katharine Beecher Stetson - Pasadena Jan 1954 - from Katharine S. Chamberlain"; and inscribing the subsequent volumes on the front free endpaper, "Wallace Stetson Chamberlain, from his mother, Jan. 1954". In her second marriage, Gilman finally found a partner who offered her the companionship, support, and respect for which she campaigned. In 1893, she became reacquainted with her first cousin, the Wall Street attorney Houghton Gilman, and in 1900 they were married. Together, they founded a publishing company to publish Charlotte's works, which were deemed too controversial by many commercial publishers. Houghton Gilman provided financial backing and his Wall Street address as the office for both the Charlton Company and The Forerunner. Gilman's inscriptions are a testimony to the success of their partnership. Gilman wrote all the material in The Forerunner, even (as her daughter notes in her inscription) the advertisements. This amounted to around 21,000 words per month. Across her editorials, articles, reviews, essays, poems, and stories, Gilman consistently encourages her readers to campaign for women's liberation from society's sexist constraints. She advocates for women's employment outside of the home, men's participation in domestic duties, economic emancipation for women, and equal education for all. Significantly, her feminist utopian trilogy - Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916) - appears in print for the first time here. At its peak, The Forerunner had an audience of 1,300 subscribers, and it remains a landmark work of early American feminism. Seven volumes, tall octavo. Original orange cloth, spines and front covers lettered in black, front covers with black pictorial block of a family supporting the world. Spine of Vol. III cocked, covers silverfished, extremities rubbed with a few spots of wear, top edges foxed, first few volumes damp stained with spots of mould at head, inner hinges tender, a few cracked but firm, Vol. I with fore edge of rear cover slightly chewed away, front free endpaper professionally stabilized, internally fresh and well preserved: a very good set. Cynthia Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography, 2010.