ABSTRACT
Influential feminist activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman lectured, kept a boarding house, worked in Chicago’s settlement house, and envisioned social change through housing (Hayden, 1982: 183). In January of 1892, she published her semiautobiographical short story The Yellow Wallpaper. In the story, the protagonist Jane’s husband John coerced her to sleep in the former nursery located on the top level of their rented country house claiming that the abundant air would be good for her nervous depression. This children’s bedroom was the catalyst for her mental deterioration. She described the bedroom and play space:
At the time that Gilman was writing, domestic experts and household managers, who were almost exclusively women, placed great importance on the environment in shaping how children developed.1 As such, negotiating the natural aspects of the nursery, as the main space for children, became the center of nursery design. Women, as managers of the household, played a significant role in designing and defining nature in nurseries. Women’s roles were threefold. First, they monitored the quality of sun and air in the nursery. Second, they protected children against corrupting natural influences, such as street views, urban sounds, dirt that drew unwanted natures such as disease and pests, and unsafe conditions. Lastly, women minimally decorated the nursery to encourage children to develop along natural lines through order, simple patterns, and allowing personal decoration, in essence
making space for the natural child to grow within. This was deemed more important for girls who might become household managers themselves.
