Bed rest wouldn't do for pioneering feminist.

• Position: Post-Partum Depression

In the late 19th century, when women were challenging traditional ideas about gender that excluded them from political and intellectual life, medical and scientific experts drew on notions of female weakness to justify inequality between the sexes. Artist and writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), who was discouraged from pursuing a career to preserve her health, rejected these ideas in the terrifying short story, 'The Yellow Wall-Paper." The famous tale served as an indictment of the medical profession and the social conventions restricting women's professional and creative opportunities.

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"Her classic tale of the treatment of depression is not only a shocking horror story, but a powerful critique of the medical profession and one of the founding texts of American feminism," notes curator Manon Parry of the National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine Division.

Charlotte Anna Perkins met Walter Stetson when she was 21 years old. The couple married in 1884 and had a child three years later. Soon after her daughter Katharine's birth, Charlotte began to experience episodes of depression. She resented the narrow confines of married life and motherhood and, like many other women of her era, longed for greater intellectual and creative fulfillment. Her husband, however, insisted on a more traditional marriage, and she became increasingly despondent.

Charlotte consulted nervous diseases specialist Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell for treatment. As one of the many physicians who debated "the woman question," he defended the notion of significant differences between the sexes and argued that an epidemic of neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, was rife among women who attempted to exceed their natural limits. He recommended a "rest cure" in which the patient was not allowed to read, write, feed herself, or talk to others--or, as Charlotte described it: "Live as domestic a life as possible ... and never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live."

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As Charlotte undertook the regimen, she became increasingly distressed and began to fear that the rest cure was bad for her health. She decided to end the treatment and her marriage. Soon after she and her husband separated, Charlotte wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" during a heat wave in Pasadena, Calif., in the summer of 1890. She took two days to complete the 6,000-word manuscript.

The narrator is a woman prescribed the rest cure by...