Early feminist author and advocate Charlotte Perkins Gilman is today best ed for the haunting short story The Yellow Wallpaper, which recounts the female protagonist's descent into madness. In addition to her prodigious body of fictional work, Gilman wrote a great deal of non-fiction, including scholarly and persuasive essays about equality and the female condition. This long-form essay details the misogyny that was pervasive in Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.