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Charlotte Anna Perkins was born on 3 July 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, to Frederick Beecher Perkins and his distant cousin Mary Fitch Wescott Perkins. She was the youngest of three children born to the couple in their first three years of marriage: the others were Thomas Henry, born on 15 March 1858, who lived only a few weeks, and Thomas Adie, born on 9 May 1859. Gilman was born into a gifted family rooted in social activism: Her father, Frederick, was the grandson of Lyman Beecher, a noted Calvinist clergyman, who, according to Ann J. Lane, "married three times and fathered twelve surviving children, which made him, according to Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker, 'the father of more brains than any other man in America.'" Her great-aunts include Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and arguably largely responsible for changing the nation's consciousness about the issue of slavery. Born at a time of national and familial conflict and to a heritage that embodied social change, Perkins grew up to be a key social activist, and so prolific a writer that she approximated her publications to be the equivalent of twenty-five volumes of writing, an estimate closely substantiated by Gary Scharnhorst's 1985 bibliography of her work.
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