Coursework focus TYW: getting AO3 (context) embedded in your essay

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in 1892.  She was concerned with political and social inequality in general. 

In 1898 (6 years after the publication of The Yellow Wallpaper), she published a study called "Women and Economics: a study of the economic relation between men and women as a factor in social evolution".  In this, she argued that financial independence for women could only benefit society as a whole.  This was a radical viewpoint in America in the 19th Century. 

Below is the preface from her study:

PREFACE

This book is written to offer a simple and natural explanation of one of the most common and most perplexing problems of human life,–a problem which presents itself to almost every individual for practical solution, and which demands the most serious attention of the moralist, the physician, and the sociologist–
To show how some of the worst evils under which we suffer, evils long supposed to be inherent and ineradicable in our natures, are but the result of certain arbitrary conditions of our own adoption, and how, by removing those conditions, we may remove the evil resultant–
To point out how far we have already gone in the path of improvement, and how irresistibly the social forces of to-day are compelling us further, even without our knowledge and against our violent opposition,–an advance which may be greatly quickened by our recognition and assistance–
To reach in especial the thinking women of to-day, and urge upon them a new sense, not only of their social responsibility as individuals, but of their measureless racial importance as makers of men.
It is hoped also that the theory advanced will prove sufficiently suggestive to give rise to such further study and discussion as shall prove its error or establish its truth.

For further critical quotations (AO5) that hint at the context of The Yellow Wallpaper and Victorian literature, (AO3)  click here, or the image of the Gilman quotation, above.