Document 10D: Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Aletta Jacobs, 22 September 1905

Document 10D: Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Aletta Jacobs, 22 September 1905, Received letters and postcards, no. 145, Aletta Henriette Jacobs Papers, Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Document 10D: Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Aletta Jacobs, 22 September 1905, Document 10D: Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Aletta Jacobs, 22 September 1905, Received letters and postcards, no. 145, Aletta Henriette Jacobs Papers, Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Included in How Did Eight Translations of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s WOMEN AND ECONOMICS Transmit Feminist Thought across National Boundaries in the Years before World War I?, Documents selected and interpreted by Harriet Feinberg.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

179 West 76th Street,
New York
22-9-05

Dear Dr. Jacobs,

Your sad news[A] came to me while off on another lecture trip; with my head so weak that all lectures were put aside. Now I am at home and getting able to write. What can I say to you?--only that after my visit to your hospitabIe [home] I know a little of how great is your loss.

Well for you that you are a strong valuable Human Being as well as a woman; your work will hold you up.

I have known much grief though never this crowning one; and I know that it is only in the large life of the world and one's work in it that one finds strength to bear pain.

So I'm glad you have it, with your own courageous nature.

Yours with cordial sympathy,
[signed]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Regards to the good nephew!

__________________________

A. Gilman refers to the death of Jacobs's husband, Carel Victor Gerritsen, on July 5, 1905. He died of gastrointestinal cancer.
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