 To solve the so-called "Negro problem" in the United States in the early twentieth century, Gilman suggested a system of state-organized labor she called "enlistment".Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Mary Perkins (formerly Mary Fitch Westcott) and Frederic Beecher Perkins.She had only one brother, Thomas Adie, who was fourteen months older, because a physician advised Mary Perkins that she might die if she bore other children.