An average American family in today's society is usually made up of a mother, a father, and a child, or children, who the father, or mother, or both, work to provide for their family or take care of their children and home. It hasn't always been this way. Modern American families and modern society are the result of the significantly changed roles of women that have occurred over the past century. For many years, women were assigned the role of “housewives” and were expected to stay at home, take care of their children, keep the house nice and clean, and comfort their husband in any way when he was home. The husband was the provider of the house; the only one who worked for pay. The picture is not as happy as it might seem; there were many limitations. According to The Norton Anthropology of American Literature, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman lived her life, for the most part, on the margins of a society whose economic assumptions and social definitions of women she vigorously repudiated” (Gilman 790). "The Yellow Wallpaper" has to some extent a relation to Gilman's life with embellishments related to the issue of the supremacy of men over women and women trying to live up to their social expectations with their role as wife-mother . Although there is a slight relationship between Gilman and the main character, we cannot assume that the unnamed character is Gilman herself. Critic Ann J. Lane commented that Gilman offered "a vivid dramatization of the social evils that arise from a competitive economic system in which women are subordinated to men and accept their subornation" (Gilman 791). Gilman managed to make his beliefs on this issue clear through the anonymous character of his short story "The Yellow".