Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social EvolutionGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Women -- Economic conditions; Women -- Employment; Women -- Social and moral questions
The family is a decreasing survival of the earliest grouping known to
man. Marriage is an increasing development of high social life, not
fully evolved. So far from being identical with the family, it improves
and strengthens in inverse ratio to the family, as is easily seen by the
broad contrast between the marriage relations of Jacob and the
unquenchable demand for lifelong single mating that grows in our hearts
to-day. There was no conception of marriage as a personal union for life
of two well-matched individuals during the patriarchal era. Wives were
valued merely for child-bearing. The family needed numbers of its own
blood, especially males; and the man-child was the price of favor to
women then. It was but a few degrees beyond the horde, not yet become a
tribe in the full sense. Its bonds of union were of the loosest,—merely
common paternity, with a miscellaneous maternity of inimical interests.
Such a basis forever forbade any high individualization, and high
individualization with its demands for a higher marriage forbids any
numerical importance to the family. Marriage has risen and developed in
social importance as the family has sunk and decreased.
It is most interesting to note that, under the comparatively similar
conditions of the settlement of Utah, the numerical strength and easily
handled common interests of many people under one head, which
distinguish the polygamous family, were found useful factors in that
great pioneering enterprise. In the further development of society a
relation of individuals more fluent, subtle, and extensive was needed.
The family as a social unit makes a ponderous body of somewhat
irreconcilable constituents, requiring a sort of military rule to make
it work at all; and it is only useful while the ends to be attained are
of a simple nature, and allow of the slowest accomplishment. It is easy
to see the family extending to the tribe by its own physical increase;
and, similarly, the father hardening into the chief, under the
necessities of larger growth. Then, as the steadily enlarging forces of
national unity make the chief an outgrown name and the tribe an outgrown
form, the family dwindles to a monogamic basis, as the higher needs of
the sex-relation become differentiated from the more primitive economic
necessities of the family.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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