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 harm does not lie in loving home and in staying there as one can,
but in the kind of a home and in the kind of womanhood that it fosters,
in the grade of industrial development on which it rests. And here,
without prophesying, it is easy to look along the line of present
progress, and see whither our home life tends. From the cave and tent
and hovel up to a graded, differentiated home, with as much room for the
individual as the family can afford; from the surly dominance of the
absolute patriarch, with his silent servile women and chattel children,
to the comparative freedom, equality, and finely diversified lives of a
well-bred family of to-day; from the bottom grade of industry in the
savage camp, where all things are cooked together by the same person in
the same pot,—without neatness, without delicacy, without
specialization,—to the million widely separated hands that serve the
home to-day in a thousand wide-spread industries,—the man and the mill
have achieved it all; the woman has but gone shopping outside, and
stayed at the base of the pyramid within.
And, more important and suggestive yet, mark this: whereas, in historic
beginnings, nothing but the home of the family existed; slowly, as we
have grown, has developed the home of the individual. The first wider
movement of social life meant a freer flux of population,—trade,
commerce, exchange, communication. Along river courses and sea margins,
from canoe to steamship, along paths and roads as they made them, from
“shank’s mare to the iron horse,” faster and freer, wider and oftener,
the individual human beings have flowed and mingled in the life that is
humanity. At first the traveller’s only help was hospitality,—the right
of the stranger; but his increasing functional use brought with it, of
necessity, the organic structure which made it easy, the transitory
individual home. From the most primitive caravansary up to the square
miles of floor-space in our grand hotels, the public house has met the
needs of social evolution as no private house could have done.
To man, so far the only fully human being of his age, the bachelor
apartment of some sort has been a temporary home for that part of his
life wherein he had escaped from one family and not yet entered another.
To woman this possibility is opening to-day. More and more we see women
presuming to live and have a home, even though they have not a family.
The family home itself is more and more yielding to the influence of
progress. Once it was stationary and permanent, occupied from generation
to generation. Now we move, even in families,—move with reluctance and
painful objection and with bitter sacrifice of household goods; but move
we must under the increasing irritation of irreconcilable conditions.
And so has sprung up and grown to vast proportions that startling,
portent of our times, the “family hotel.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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