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
What the human race requires is permanent provision for the needs of
individuals, disconnected from the sex-relation. Our assumption that
only married people and their immediate relatives have any right to live
in comfort and health is erroneous. Every human being needs a
home,—bachelor, husband, or widower, girl, wife, or widow, young or old.
They need it from the cradle to the grave, and without regard to
sex-connections. We should so build and arrange for the shelter and
comfort of humanity as not to interfere with marriage, and yet not to
make that comfort dependent upon marriage. With the industries of home
life managed professionally, with rooms and suites of rooms and houses
obtainable by any person or persons desiring them, we could live singly
without losing home comfort and general companionship, we could meet
bereavement without being robbed of the common conveniences of living as
well as of the heart’s love, and we could marry in ease and freedom
without involving any change in the economic base of either party
concerned.
Married people will always prefer a home together, and can have it; but
groups of women or groups of men can also have a home together if they
like, or contiguous rooms. And individuals even could have a house to
themselves, without having, also, the business of a home upon their
shoulders.
Take the kitchens out of the houses, and you leave rooms which are open
to any form of arrangement and extension; and the occupancy of them does
not mean “housekeeping.” In such living, personal character and taste
would flower as never before; the home of each individual would be at
last a true personal expression; and the union of individuals in
marriage would not compel the jumbling together of all the external
machinery of their lives,—a process in which much of the delicacy and
freshness of love, to say nothing of the power of mutual rest and
refreshment, is constantly lost. The sense of lifelong freedom and
self-respect and of the peace and permanence of one’s own home will do
much to purify and uplift the personal relations of life, and more to
strengthen and extend the social relations. The individual will learn to
feel himself an integral part of the social structure, in close, direct,
permanent connection with the needs and uses of society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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