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 inevitable trend of human life is toward higher civilization; but,
while that civilization is confined to one sex, it inevitably
exaggerates sex-distinction, until the increasing evil of this condition
is stronger than all the good of the civilization attained, and the
nation falls. Civilization, be it understood, does not consist in the
acquisition of luxuries. Social development is an organic development. A
civilized State is one in which the citizens live in organic industrial
relation. The more full, free, subtle, and easy that relation; the more
perfect the differentiation of labor and exchange of product, with their
correlative institutions,—the more perfect is that civilization. To eat,
drink, sleep, and keep warm,—these are common to all animals, whether
the animal couches in a bed of leaves or one of eiderdown, sleeps in the
sun to avoid the wind or builds a furnace-heated house, lies in wait for
game or orders a dinner at a hotel. These are but individual animal
processes. Whether one lays an egg or a million eggs, whether one bears
a cub, a kitten, or a baby, whether one broods its chickens, guards its
litter, or tends a nursery full of children, these are but individual
animal processes. But to serve each other more and more widely; to live
only by such service; to develope special functions, so that we depend
for our living on society’s return for services that can be of no direct
use to ourselves,—this is civilization, our human glory and
race-distinction.
All this human progress has been accomplished by men. Women have been
left behind, outside, below, having no social relation whatever, merely
the sex-relation, whereby they lived. Let us bear in mind that all the
tender ties of family are ties of blood, of sex-relationship. A friend,
a comrade, a partner,—this is a human relative. Father, mother, son,
daughter, sister, brother, husband, wife,—these are sex-relatives. Blood
is thicker than water, we say. True. But ties of blood are not those
that ring the world with the succeeding waves of progressive religion,
art, science, commerce, education, all that makes us human. Man is the
human creature. Woman has been checked, starved, aborted in human
growth; and the swelling forces of race-development have been driven
back in each generation to work in her through sex-functions alone.
This is the way in which the sexuo-economic relation has operated in our
species, checking race-development in half of us, and stimulating
sex-development in both.
V.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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