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 sex relation is intensely personal. All the functions and relations
ensuing are intensely personal. The spirit of “me and my wife, my son
John and his wife, us four, and no more,” is the natural spirit of this
phase of life. By confining half the world to this one set of functions,
we have confined it absolutely to the personal. And man that is born of
woman is reared by her in this same atmosphere of concentrated
personality, and afterward spends a large part of his life in it. This
condition tends to magnify the personal and minimize the general in our
minds, with results that are familiar to us all. The difficulty of
enforcing sanitary laws, where personal convenience must be sacrificed
to general safety, the size of the personal grievance as against the
general, the need of “having it brought home to us,” which hinders every
step of public advancement, and our eager response when it is “brought
home to us,”—these are truisms. So far as a comparison can be made,
women are in this sense more personal than men, more personally
sensitive, less willing to “stand in line” and “take turns,” less able
to see why a general restriction is just when it touches them or their
children. This is natural enough, inevitable enough, and only mentioned
here as partially explaining why people do not see the general facts as
to our over-sexed condition. Yet they are patent everywhere, not only
patent, but painful. Being used to them, we do not notice them, or,
forced to notice them, we attribute the pain we feel to the evil
behavior of some individual, and never think of it as being the result
of a condition common to us all.
If we have among us such a condition as has been stated,—a state of
morbid and excessive sex-development,—it must, of course, show itself in
daily life in a thousand ways. The non-observer, not having seen any
such manifestation, concludes that there is none, and so denies the
alleged condition,—says it sounds all right, but he does not see any
proof of it! Having clearly in mind that, if such proof exists, such
commensurate evil in common life as would naturally result from an
abnormal sex-distinction, these evils must be so common and habitual as
to pass unobserved; and, farther, that, when forced upon our notice, we
only see them as matters of personal behavior,—let us, in spite of these
hindrances, see if the visible results among us are not such as must
follow such a cause, and let us seek them merely in the phenomena of
every-day life as we know it, not in the deeper sexual or social
results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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