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
Love never yet went with self-interest. The deepest antagonism lies
between them: they are diametrically opposed forces. In the beautiful
progress of evolution we find constant opposition between the instincts
and processes of self-preservation and the instinct and processes of
race-preservation. From those early forms where birth brought death, as
in the flowering aloe, the ephemeral may-fly, up to the highest glory of
self-effacing love; these two forces work in opposition. We have tied
them together. We have made the woman, the mother,—the very source of
sacrifice through love,—get gain through love,—a hideous paradox. No
wonder that our daily lives are full of the flagrant evils produced by
this unnatural state. No wonder that men turn with loathing from the
kind of women they have made.
VI.
The peculiar combination of functions which we are studying has not only
an immediate effect on individuals through sex-action, and through the
sex-affected individuals upon society, but also an effect upon society
through economic action, and through the economically affected society
upon the individual.
The economic aspect of the question brings it prominently forward to-day
as influencing not only our private health and happiness and the
processes of reproduction, but our public health and happiness and the
processes of social economics as well. Society is confronted in this age
with most pressing problems in economics, and we need the fullest
understanding of the factors involved. These problems are almost wholly
social rather than physical, and concern not the capacity of a given
society to produce and distribute enough wealth for its maintenance, but
some maladjustment of internal processes which checks that production
and distribution, and developes such irregular and morbid processes of
innutrition, malnutrition, and over-nutrition as continually to injure
the health and activity of the social organism. Our difficulty about
wealth is not in getting it out of the earth, but in getting it away
from one another. We have phenomena before us in the development of
social economic relations analogous to those accompanying our
development in sex-relation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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