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
To many this view will not seem clear at first; and the case of working
peasant women or females of savage tribes, and the general household
industry of women, will be instanced against it. Some careful and honest
discrimination is needed to make plain to ourselves the essential facts
of the relation, even in these cases. The horse, in his free natural
condition, is economically independent. He gets his living by his own
exertions, irrespective of any other creature. The horse, in his present
condition of slavery, is economically dependent. He gets his living at
the hands of his master; and his exertions, though strenuous, bear no
direct relation to his living. In fact, the horses who are the best fed
and cared for and the horses who are the hardest worked are quite
different animals. The horse works, it is true; but what he gets to eat
depends on the power and will of his master. His living comes through
another. He is economically dependent. So with the hard-worked savage or
peasant women. Their labor is the property of another: they work under
another will; and what they receive depends not on their labor, but on
the power and will of another. They are economically dependent. This is
true of the human female both individually and collectively.
In studying the economic position of the sexes collectively, the
difference is most marked. As a social animal, the economic status of
man rests on the combined and exchanged services of vast numbers of
progressively specialized individuals. The economic progress of the
race, its maintenance at any period, its continued advance, involve the
collective activities of all the trades, crafts, arts, manufactures,
inventions, discoveries, and all the civil and military institutions
that go to maintain them. The economic status of any race at any time,
with its involved effect on all the constituent individuals, depends on
their world-wide labors and their free exchange. Economic progress,
however, is almost exclusively masculine. Such economic processes as
women have been allowed to exercise are of the earliest and most
primitive kind. Were men to perform no economic services save such as
are still performed by women, our racial status in economics would be
reduced to most painful limitations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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