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 poor man’s wife has far too much of other work to do to spend all
her time in waiting on her children. The rich man’s wife could do it,
but does not, partly because she hires some one to do it for her, and
partly because she, too, has other duties to occupy her time. Only in
isolated cases do we find a mother deputing all other service to others,
and concentrating her energies on feeding, clothing, washing, dressing,
and, as far as may be, educating her own child. When such cases are
found, it remains to be shown that the child so reared is
proportionately benefited by this unremittent devotion of its mother. On
the contrary, the best service and education a child can receive involve
the accumulated knowledge and exchanged activities of thousands upon
thousands besides his mother,—the fathers of the race.
There does not appear, in the care and education of the child as given
by the mother, any special superiority in human maternity. Measuring
woman first in direct comparison of her reproductive processes with
those of other animals, she does not fulfil this function so easily or
so well as they. Measuring her educative processes by inter-personal
comparison, the few admittedly able mothers with the many painfully
unable ones, she seems more lacking, if possible, than in the other
branch. The gain in human education thus far has not been acquired or
distributed through the mother, but through men and single women; and
there is nothing in the achievements of human motherhood to prove that
it is for the advantage of the race to have women give all their time to
it. Giving all their time to it does not improve it either in quantity
or quality. The woman who works is usually a better reproducer than the
woman who does not. And the woman who does not work is not
proportionately a better educator.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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