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Women and Economics
A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in
Social Evolution
By
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Boston:
Small, Maynard & Co.,
1898
PROEM
In dark and early ages, through the primal forests faring,
Ere the soul came shining into prehistoric night,
Twofold man was equal; they were comrades dear and daring,
Living wild and free together in unreasoning delight.
Ere the soul was born and consciousness came slowly,
Ere the soul was born, to man and woman, too,
Ere he found the Tree of Knowledge, that awful tree and holy,
Ere he knew he felt, and knew he knew.
Then said he to Pain, “I am wise now, and I know you!
No more will I suffer while power and wisdom last!”
Then said he to Pleasure, “I am strong, and I will show you
That the will of man can seize you,–aye, and hold you fast!”
Food he ate for pleasure, and wine he drank for gladness.
And woman? Ah, the woman! the crown of all delight!
His now,–he knew it! He was strong to madness
In that early dawning after prehistoric night.
His,–his forever! That glory sweet and tender!
Ah, but he would love her! And she should love but him!
He would work and struggle for her, he would shelter and defend her,–
She should never leave him, never, till their eyes in death were dim.
Close, close he bound her, that she should leave him never;
Weak still he kept her, lest she be strong to flee;
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And the fainting flame of passion he kept alive forever
With all the arts and forces of earth and sky and sea.
And, ah, the long journey! The slow and awful ages
They have labored up together, blind and crippled, all astray!
Through what a mighty volume, with a million shameful pages,
From the freedom of the forests to the prisons of to-day!
Food he ate for pleasure, and it slew him with diseases!
Wine he drank for gladness, and it led the way to crime!
And woman? He will hold her,–he will have her when he pleases–
And he never once hath seen her since the prehistoric time!
Gone the friend and comrade of the day when life was younger,
She who rests and comforts, she who helps and saves.
Still he seeks her vainly, with a never-dying hunger;
Alone beneath his tyrants, alone above his slaves!
Toiler, bent and weary with the load of thine own making!
Thou who art sad and lonely, though lonely all in vain!
Who hast sought to conquer Pleasure and have her for the taking,
And found that Pleasure only was another name for Pain–
Nature hath reclaimed thee, forgiving dispossession!
God hath not forgotten, though man doth still forget!
The woman-soul is rising, in despite of thy transgression–
Loose her now, and trust her! She will love thee yet!
Love thee? She will love thee as only freedom knoweth!
Love thee? She will love thee while Love itself doth live!
Fear not the heart of woman! No bitterness it showeth!
The ages of her sorrow have but taught her to forgive!
PREFACE
This book is written to offer a simple and natural explanation of one of the most common
and most perplexing problems of human life,–a problem which presents itself to almost
every individual for practical solution, and which demands the most serious attention of
the moralist, the physician, and the sociologist–
To show how some of the worst evils under which we suffer, evils long supposed to be
inherent and ineradicable in our natures, are but the result of certain arbitrary conditions
of our own adoption, and how, by removing those conditions, we may remove the evil
resultant–
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To point out how far we have already gone in the path of improvement, and how
irresistibly the social forces of to-day are compelling us further, even without our
knowledge and against our violent opposition,–an advance which may be greatly
quickened by our recognition and assistance–
To reach in especial the thinking women of to-day, and urge upon them a new sense, not
only of their social responsibility as individuals, but of their measureless racial
importance as makers of men.
It is hoped also that the theory advanced will prove sufficiently suggestive to give rise to
such further study and discussion as shall prove its error or establish its truth.
Charlotte Perkins Stetson
I.
SINCE we have learned to study the development of human life as we study the
evolution of species throughout the animal kingdom, some peculiar phenomena which
have puzzled the philosopher and moralist for so long, begin to show themselves in a new
light. We begin to see that, so far from being inscrutable problems, requiring another life
to explain, these sorrows and perplexities of our lives are but the natural results of natural
causes, and that, as soon as we ascertain the causes, we can do much to remove them.
In spite of the power of the individual will to struggle against conditions, to resist them
for a while, and sometimes to overcome them, it remains true that the human creature is
affected by his environment, as is every other living thing. The power of the individual
will to resist natural law is well proven by the life and death of the ascetic. In any one of
those suicidal martyrs may be seen the will, misdirected by the ill-informed intelligence,
forcing the body to defy every natural impulse,–even to the door of death, and through it.
But, while these exceptions show what the human will can do, the general course of life
shows the inexorable effect of conditions upon humanity. Of these conditions we share
with other living things the environment of the material universe. We are affected by
climate and locality, by physical, chemical, electrical forces, as are all animals and plants.
With the animals, we farther share the effect of our own activity, the reactionary force of
exercise. What we do, as well as what is done to us, makes us what we are. But, beyond
these forces, we come under the effect of a third set of conditions peculiar to our human
status; namely, social conditions. In the organic interchanges which constitute social life,
we are affected by each other to a degree beyond what is found even among the most
gregarious of animals. This third factor, the social environment, is of enormous force as a
modifier of human life. Throughout all these environing conditions, those which affect us
through our economic necessities are most marked in their influence.
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Without touching yet upon the influence of the social factors, treating the human being
merely as an individual animal, we see that he is modified most by his economic
conditions, as is every other animal. Differ as they may in color and size, in strength and
speed, in minor adaptation to minor conditions, all animals that live on grass have
distinctive traits in common, and all animals that eat flesh have distinctive traits in
common,–so distinctive and so common that it is by teeth, by nutritive apparatus in
general, that they are classified, rather than by means of defence or locomotion. The food
supply of the animal is the largest passive factor in his development; the processes by
which he obtains his food supply, the largest active factor in his development. It is these
activities, the incessant repetition of the exertions by which he is fed, which most modify
his structure and develope his functions. The sheep, the cow, the deer, differ in their
adaptation to the weather, their locomotive ability, their means of defence; but they agree
in main characteristics, because of their common method of nutrition.
The human animal is no exception to this rule. Climate affects him, weather affects him,
enemies affect him; but most of all he is affected, like every other living creature, by
what he does for his living. Under all the influence of his later and wider life, all the
reactive effect of social institutions, the individual is still inexorably modified by his
means of livelihood: “the hand of the dyer is subdued to what he works in.” As one clear,
world-known instance of the effect of economic conditions upon the human creature,
note the marked race-modification of the Hebrew people under the enforced restrictions
of the last two thousand years. Here is a people rising to national prominence, first as a
pastoral, and then as an agricultural nation; only partially commercial through race
affinity with the Phoenicians, the pioneer traders of the world. Under the social power of
a united Christendom–united at least in this most unchristian deed–the Jew was forced to
get his livelihood by commercial methods solely. Many effects can be traced in him to
the fierce pressure of the social conditions to which he was subjected: the intense family
devotion of a people who had no country, no king, no room for joy and pride except the
family; the reduced size and tremendous vitality and endurance of the pitilessly selected
survivors of the Ghetto; the repeated bursts of erratic genius from the human spirit so
inhumanly restrained. But more patent still is the effect of the economic conditions,–the
artificial development of a race of traders and dealers in money, from the lowest
pawnbroker to the house of Rothschild; a special kind of people, bred of the economic
environment in which they were compelled to live.
One rough but familiar instance of the same effect, from the same cause, we can all see in
the marked distinction between the pastoral, the agricultural, and the manufacturing
classes in any nation, though their other conditions be the same. On the clear line of
argument that functions and organs are developed by use, that what we use most is
developed most, and that the daily processes of supplying economic needs are the
processes that we most use, it follows that, when we find special economic conditions
affecting any special class of people, we may look for special results, and find them.
In view of these facts, attention is now called to a certain marked and peculiar economic
condition affecting the human race, and unparalleled in the organic world. We are the
only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal
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species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation. With us an entire sex lives
in a relation of economic dependence upon the other sex, and the economic relation is
combined with the sex-relation. The economic status of the human female is relative to
the sex-relation.
It is commonly assumed that this condition also obtains among other animals, but such is
not the case. There are many birds among which, during the nesting season, the male
helps the female feed the young, and partially feeds her; and, with certain of the higher
carnivora, the male helps the female feed the young, and partially feeds her. In no case
does she depend on him absolutely, even during this season, save in that of the hornbill,
where the female, sitting on her nest in a hollow tree, is walled in with clay by the male,
so that only her beak projects; and then he feeds her while the eggs are developing. But
even the female hornbill does not expect to be fed at any other time. The female bee and
ant are economically dependent, but not on the male. The workers are females, too,
specialized to economic functions solely. And with the carnivora, if the young are to lose
one parent, it might far better be the father: the mother is quite competent to take care of
them herself. With many species, as in the case of the common cat, she not only feeds
herself and her young, but has to defend the young against the male as well. In no case is
the female throughout her life supported by the male.
In the human species the condition is permanent and general, though there are exceptions,
and though the present century is witnessing the beginnings of a great change in this
respect. We have not been accustomed to face this fact beyond our loose generalization
that it was “natural,” and that other animals did so, too.
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,
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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.
To take from any community its male workers would paralyze it economically to a far
greater degree than to remove its female workers. The labor now performed by the
women could be performed by the men, requiring only the setting back of many
advanced workers into earlier forms of industry; but the labor now performed by the men
could not be performed by the women without generations of effort and adaptation. Men
can cook, clean, and sew as well as women; but the making and managing of the great
engines of modern industry, the threading of earth and sea in our vast systems of
transportation, the handling of our elaborate machinery of trade, commerce,
government,–these things could not be done so well by women in their present degree of
economic development.
This is not owing to lack of the essential human faculties necessary to such achievements,
nor to any inherent disability of sex, but to the present condition of woman, forbidding
the development of this degree of economic ability. The male human being is thousands
of years in advance of the female in economic status. Speaking collectively, men produce
and distribute wealth; and women receive it at their hands. As men hunt, fish, keep cattle,
or raise corn, so do women eat game, fish, beef, or corn. As men go down to the sea in
ships, and bring coffee and spices and silks and gems from far away, so do women
partake of the coffee and spices and silks and gems the men bring.
The economic status of the human race in any nation, at any time, is governed mainly by
the activities of the male: the female obtains her share in the racial advance only through
him.
Studied individually, the facts are even more plainly visible, more open and familiar.
From the day laborer to the millionnaire, the wife’s worn dress or flashing jewels, her low
roof or her lordly one, her weary feet or her rich equipage,–these speak of the economic
ability of the husband. The comfort, the luxury, the necessities of life itself, which the
woman receives, are obtained by the husband, and given her by him. And, when the
woman, left alone with no man to “support” her, tries to meet her own economic
necessities, the difficulties which confront her prove conclusively what the general
economic status of the woman is. None can deny these patent facts,–that the economic
status of women generally depends upon that of men generally, and that the economic
status of women individually depends upon that of men individually, those men to whom
they are related. But we are instantly confronted by the commonly received opinion that,
although it must be admitted that men make and distribute the wealth of the world, yet
women earn their share of it as wives. This assumes either that the husband is in the
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position of employer and the wife as employee, or that marriage is a “partnership,” and
the wife an equal factor with the husband in producing wealth.
Economic independence is a relative condition at best. In the broadest sense, all living
things are economically dependent upon others,–the animals upon the vegetables, and
man upon both. In a narrower sense, all social life is economically interdependent, man
producing collectively what he could by no possibility produce separately. But, in the
closest interpretation, individual economic independence among human beings means
that the individual pays for what he gets, works for what he gets, gives to the other an
equivalent for what the other gives him. I depend on the shoemaker for shoes, and the
tailor for coats; but, if I give the shoemaker and the tailor enough of my own labor as a
house-builder to pay for the shoes and coats they give me, I retain my personal
independence. I have not taken of their product, and given nothing of mine. As long as
what I get is obtained by what I give, I am economically independent.
Women consume economic goods. What economic product do they give in exchange for
what they consume? The claim that marriage is a partnership, in which the two persons
married produce wealth which neither of them, separately, could produce, will not bear
examination. A man happy and comfortable can produce more than one unhappy and
uncomfortable, but this is as true of a father or son as of a husband. To take from a man
any of the conditions which make him happy and strong is to cripple his industry,
generally speaking. But those relatives who make him happy are not therefore his
business partners, and entitled to share his income.
Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a partnership.
The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor
are her frugality and industry. A housekeeper, in her place, might be as frugal, as
industrious, but would not therefore be a partner. Man and wife are partners truly in their
mutual obligation to their children,–their common love, duty, and service. But a
manufacturer who marries, or a doctor, or a lawyer, does not take a partner in his
business, when he takes a partner in parenthood, unless his wife is also a manufacturer, a
doctor, or a lawyer. In his business, she cannot even advise wisely without training and
experience. To love her husband, the composer, does not enable her to compose; and the
loss of a man’s wife, though it may break his heart, does not cripple his business, unless
his mind is affected by grief. She is in no sense a business partner, unless she contributes
capital or experience or labor, as a man would in like relation. Most men would hesitate
very seriously before entering a business partnership with any woman, wife or not.
If the wife is not, then, truly a business partner, in what way does she earn from her
husband the food, clothing, and shelter she receives at his hands? By house service, it will
be instantly replied. This is the general misty idea upon the …
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