Charlotte Perkins Gilman

c. 1898

Their wordsWe are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation.

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c. 1898

Their wordsIt is revolting so to consider them; and, if we dare face our own thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see that nothing could be more repugnant to human feeling, or more socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a trade.

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c. 1898

Their wordsIt is not motherhood that keeps the housewife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service, not child service.

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c. 1898

Their wordsSex-distinction in humanity is so marked as to retard and confuse race-distinction, to check individual distinction, seriously to injure the race.

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c. 1898

Their wordsFor, in her position of economic dependence in the sex-relation, sex-distinction is with her not only a means of attracting a mate, as with all creatures, but a means of getting her livelihood, as is the case with no other creature under heaven.

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c. 1898

Their wordsThis is the way in which the sexuo-economic relation has operated in our species, checking race-development in half of us, and stimulating sex-development in both.

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c. 1898

Their wordsThe mercenary marriage is a perfectly natural consequence of the economic dependence of women.

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c. 1898

Their wordsHalf the human race is denied free productive expression, is forced to confine its productive human energies to the same channels as its reproductive sex-energies.

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c. 1898

Their wordsAgain, the consuming female, debarred from any free production, unable to estimate the labor involved in the making of what she so lightly destroys, and her consumption limited mainly to those things which minister to physical pleasure, creates a market for sensuous decoration and personal ornament, for all that is luxurious and enervating, and for a false and capricious variety in such supplies, which operates as a most deadly check to true industry and true art.

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c. 1898

Their wordsThe sexuo-economic relation was necessary to raise and broaden, to deepen and sweeten, to make more feminine, and so more human, the male of the human race.

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c. 1898

Their wordsThe banner advanced proclaims “equality before the law,” woman’s share in political freedom; but the main line of progress is and has been toward economic equality and freedom.

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c. 1898

Their wordsNo sociological change equal in importance to this clearly marked improvement of an entire sex has ever taken place in one century.

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c. 1898

Their wordsSo far from the economic dependence of women working in the interests of motherhood, it is the steadily acting cause of a pathological maternity and a decreasing birth-rate.

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c. 1898

Their wordsMotherhood is the work of grown women, not of half-children; and, when we honestly care as much for motherhood as we pretend, we shall train the woman for her duty, not the girl for her guileless manœuvres to secure a husband.

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c. 1898

Their wordsIf it can be shown that our babies would be better off if part of their time was passed in other care than their mothers’, then such other care would be right; and it would be the duty of motherhood to provide it.

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c. 1898

Their wordsArchitecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and, while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur’s work.

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c. 1898

Their wordsA home in which the rightly dominant feminine force is held at a primitive plane of development, and denied free participation in the swift, wide, upward movement of the world, reacts upon those who hold it down by holding them down in turn.

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c. 1898

Their wordsIt is in the training of children for this stage of human life that the private home has ceased to be sufficient, or the isolated, primitive, dependent woman capable.

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c. 1898

Their wordsIt is a glaring proof of the insufficient and irritating character of our existing form of marriage that women must be forced to it by the need of food and clothes, and men by the need of cooks and housekeepers.

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