What Charlotte Perkins Gilman thinks about gender equality
American writer and feminist theorist (1860 to 1935); author of Women and Economics.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not write this page.
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17 dated positions, c. 1898, in their own words. Our reading of what Charlotte Perkins Gilman has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsIt is not motherhood that keeps the housewife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service, not child service.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsSex-distinction in humanity is so marked as to retard and confuse race-distinction, to check individual distinction, seriously to injure the race.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Our readingThe sexuo-economic relation has checked human development in women and overdeveloped sex in both
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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsThe mercenary marriage is a perfectly natural consequence of the economic dependence of women.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Our readingWomen barred from production create a market for luxury that checks true industry and art
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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Our readingThe sexuo-economic relation was necessary to make the human male more feminine and so more human
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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsNo sociological change equal in importance to this clearly marked improvement of an entire sex has ever taken place in one century.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Our readingMarriage is flawed when women enter it for food and clothes and men for cooks and housekeepers
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.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book
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Their wordsWhat we need to see is that it is not woman as a sex who is responsible for this mis-mothered world, but the economic position of woman which makes her what she is.
↗Women and Economics (1898)gutenberg.org All 20 from this book