Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

There should be an end to the bitterness of feeling which has arisen between the sexes in this century.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.
It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place... and the world waits while she powders her nose.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is the duty of youth to bring its fresh new powers to bear on social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should lift the world forward. That is what they are for.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A million million worlds that move in peace;
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.
They sleep beneath the sod
And trust in God.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them-on the race. You see, we are MOTHERS, she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
To speak broadly, the troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers.' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
All social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The first duty of a human is to assume the right functional relationship to society — more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman