Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty - for growth.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold.... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We have built into the constitution of the human race the habit and desire of taking, as divorced from its natural precursor and concomitant of making.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
If only religion could be brought to take an interest in this earthly future, what a help it would be!... Think of the appeal to the less spiritual of us, to those who never did get enthusiastic about eternity, or care so tenderly about their own souls, yet who could rise to the thought of improving this world for the children they love, and their children after them.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is not for nothing that a man's best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages--not alimony.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gaveus relgions which coule not possible maintained without belief and obedience:... we find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to swquare their beliefs with the laws of life.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Architecture 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.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A family unity which is only bound together with a table-cloth is of questionable value.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more, I saw at last its meaning and its place; Not the blind passion of the brooding past, But Mother -- the World's Mother -- come at last, To love as she had never loved before -- To feed and guard and teach the human race.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life-of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman