Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Woman Quotes

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To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development — the full use of one's best faculties — this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.

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

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
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
Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire — and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period — has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of evil.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship.

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
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