Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Women and Economics (1898)

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

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Legitimate sex-competition brings out all that is best in man.

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
What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The labour of women in the house, certainly enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed to men and forbidden to women.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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
While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman