Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman [epub read online books .txt] 📗

every condition of life tends to develop sex in women, to crush out the power and the desire for economic production and exchange, and to develop also the age-long habit of seeking all earthly good at a man’s hands and of making but one return; where, on the other hand, man inherits the excess in sex-energy, and is never blamed for exercising it, and where he develops also the age-long habit of taking what he wants from women, for whose helpless acquiescence he makes an economic return⁠—what should naturally follow? Precisely what has followed. We live in a world of law, and humanity is no exception to it. We have produced a certain percentage of females with inordinate sex-tendencies and inordinate greed for material gain. We have produced a certain percentage of males with inordinate sex-tendencies and a cheerful willingness to pay for their gratification. And, as the percentage of such men is greater than the percentage of such women, we have worked out most evil methods of supplying the demand. But always in the healthy social heart we have known that it was wrong, a racial wrong, productive of all evil. Being a man’s world, it was quite inevitable that he should blame woman for their mutual misdoing. There is reason in it, too. Bad as he is, he is only seeking gratification natural in kind, though abnormal in degree. She is not only in some cases doing this, but in most cases showing the falseness of the deed by doing it for hire⁠—physical falsehood⁠—a sin against nature.

It is a true instinct that revolts against obtaining bread by use of the sex-functions. Why, then, are we so content to do this in marriage? Legally and religiously, we say that it is right; but in its reactionary effect on the parties concerned and on society at large it is wrong. The physical and psychical effects are evil, though modified by our belief that it is right. The physical and psychical effects of prostitution were still evil when the young girls of Babylon earned their dowries thereby in the temple of Bela, and thought it right. What we think and feel alters the moral quality of an act in our consciousness as we do it, but does not alter its subsequent effect. We justify and approve the economic dependence of women upon the sex-relation in marriage. We condemn it unsparingly out of marriage. We follow it with our blame and scorn up to the very doors of marriage⁠—the mercenary bride⁠—but think no harm of the mercenary wife, filching her husband’s pockets in the night. Love sanctifies it, we say: love must go with it.

Love never yet went with self-interest. The deepest antagonism lies between them: they are diametrically opposed forces. In the beautiful progress of evolution we find constant opposition between the instincts and processes of self-preservation and the instinct and processes of race-preservation. From those early forms where birth brought death, as in the flowering aloe, the ephemeral mayfly, up to the highest glory of self-effacing love; these two forces work in opposition. We have tied them together. We have made the woman, the mother⁠—the very source of sacrifice through love⁠—get gain through love⁠—a hideous paradox. No wonder that our daily lives are full of the flagrant evils produced by this unnatural state. No wonder that men turn with loathing from the kind of women they have made.

VI

The peculiar combination of functions which we are studying has not only an immediate effect on individuals through sex-action, and through the sex-affected individuals upon society, but also an effect upon society through economic action, and through the economically affected society upon the individual.

The economic aspect of the question brings it prominently forward today as influencing not only our private health and happiness and the processes of reproduction, but our public health and happiness and the processes of social economics as well. Society is confronted in this age with most pressing problems in economics, and we need the fullest understanding of the factors involved. These problems are almost wholly social rather than physical, and concern not the capacity of a given society to produce and distribute enough wealth for its maintenance, but some maladjustment of internal processes which checks that production and distribution, and develops such irregular and morbid processes of innutrition, malnutrition, and over-nutrition as continually to injure the health and activity of the social organism. Our difficulty about wealth is not in getting it out of the earth, but in getting it away from one another. We have phenomena before us in the development of social economic relations analogous to those accompanying our development in sex-relation.

In the original constituents of society, the human animal in its primitive state, economic processes were purely individual. The amount of food obtained by a given man bore direct relation to his own personal exertions. Other men were to him merely undesirable competitors for the same goods; and, the fewer these competitors were, the more goods remained for him. Therefore, he killed as many of his rivals as possible. Given a certain supply of needed food, as the edible beasts or fruits in a forest, and a certain number of individuals to get this food, each by his own exertions, it follows that, the more numerous the individuals, the less food to be obtained by each; and, conversely, the fewer the individuals, the more food to be obtained by each. Wherefore, the primitive savage slew his fellow-man at sight, on good economic grounds. This is the extreme of individual competition, perfectly logical, and, in its time, economically right. That time is forever past. The basic condition of human life is union; the organic social relation, the interchange of functional service, wherein the individual is most advantaged, not by his own exertions for his own goods, but by the exchange of his exertions with the exertions of others for goods produced by them together. We are not treating here of any