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

chooses the winner, so far we are directly benefited. But there is a radical distinction between sex-competition and marriage by purchase. In the first the male succeeds by virtue of what he can do; in the second, by virtue of what he can get. The increased power to do, transmitted to the young, is of racial advantage. But mere possessions, with no question as to the method of their acquisition, are not necessarily of advantage to the individual as a father. To make the sexual gain of the male rest on his purchasing power puts the immense force of sex-competition into the field of social economics, not only as an incentive to labor and achievement, which is good, but as an incentive to individual gain, however obtained, which is bad; thus accounting for our multiplied and intensified desire to get⁠—the inordinate greed of our industrial world. The tournament of the Middle Ages was a brutal sport perhaps, with its human injury, pain, and death, under the cry of: “Fight on, brave knights! Fair eyes are looking on you!” but it represents a healthier process than our modern method of securing the wherewithal to maintain the sex-relation. As so beautifully phrased by Jean Ingelow:⁠—

“I worked afar that I might rear
A happy home on English soil;
I labored for the gold and gear,
I loved my toil.

“Forever in my spirit spake
The natural whisper, ‘Well ’twill be
When loving wife and children break
Their bread with thee!’ ”

Or, put more broadly by Kipling:⁠—

“But since our women must walk gay,
And money buys their gear,
The sealing vessels filch this way
At hazard, year by year.”

The contest in every good man’s heart today between the “ought to” and the “must,” between his best work and the “potboiler,” is his personal share of this incessant struggle between social interest and self-interest. For himself and by himself he would be glad to do his best work, to be true to his ideals, to be brave in meeting loss for that truth’s sake. But as the compromising capitalist says in Put Yourself in His Place, when his sturdy young friend⁠—a bachelor⁠—wonders at his giving in to unjust demands, “Marriage makes a mouse of a man.” To the young business man who falls into evil courses in the sex-relation the open greed of his fair dependant is a menace to his honesty, to his business prospects. On the same man married the needs of his wife often operate in the same way. The sense of the dependence of the helpless creature whose food must come through him does not stimulate courage, but compels submission.

The foregoing distinction should be clearly held in mind. Legitimate sex-competition brings out all that is best in man. To please her, to win her, he strives to do his best. But the economic dependence of the female upon the male, with its ensuing purchasability, does not so affect a man: it puts upon him the necessity for getting things, not for doing them. In the lowest grades of labor, where there is no getting without doing and where the laborer always does more than he gets, this works less palpable evil than in the higher grades, the professions and arts, where the most valuable work is always ahead of the market, and where to work for the market involves a lowering of standards. The young artist or poet or scientific student works for his work’s sake, for art, for science, and so for the best good of society. But the artist or student married must get gain, must work for those who will pay; and those who will pay are not those who lift and bear forward the standard of progress. Community of interest is quite possible with those who are working most disinterestedly for the social good; but bring in the sex-relation, and all such solidarity disintegrates⁠—resolves itself into the tiny groups of individuals united on a basis of sex-union, and briskly acting in their own immediate interests at anybody’s or everybody’s expense.

The social perception of the evil resultant from the intrusion of sex-influence upon racial action has found voice in the heartless proverb, “There is no evil without a woman at the bottom of it.” When a man’s work goes wrong, his hopes fail, his ambitions sink, cynical friends inquire, “Who is she?” It is not for nothing that a man’s best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius. This judgment of the world has obtained side by side with its equal faith in the ennobling influence of woman. The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent. Both judgments are correct. Woman affecting society through the sex-relation or through her individual economic relation is an ennobling influence. Woman affecting society through our perverse combination of the two becomes a strange influence, indeed.

One of the amusing minor results of these conditions is that, while we have observed the effect of marriage upon social economic relation and the effect of social economic relation upon marriage⁠—seeing that the devoted servant of the family was a poor servant of society and that the devoted servant of society was a poor servant of the family, seeing the successful collectivity of celibate institutions⁠—we have jumped to the conclusion that collective prosperity was conditioned upon celibacy, and that we did not want it. That is why the popular mind is so ready to associate socialistic theories with injury to marriage. Having seen that marriage makes us less collective, we infer conversely that collectivity will make us less married⁠—that it will “break up the home,” “strike at the roots of the family.”

When we make plain to ourselves that a pure, lasting, monogamous sex-union can exist without bribe or purchase, without the manacles of economic dependence, and that men and women so united in sex-relation will still be free to combine with others in economic relation, we shall not regard devotion to humanity as an unnatural sacrifice, nor collective