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

to do now. Her personality developed by a free and useful life, clearheaded and open-eyed⁠—a woman still, but a personality as well as a woman⁠—the girl trained to economic independence, and associating freely with young men in their common work and play, would learn a new estimate of what constitutes noble manhood.

The young man, no longer able to cover all his shortcomings with a dress-coat, and to obtain absolution for every offence by the simple penance of paying for it, unable really to do much that was wrong for lack of the old opportunity and the old incentive, constantly helped and inspired by the friendly presence of honest and earnest womanhood, would have all the force of natural law to lift him up instead of pulling him heavily downward, as it does now.

With the pressure of our over-developed sex-instinct lifted off the world, born clean and strong, of noble-hearted, noble-minded, noble-bodied mothers, trained in the large wisdom of the new motherhood, and living freely in daily association with the best womanhood, a new kind of man can and will grow on earth. What this will mean to the race in power and peace and happiness no eye can foresee. But this much we can see:⁠—that our once useful sexuo-economic relation is being outgrown, that it now produces many evil phenomena, and that its displacement by the economic freedom of woman will of itself set free new forces, to develop in us, by their natural working, the very virtues for which we have striven and agonized so long.

This change is not a thing to prophesy and plead for. It is a change already instituted, and gaining ground among us these many years with marvellous rapidity. Neither men nor women wish the change. Neither men nor women have sought it. But the same great force of social evolution which brought us into the old relation⁠—to our great sorrow and pain⁠—is bringing us out, with equal difficulty and distress. The time has come when it is better for the world that women be economically independent, and therefore they are becoming so.

It is worth while for us to consider the case fully and fairly, that we may see what it is that is happening to us, and welcome with open arms the happiest change in human condition that ever came into the world. To free an entire half of humanity from an artificial position; to release vast natural forces from a strained and clumsy combination, and set them free to work smoothly and easily as they were intended to work; to introduce conditions that will change humanity from within, making for better motherhood and fatherhood, better babyhood and childhood, better food, better homes, better society⁠—this is to work for human improvement along natural lines. It means enormous racial advance, and that with great swiftness; for this change does not wait to create new forces, but sets free those already potentially strong, so that humanity will fly up like a released spring. And it is already happening. All we need do is to understand and help.

XV

As we learn to see how close is the connection of that which we call the soul with our external conditions, how the moral sense and the behavior of man are modified by the environment, we must of course look for marked results in psychic development arising from so important a condition as our sexuo-economic relation.

The relation of the sexes, in whatever form, has always been observed to affect strongly the moral nature of mankind; and this is one reason why we have placed such disproportionate stress upon the special virtues of that relation. The word “moral” in common use means “chaste”; and, in the case of women, the word “virtue” itself simply implies the one virtue of chastity. Large, popular conceptions are never baseless. They are rooted in deep truths, felt rather than seen, and, however false and silly in external interpretation, may be trusted in their general trend. It is not that the virtue of chastity is so much more important to the race than the virtue of honesty, the virtue of courage, the virtues of cheerfulness, of courtesy, of kindness, but that upon the sex-relation in which we live depends so much of the further development and arrangement of our whole moral nature.

What we call the moral sense is an intellectual recognition of the relative importance of certain acts and their consequences. This appears vaguely and weakly among early savages, and was for long mainly applied to a few clearly defined and arbitrary rites and ceremonies, set rules in a game of priest-and-people. But the habit of associating a sense of worthiness with certain acts by which came praise and profit grew in the childish soul, and the range of moral deeds widened. It has been widening ever since, growing deeper and higher and far more subtle, developing with the other social qualities.

No human distinction is more absolutely and exclusively social than the moral sense. Ethics is a social science. There is no ethics for the individual. Taken by himself, man is but an animal; and his conduct bears relation only to the needs of the animal⁠—self-preservation and race-preservation. Every virtue, and the power to see and strive for it, is a social quality. The highest virtues are those wherein we best serve the most people, and their development in us keeps pace with the development of society. It is the social relation which calls for our virtues, and which maintains them.

A simple instance of this is in the prompt lapse to barbarism of a man cut off from his kind, and forced to live in conditions of savagery. Even a brief and partial change in condition changes conduct at once, as is shown by the behavior of the most pious New Englanders when in mining camps. It is shown, also, by the different scale of virtue in the different classes and industries.

Every social relation has its ethics; and the general