Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Under the Ego concept they speak of “every man’s right to the product of his own labour,” a sociological absurdity. In the first place no member of Society has any “own” labour, our labour is all collective and co-ordinate. In the second place it is not the product of his fraction of our labour that a man wants, but the product of the labour of many other persons, of all times and places. In the third place it is not even “the equivalent” of his fraction of our labour that a man wants, it is a previous supply of the social product bearing no relation to his subsequent output except that of nourishment and stimulus.

In short, there is no true class-distinction in acceptance of those deep-seated errors which together modify the conduct of mankind so injuriously. The false classification we are treating is the product of those errors. With right economic belief and action there would be no division of Producer and Consumer, no Leisure Class, no Working Class, no serried ranks of Capital and Labour. All would produce, all would consume; all would work and all would have leisure; all would share in the social capital and the social labour,—both elements of social advantage.

The economic relation of the sexes is of enormous importance in our present-day problems, as I have endeavored to point out in my previous book, “Women and Economics.” The economic dependence of the female on the male, her food being obtained, not in industrial relation with society, but in the sex relation with the individual male, affects the race not only through the ensuing overdevelopment of sex, but through an artificial maintenance of primitive ideas and feelings in economics. The woman’s artless attitude of taking all that is given her and frequently asking for more, without ever entertaining the idea of return in kind, of paying for her keep, maintains in the race, as we have previously shown, the tendency to inordinate consumption, the quenchless appetite of a parasite. This parasitic appetite is the invariable result of economic dependence. We need not wonder at the evolution of a parasitic class when we maintain, or seek to maintain, a parasitic sex.

As we have seen in an earlier chapter, another effect of this condition is, by its resultant exaggeration of the sex nature of the male, to maintain in him the belligerent and destructive tendencies which belong to a remote period of race improvement through sex competition, a period of animal individualism, and which work much evil in a period of constructive and co-ordinate industry. Where wealth and progress depend on the cordial intelligent interdependence of the group, it is most deteriorating to have maintained this primitive attitude of sex combat. Again, the male, being obliged to provide goods for several persons besides himself, and yet being limited in goods to the amount he can himself produce, the natural desires of the individual are augmented by the accumulated desires of the whole family, yet gratified only through him; and each man faces the world, with the output of one, yet requiring the income to support six—or whatever number he represents! According to the Want theory this is a beautiful provision of nature for augmenting the man’s output. In the light of fact it does nothing of the kind. It simply augments his desire to get—in no way adding to his power to give. That moving mirror of life, our literature, is one long picture of the effects of this incarnate appetite at home, dragging ever at the man’s purse strings, and pushing hard against social honour, social duty, all the high traits of citizenship.

The child, most important of all, reared in this atmosphere of continual demand, seeing his father looking on the world as a place to hunt for prey for his mate and young, seeing his mother do nothing whatever but minister to the family needs, inevitably grows up to look at life in the same way. To his growing soul, the world appears to be a number of houses with families in them. The business of life appears to be to keep house for these families. The mother does this in a life of personal service. The father does it in mulcting “the world” as far as he is able.

If, on the contrary, a young human being grew up to see his father regarding his work for humanity as the chief duty in life, his mother with the same attitude, both regarding the consumption of goods as but a means to further and better work, and those goods always explained to him to come, not from the individual exertions of his father “wrestling with the world,” but from the combined exertions of that world—that great, rich, kind, ever-fruitful, and generous world of willing workers which feeds all its children so well,—but I stray into consideration of future conditions instead of present.

At present we have for the common lot of humanity that painful exhibition known as “the round man in the square hole.” Of all human troubles, none is so universal as this—a man’s work does not fit him. His income is insufficient, his output is insufficient, and he does not healthfully enjoy the process of living. A general condition of misadaptation, with necessary results of mal-nutrition and mal-production,—that is the prominent and visible symptom of our deep-lying psychological errors.

Consider the life of a typical average man.

He is misborn, misfed, mistaught, mis-clothed, misgoverned, to a varying degree. Instead of having a clear view of the social life and his place in it, he has a false and distorted view of his personal life, and only sees the social action as it infringes on him. He is surrounded from infancy with poor workmanship, the grudging product of those unhappy, misplaced men in square holes. The education which should be his introduction to the great and beautiful facts and laws of life, is too often a “bread-winning” process, practised by celibate women, as being more respectable than other work, and introducing him merely to a mass of unrelated facts and old ideas. The higher the field of social service, the less does “whip-dodging” or “bread-winning” help, and none is higher than teaching.

Thus mishandled, the boy grows up without the aid of that subtle discernment and delicately applied special training which would have brought out his best faculties. He is a blurred, indeterminate, self-contradicting group of faculties, he has no unerring organic preference to lead him to his work. He is the nearest approach we can make to that “all-round man” we hear so much of; but the intricate duties of social service do not furnish us with one-sized cylindrical holes for our machine-made pegs. Into some hole he must go, we will not feed him else; so in he pops, and “settles down for life.”