Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

That is our common phrase for a permanent establishment in the active service of Society, otherwise known as “self-support,” “earning one’s living,” “maintaining a family.” Our average man is not expected to love his work, to enjoy it, to grow continually through it. He does all this sometimes, but too rarely. Our methods of education have been specially esteemed, not because they taught the child to like what he did, but taught him to do what he did not like. We take it for granted that he will not like his life work, and so seek to fit him for continued application to distasteful service.

In such work as this, there is a continuous waste of nerve force. Compelled attention, and action that is not led by interest and fed by the natural discharge of energy along preferred lines, are suicidally wasteful. In Nature’s effort to reduce this steady leakage of life force, she transfers the action to the domain of habit as rapidly as possible; and the sufferer experiences that much relief. Dislike, the exhausting effort of enforced attention and the plunging and kicking of more normal impulses toward other activities, give way at length to a dull contentment, a patient submission to monotonous routine, and some pale pleasure in its monotony.

There are three large distinct evils to Society in such an artificial misplacement of its members. First, the work done is not as good nor as plentiful as if it were done on lines of true organic relation, by the men specialised in power and preference for that work. In the second place, the man is weakened and worn out prematurely by the unnatural effort to do what he does not like, what he is not fitted for, what is not his own special work; thus further reducing the output. And in the third place, the overtaxed and unhappy worker requires all manner of extra inducements and palliations to keep him at his unsuitable task. He has to have rest, more and more vacations and changes, or breaks down sooner. He has to have various fictitious excitements in his work—making it a game, a race, or a fight; to make up for its lack of normal interest.

And he has to have “amusement” and “recreation” also of an unnatural, morbid kind—heavy doses of social stimulus coarsened and concentrated to suit his exhausted nerves. All this beyond the prominent well-known evil of the resort to physical stimulant and solace, such as alcohol and tobacco. These last rapidly deteriorate the physical stock of the race; again injuring Society in the stuff it is made of; but the degraded and excessive amusements injure the very soul of Society; lowering every kind of art which caters to them, and so demoralising the highest lines of advancement.

A thousand minor lines of injury may be traced, such as the increase in defective children, owing to exhausted parents, and its accompanying tax upon Society’s resources; but these main lines stand forth clearly: The limitation and degradation of the social output, and the deterioration of tissue in the constituent members of Society.

The deterioration of human stock is twofold; partly due to the strained, unnatural position of the worker; and partly due to the effect of inferior supplies furnished by his degraded product. In the more directly useful human products there is less injury than in the higher forms. In food and clothing and carpenter work it is easier to detect fault and falsehood, and there is less of it; though even in these departments our adulterated food, shoddy clothing, and jerry-built houses do harm enough; but in the more advanced professions, the evil is enormous. The faults and falsehoods in product, in literature, art, religion, government, and education, that spring, first, from their being done by the round man in the square hole, and second, from their being done for the unhealthy demands of the other round men in square holes,—these work incalculable harm.

Here is the girl who is trained to be a teacher because it is reputable, and who accepts her square hole and does her unsatisfying work as patiently and dutifully as she can. It is excellence we want in work, not a patient and dutiful inferiority. This inferior quality of teaching is further lowered by the unwise demands of the misplaced people who pay the teacher, and so a continuous morbid action is generated. It would be a hard task to show one human grief, one human sin, that does not find part of its cause and maintenance in this so general condition of our life to-day. See the comparative result in our physical organism if we set fingers to serving as toes, eyes as ears, lungs as livers. If any such misplacement were conceivable, it would involve so low a degree of development in the various parts that it was possible to exchange services, and none of them could do good service.

In the social organism such high specialism and efficiency as we have is due to the progressive force of our economic development, calling forth such positive preference in some men that they will do the work they like best. All the world’s great servants and helpers have been thus driven from within, by the rising flood of social energy, specialised to one burning focal point of expression. Such men work without reward, and regardless of opposition; work their lives long, often live and die poor and unhonoured, simply because they were true to their fundamental duty as human beings—to serve Society in the function for which they were evolved. In spite of their neglect, abuse, and injury, they are not to be pitied; for, on the one hand, they had the enormous joy of serving humanity; and on the other—even if they were not aware of that high pleasure—they had the intense functional satisfaction of doing the work they were made for.

We are so used to “the dull level of mediocrity,” and the labour whose noblest height is conscientious effort, that when we do find a strongly specialised individual so highly fitted to perform one service that he can do no other—we call him a genius. So great is the power of working in these “geniuses”—the happy lavish outpour of social energy through a natural channel—that we have put the cart before the horse as usual, and defined genius as “the capacity for hard work.” There are a thousand hard workers for one genius, but a fact like that does not worry our shallow generalisers. Unfortunately, owing to our lack of true education and the crushing weight of the false, only the exceptional genius now and then succeeds in forcing his way to his true place, and he does it by breaking through the poor, blundering, reward-and-penalty system with which we obstruct social development, and by letting out what is in him, producing his natural fruitage of work, quite irrespective of pay or punishment.

Thanks to this quenchless functional vigour of Society we are never without some natural work; and thanks to our vast facility of transmission we all share in the products of genius to a greater or less extent. Yet it is but a painful and niggard harvest compared to the universal crop we might enjoy if we would let it grow. Happiness to the individual is in fulfilment of function, it is as much in farming as in fiddling, if you like it—“every man to his taste.” And the benefit to society lies in every man’s working “to his taste”; as beautiful and desirable a combination as need be imagined.