Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Now, what, in the light of truth as at present open to us, is the best way to improve the human race, and therefore our highest duty? Recognising the organic relation of Society; that our very life, to say nothing of our improvement, rests on our becoming properly related to each other in the specialised service which constitutes a human life; and to perform that service ever better—the first duty of a human being stands prominently forth. It is this:

To assume right functional relation to Society, to one another. Not charity, not philanthropy, not benevolence, not self-immolation or self-sacrifice or self anything; but simply to find and hold our proper place in the Work in which and by which we all live.

To do one’s right work involves all the virtues.

Our virtues are always matters of interrelation; they concern our attitude toward each other, our treatment of each other. An individual man, alone, can manifest no virtues beyond those of a clean beast. Human life is interrelative, and all its virtues, i. e., distinctive qualities, are interrelative. Once accept this basic duty in fulfilment of specialised service, and all those virtues, we, as individuals, have been so fatuously striving for, appear in us, as natural corollary of that right relation. Conversely our “sins,” namely, our various forms of social disease, manifest in the bewildered individual, will of themselves go out as naturally as the virtues come in.

Classify our sins. One enormous mass we call sins against property; all forms of theft, robbery, and the larger and subtler kind of dishonest appropriation. This class is the natural result of our perverted distribution of social products. It is one of the many weak spots of the Want theory that an absence of the essentials of life, instead of promoting industry, often produces more direct and injurious methods of transfer. Quite the larger part of our legal machinery is devoted to the maintenance of the local congestion of wealth on the one hand, and to the prevention of the breaking-down of the social tissues under pressure of that congestion on the other. Given a surplus of wealth in some places and a deficit in others, and the fabric of human nature breaks down in a given proportion.

Want makes men steal quite as naturally as it makes them work, indeed more so, as being the earlier custom. Our political economics founded on the Want theory should give half their pages to a study of the proportionate relation between Want, Theft, and Wealth, after the learned discussion of Want, Work, and Wealth. One is as legitimate a fact in economics as the other.

That normal distribution of social products which would provide the growing individual with all that he needed to bring out his best powers, and which would teach him clearly where and how to use those powers in return, would drop out of the world completely this class of sins. The supply coming first, the child growing up to measure his conduct as a return for what has been given him; taught from infancy to see in the world, behind and around him, the endless Giver, and himself as the product of it all and owing his output to those now alive, and more especially those to come—that child, that man, will have no comprehension of theft, major or minor. In a word: All illegitimate acquisition of property rests on the illegitimate retention of property. Remove the cause, and you remove the effect.

What remains? Sins against the person. Part of these are based on property also,—all murder and violence done “with interested motives,” or in revenge for previous injury to property, or denial of property. A large majority of the sins against the person would go, too, when we establish right distribution.

There remain the sins based on the sex relation. The right economic position for women will remove the greater part of these. When women no longer make their living out of their loving, the prostitute, and that more successful specialist, the mercenary wife, will leave the world. The reduction of sex-attraction from its present fever-height to a normal level, and the perfect freedom for true marriage resultant upon right distribution of property, will take away the cruder and more violent forms of sexual sin, and gives us pure monogamy at last.

I do not say that all sin would leave the world upon our assuming right economic relations; nor even that this great mass would disappear in a night; but the cause of the disease being removed, the healthy social currents would flow calmly on and we should soon outgrow these evils too long endured. Social disease will eliminate itself by right living as does physical disease.