Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The capacity of the world to support humanity in health and comfort has a limit; it is not near enough to frighten us, but it is there. If human beings are left to struggle on alone in unnatural individualism, their arrested development fills up the world, too, with numerous, but inefficient people. But as a conscious and intelligent society hastens to spread its gains among all its parts; to make the progress of the race the rich possession of all its members; so fully to educate and develop every child as to promote the higher specialisation of the individual, at a rate unconscious natural processes never dreamed of, then we see a steady diminution of this threatening birth rate. By this means we work steadily toward a far higher average of social efficiency, with a permanent balance of birth and death, involving no arbitrary personal tampering with natural processes, but a recognition of the working of natural law.

It would seem needless to say that the individuation of woman is the most prominent necessity here, as her rate of fecundity is the determining factor in the case, not the man’s; yet there are still some who ignore even so patent a fact as this.

See, then, how swiftly and surely an awakened society can right its wrongs, cure and outgrow its diseases, understand, pity, and leave far behind its sins. The highest human duty for the individual is to enter upon his or her special work in the world—that is vital, that is first, that underlies all. There is no right life for any human creature who is not taking part in the organic processes of Society. And if, in our present blurred and jumbled condition, we have not the sure guide of a “calling,” a special inborn preference and power; why, that only leaves us freer to take hold anywhere of the thousand things that need doing; paid, or unpaid—that is immaterial. The point is to do the work and to do it for the service of Society. No matter for the past account, for arrears of social pampering or social neglect; we are all responsible for both. No malicious crowd of despots, masters, owners, and employers has conspired to injuriously deprive the angelic workingman of his rights. We have all believed in these economic falsehoods, the inevitable action of which was to produce the conditions we now suffer from. We must all lay them aside; wasting no time or energy on remorse, and simply set to work to make things right.

From that class of people who “do not have to work”—that is, who have been paid and overpaid in advance—there is an overwhelming debt of honour due the world. In that great field of action where there is no pay, nor even thanks as yet; in the efforts necessary to teach the right things, and to provide the right things for the world’s little children, there is ample room for the most helplessly rich. Also in the work of spreading the social supplies where they belong—among the whole people—there is work there, much work, not only unpaid and unthanked, but heartily resisted.

There was never a time in history when more splendid opportunities were open to those who would serve society. Thousands of us are at it already, organised and unorganised; a rising flood of love and service, toiling manfully, and womanfully, at the mighty task. But the economic darkness makes it blind work at best.

Most of our conscious “social service” to-day is directed, naturally enough, to ministering to the social diseases. Now, if a man is sick, there are two ways to re-establish his health—both necessary. One is to restore normal conditions to his body, trusting that a normal body will urge to normal action, and so keep him well. The other is to induce normal action, trusting to that to restore right conditions in the body. Each is a good thing, each tends to produce the desired result; but both are incomparably better than either. Our sick Society needs this double treatment. The first condition of normal action we have here reviewed at length; consciously to assume true place in the organic industries of human life. If all of us do that, the currents of right action will assuredly build us a healthy social body. But we can greatly hasten that good end by rearranging the social body too. Here the law of interaction between spirit and form comes to our aid, and makes possible an incredible rate of progress.

Take, for instance, an advanced case in social pathology—a city slum. Now there are two ways for a conscious society to focus its forces on the diseased part and regenerate it. One is by dealing with the spirit of the slum, the people themselves; by so educating the children, so stimulating the adult, so providing proper opportunity for right social service for all, that the people will change in character, and, reacting, soon make the slum a fair, clean, healthful part of the city.

The other is to deal with the body of the slum, the houses, streets, and shops; and so to reconstruct them that they shall steadily react on the people and change their character. Both can be done, both are being done, but so feebly and partially, in such tiny spots of change, under such heavy opposition and heavier indifference, that the gain is heart-breakingly slow. While one playground is being made, while one new method of education is being introduced, a thousand babies die, a thousand children become criminals, a thousand wretched men and women sink to the hopeless grade, are lost to society, become diseased tissue, and are miserably sloughed off through asylum, prison, and hospital.

The cause of the delay is this: We are treating social disease by local application. We find, as it were, a tubercle or boil upon the body politic, we apply all manner of treatment-the poultice, the counter-irritant, the excising knife of capital punishment; but we forget, or do not know, that this local trouble, however poignantly conspicuous, is on a living body, and is caused and maintained by diseased conditions in that body, far beyond the material boundaries of that location.

We must, of course, use prompt and strong measures in these most painful spots; but the treatment necessary to prevent the formation of these conspicuously evil places must be applied to all of us. It is as necessary for the right education and stimulus to be applied to the rich and well-to-do as to the poor, to the isolated farmer in the field as well as the crowded sweater in the shop; and not only those methods touching the people’s character, but the other, the prompter ones, touching their physical conditions.