Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The social organism does not walk about on legs. It spreads and flows over the surface of the earth, its members walking in apparent freedom, yet bound indissolubly together and thrilling in response to social stimulus and impulse.

Before Society grew at all we were but human animals, maintaining and reproducing ourselves like any other animals, but with no connection, no common life. They were of no faintest use to one another, but quite the contrary, being legitimate competitors for a free supply, and so naturally hating and destroying one another. As Society grows the connection between its members grows and thickens and differentiates. Men are of increasing use to one another, no longer competitors in any legitimate sense, but combiners in common production and distribution, and so naturally helping and loving one another. Those who still compete and destroy are but survivals from the earlier period, mischievous relics and back-numbers. All Social evolution is the story of the development and improvement of the connective tissues of Society, from language, the great psychic medium, to steel rail and wire, the infinitely multiplying physical medium. This connection and interaction of the human animals is the most conspicuous fact about them, and that connection is by every test organic.

Another and similar reason for our denial of the social organism is the fact of the temporary detachableness of the individual human being. Men visibly walk about on their own feet, going apparently where they will, and no examination discloses a Siamese band between one man and his brother man. So when the sociologist says there is no such thing as a separate human creature,—that a solitary human creature is a contradiction in terms,—the average individualist replies, “See Robinson Crusoe!” This answer shows great lack of biological knowledge. The splendid growth of education in our day, which is beginning to teach our children dynamics as well as statics, laws as well as facts, will soon remove this ignorance.

If I say, “There is no such thing as a tree without roots,” it might be replied, “But there is! See my Christmas tree?” Yes, it is there for a little, but it is not really a tree, it is timber; it cannot last, nor grow, nor reproduce its kind.

I may say, “There is no such thing as a man without a head,” and someone reply, “But there is! See this gentleman on the dissecting table and his head on the tray yonder.” That is not a man, it is a corpse. I may say, “There is no such thing as a finger without a hand,” and it be replied, “See this one here in alcohol!” That again is not a finger, it is but a corpse. If you join a severed finger quickly enough, it will grow on again. If you return a severed man to his society soon enough, he will grow on again. So in this perfectly true statement, “There is no such thing as a solitary human creature; it is a contradiction in terms”; the presentation of a man on an island or in a prison cell is no answer.

Though cut off like the finger, he does not instantly deliquesce and disappear. His connection with the society which evolved him being severed, he may continue to live as an animal, but is in process of decay as a human being; he is an ex-man. Our connection is so subtle, so fluent, each human brain being so large a storage battery of social energy, that we can separate for a time with no loss. But make the separation complete and the humanness dies.

We have been deterred also from seeing the larger and more vital human relation by the smaller and more arbitrary. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is the Family, often called the Unit of the State.

Now the family is not a distinctively human relation at all; many varieties of animals, especially among the higher carnivora, have families, with monogamic union, too, where devoted parents strive and suffer to provide for and protect their young. A perfectly normal and necessary group is the family, and one proved best for successful reproduction of the species, but not a social unit at all. The individual is the social unit, combining to develop the structure and functions of Society.

Families never combine, they can’t. Families take no part in social relation. Each family has its own structure and functions, its own interests, its own purposes, and these are frequently in direct opposition to the social good. Just as Society offers a surer, safer, higher life to the individual, and thus makes possible that inordinate egoism which is so serious a danger; so it gives the same opportunity to the family and allows of a wider, deeper, and more intense familism than is possible among sub-social animals.

It is most interesting to watch the slow struggle of the true social relation to establish and extend itself against these natural obstacles, as in the successive overthrow of Patriarchism and Feudalism by the State. The City as a social group has much easier recognition with us than larger entities. Civic consciousness began early and found its splendid flower and fruit, as well as its iron limitations, in Greece. National consciousness is now quite well established, having the same advantages and disadvantages as the Civic, only on larger scale. To-day we are beginning to feel the largest consciousness of all, the truly Human, in whose unbounded growth and beautifully progressive development the petty limitations of all earlier forms are slowly disappearing. “What are your national distinctions?” an inquiring Englishman asked me. “The time is past for national distinctions,” I replied. “The time is coming for the people of the world, and Americans are the first of them.”