Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The statement, “Hens lay eggs,” expresses a fact in Ornithology, Zoölogy, and Biology—but it is none the more difficult to grasp. The special student may, if he so desires, amass enough knowledge in these lapping sciences to appall the uninitiated; but a mere practical farmer can learn enough of the nature and habits of hens to insure a profitable supply of eggs, without overtaxing his brain. There may be fields of sociological science quite beyond the average mind, and rightly left to the learned specialist; but that is no reason why we should not learn enough of the nature and habits of society to insure a more profitable and pleasant life.

With our fertility of resource and high attainments in skill, knowledge, power, and their material product, it is strange indeed that we have made so little progress in the management of our social processes. The civilisation natural to our age is conspicuously retarded by ignorance, disease, crime, poverty, and other disagreeable anachronisms. These things no more belong to this period of civilisation because they coexist with it than do the Bushman and Hottentot because they coexist with it, or than the vermiform appendix belongs to our stage of physiological development because it still exists in it—a mischievous rudiment. Our sociological rudiments cause us increasing pain.

The growing social consciousness of our times is most keenly stirred by a sense of pain. We are beginning to feel the great common processes of human life; but we feel them, at first, only when they hurt. Our individual distresses we have always felt; and have voiced our anguish and resentment more and more loudly as civilisation progressed. Earlier man—and in particular the unhappy savage, with his unavoidable privations, dangers, and mishaps, and his ingenious systems of self-torture—had more to hurt him, but made far less fuss about it. For many an age the pain of human life has formed so conspicuous a fact that we have called the earth “The Star of Suffering.” Our common illustrations of happiness are drawn from the lower animals: “as happy as a clam,” we say; “as gay as a lark”; “as merry as a cricket.”

The world’s greatest religions have rested on a conception of general human unhappiness. Divine curses are held to account for it, Divine blessings to allay it, and a future life to recompense us for it—if we are good; but the basic proposition is the unhappiness of human life. Again, we are given a theory of reincarnation; of a slow transmigration through many lines towards a plane where we do not feel, feeling being admitted to mean pain. In Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, from the Happy Hunting Grounds and Walhalla to our most refined conception of eternal progress, the bliss of a future life is advanced as some countercheck to the misery of this one, some hope to enable us to live.

So unbearable is the amount of human pain that we alone among all animals manifest the remarkable phenomenon of suicide—a deliberate effort of a form of life to stop living because living hurts so much. Social evolution does not proportionately abate social suffering; it improves external conditions and insures physical existence more and more reliably; but it does not make us commensurately happier. We die of different diseases, and we do not die so soon, but we continue to suffer while alive, we continue to refer to “the sea of human misery,” we continue to kill ourselves because we cannot bear the pain of being alive.

All this distress, formerly borne by each man as simply his “lot,”—his personal allowance,—was yet vaguely recognised by larger thinkers as “our common lot”; even physical diseases, those most personal facts, we have generalised as “the ills that flesh is heir to.” This generalising is a most legitimate social instinct; now grown keener, more accurate, felt by far more persons; and in its light we have begun to recognise many of those long-borne “ills” as not only remediable, but preventable. Yet, though we have done something, our condition remains lamentable. The general causes of our still-existing difficulties are internal rather than external.

Society has long since mastered the difficulties of adjustment with physical conditions, but cannot arrange its own intersocial conditions on a satisfactory basis. “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn”—not nature’s. From the Arctic Circle to the Tropics man gets along contentedly enough with natural obstacles; he may be checked and modified in development, but he is not unhappy; he strikes a balance with nature and is comparatively at rest. But in his progressive social development he has not yet been able to strike a balance; his interhuman relations are uncertain and mischievous. So far as history shows us, each social group seems to have carried within it the seeds of disease; to have grown worse as it progressed; and, while conquering all external difficulties, to have succumbed in the end to its own inward disorders. The suffering of an advanced society is not that of one struggling for subsistence, or in combat with enemies, but of one in the throes of disease. Society has safety, peace, shelter, warmth, enough to eat,—and chronic indigestion!

Are these disadvantages of human life essential, as heretofore supposed; or are they merely pathological phenomena and quite unnecessary? We are now beginning to take the latter view, and a most cheerful one it is.

Instead of accepting “human nature” as a fixed condition of mingled pain and pleasure, goodness and badness, with the pain and badness preponderating, we are now recognising that human nature grows and changes like the rest of created forms; that it has already greatly changed and improved, and will continue to do so. We are learning that the troubles of any race and time are partly external and subduable; partly internal and these also subduable. See, for instance, a savage tribe in North America. Their existence is retarded by certain conditions of climate and geography; of the fauna and flora surrounding them; of animal and human enemies and competitors; but also and more seriously by their superstitions. The theory of witchcraft; the ignorance as to hygiene and belief in “the medicine man”; the contempt for women and so for productive labour—these kept the savage savage in the same region where another race is civilised. That race, dominated by larger and truer concepts, has conquered the same external difficulties and risen to far higher levels.

So we, in our present stage of civilisation, are partly retarded by natural conditions of environment. We are still decimated by wild beasts, though it takes a microscope to find them, and by still more bloodthirsty vegetables, of similar dimensions. We are still frozen to death, sunstruck, drowned, and shocked by lightning. We fight the phylloxera, the cottony scale, and anopheles; we have to tunnel mountains, irrigate deserts, bridge rivers, and cross seas; our struggle with the environment is still highly educative. But meanwhile our progress is retarded far more by conditions of social pathology—by ignorance, poverty, and crime; and these conditions are no part of our essential environment, but are due to economic errors and superstitions. If we could straighten out our internal difficulties we could get on gaily with the outside ones.