Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

But as the farmer marries early and easily; woman, too, on that plane of economic activity being a valued co-agent in living, like the squaw; so the farmer is under no strong temptation to unchastity. His life of out-of-door muscular exertion is another help here. Lacking other forms of association, the church is a welcome social ground for the farmer and his wife; so he conforms easily to the current standard of morality. And with this moral tendency and lack of startling events, we find the reason for his temperance in speech and other habits.

In the sailor’s life, the opposite conditions obtain. His is a late and highly socialised industry. He combines with other men in elaborately specialised labour for the benefit of innumerable widely scattered people. His combination is absolute for considerable periods of time, and physically isolated from all other social forms. The dangers of the profession are great, requiring constant watchfulness and the most prompt and perfect interdependence. From the seamen singing and hauling together to the quick co-ordination between the captain on the bridge and the uttermost sailor on the yards, there is this constant interplay and conspicuous interdependence. Of course, they develop a high degree of comradeship—of course, they stand by one another to the last degree of danger. It indicates no greater nobility in Jack Jones, who went to sea, over Jedediah Jones, who stayed on the farm; it is a quality of his industry, that is all.

So with the other traits. The sailor is communally fed while engaged in these common activities. The ego is not called out in any way. Then, his private share of wealth being given him at the same time when he is turned loose to provide for himself, he naturally pours forth the money freely; a trait well known by all the barnacles and borers who infest the sailor ashore, as others do the ships at sea.

The sailor has no wife; he cannot marry as early as the farmer, because Jack has to support his wife at long range out of his earnings; she being of no service in maintaining the family. Or, if married, he must be away from his wife for long periods. Thus denied the natural relations of the sexes and exposed when ashore to the instant swooping down of the parasitic female animal in her frankest form, he is, inevitably, “immoral.” Let Jedediah go to sea and Jack stay at home, and you reverse the characteristics of each.

The intemperance comes under the action of these last conditions, long-enforced abstinence and sudden profusion; and the profanity is coincident with the sudden shocks of excitement in his work, with all the jars, difficulties, and dangers involved. For similar reasons ox-drovers are less given to profanity than mule-drivers. Thus we see the vices and virtues of a given profession inhere in its conditions. Individual character may fight against it, and there is a difference always in the personal expression, but as industrial classes the farmer and the sailor manifest certain distinctive characteristics involved in their form of industry.

Miners furnish another conspicuous instance of this force. In no class of men—not even in sailors—is altruism, even to heroism, more prominent. Given death and danger well-nigh certain, but comrades to be saved, and the miners always volunteer at once. If valour and self-sacrifice among miners were rewarded as they are in some sporadic rescue of the drowning, we should need to run a factory of decorations. The miner, like the sailor, is engaged in a highly socialised industry. He works at great personal sacrifices to promote the social welfare.

The farmer, in his corn, sees tangible immediate food for himself and family. The miner sees no such prompt advantage in his coal. The farmer, safely and alone, pursues his individual labours. The miner, in danger and in company, pursues his group labour. They are cut off from the rest of the world, the mining group, and easily develop a common consciousness. Their danger is a common danger, only to be met and overcome by common action. Hence they act in common and for each other.

This may be studied in varying degree in all industries. The effect of household labour on the growth of altruism is even worse than that of farm labour. The farmer does in truth connect with the whole world, serve the whole world through his products. The domestic labourer connects with nothing but the family, serves nothing but the family. Absolutely the most primitive form of human labour surviving among us is that of the woman “doing her own work” like the squaw. The only enlargement admitted is that of domestic service, being a survival of the next lowest form, slave labour. This industry, in its shortest of short circuits, develops no social spirit whatever; nothing but egoism and familism grow from it.

Altruism, due to other causes, may be felt and manifested by the domestic worker, but the work does not conduce to it. Conversely, when this stage of labour is at last abandoned; when we have socialised these antiquated industries; an immense increase of altruism will appear. We are so accustomed to think of men as egoists, and women as altruists that it will be a blow to many to advance this position, but seeing that altruism, the social spirit, is but the essential condition and result of our social co-activities; that only men take part in these activities, and that women have been arrested in this natural development and forced to remain as they began, working in solitude and utter disconnection, for their own families solely; it is plain that the world’s growth in altruism comes through men as a class, and that women as a class contribute to the social spirit only an exaggerated familism and egoism. That animal instinct shown in “the maternal sacrifice,” or the devotion to one’s mate of exaggerated sex development, have nothing to do with the larger human love—with omniism.

The two are constantly blended through heredity, but the industrial influence of the sexes is as above stated, and it is through industrial development that our altruism comes. Observe that the nations most “humane” are those most advanced in industry, and those least “humane” are those most primitive in industry, down to the savage who has only the rudiments of either industry or humanity. Altruism is recognised by religion as a virtue and urged upon us, but it appears in us only in proportion to our social progress in interrelated service. Our own principal religion, Christianity, is altruism incarnate—but it is not altruism understood. It preaches altruism as a virtue and a duty, but it does not show altruism to be a natural product of certain industrial relations and urge upon its followers their entering upon those relations as the chief means of developing altruism.