Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Now, since we can easily see in history how we have at given times suffered from certain popular mistakes, and how on better knowledge we have outgrown those errors and their painful consequences, why is it not reasonable to assume that we may outgrow our present mistakes and superstitions and their painful consequences? Is it not possible that the persistence in society of certain morbid phenomena is due to an equal persistence of certain false ideas? and that the one may be removed by removing the other? So long as we believe in witchcraft, or in the divine right of kings, or in chattel slavery, so long do we act from that belief, and so long is our action injurious.

Our most conspicuous troubles to-day are economic. We have reached a stage of religious freedom where the growing power of the human brain is allowed to work unchecked toward higher perceptions of truth, and beautiful results have followed. We have reached a stage of political freedom where we can express the public will in public action, as far as the great majority of one sex is concerned, and are rapidly advancing to where the whole nation will share the same position. Here, too, beautiful results have followed. But in economic development we find that whereas there is a great extension and multiplication of economic processes, and commensurately of wealth, yet there is a mighty product of evil which seems to keep pace with the advance of civilisation.

So many of our troubles are patently due to economic sources that our rough-and-ready philosophy has accepted the statement, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Some shorten the accusation to money itself.

This general observation is right in its direction, but not sufficiently accurate to be reliable. Money being a concrete fact, and in its function as representative of all purchasable goods of fascinating importance, we quite naturally attach to it directly the glaring evils we find in its company. We see the misery and sin caused by too little of it and the misery and sin caused by too much of it; we see the various villainies practised to get it, from robbery so small and direct that you catch the thief’s hand in your pocket, to robbery so large and indirect that the thieving hand filches uncaught from a million pockets, via hired railroads, hired legislators, and hired newspapers; we see all this, and attach our condemnation to money itself, or, at farthest, to the love of it.

Now, knowing more of the nature of society, we can begin to classify and analyse its difficulties more intelligently and find them somewhat in this order. Let us call poverty in-nutrition—a large part of our social tissues are insufficiently nourished. Let us call wealth over-nutrition, or repletion, or congestion, or fatty degeneration—a small part of our social tissues are gorged and inflamed with too much nourishment. Then let us call our large supply of poor, false, bad things: adulterated articles of food, shoddy clothes, paper shoes,—all the flood of worthless stuff society produces and consumes,—mal-nutrition; the blood is bad and does not nourish. Back of these phenomena we find still more important conditions, having to do not with the nourishment of the body politic, but with its activities. There is wrong action in the social organism; it does not work properly. Hence this local congestion of wealth, this peculiar arrest of distribution which makes both rich and poor dissatisfied in the widest field of life—work.

Work is the most conspicuous feature of human life. In the conditions of work, in our ideas and feelings about work, in our habits, methods, and systems of work, lies the subject-matter of this book. It is held that our difficulties are to be found, not in any essential traits of human nature, and not in any essential conditions of human life, but merely in the preservation in our minds of certain ancient and erroneous ideas and feelings which act continually upon the normal processes of social economics, preventing the process and poisoning the product. See, for instance, among our American savages, how the accepted theory, that work is proper only to women, arrests their economic development and their personal progress as well. See, in the Southern States of earlier years, how the popular error, that work was proper only to slaves, arrested development in many lines. It is here asserted that we have still in the popular mind certain traditions—superstitions, falsehoods—about work, and that to them is traceable the economic distresses so conspicuous among us.

Our increasing consciousness of this distress is a most gratifying fact. Consciousness always involves power. The power to feel implies the power to act. Feeling was evolved as a guide to action; in nature’s wise administration there would have been no reason for giving conscious pain and pleasure to a creature which could neither avoid the one nor seek the other. The sensory nerves are developed in careful proportion to the motory: what feels can move, what moves can feel. This law is followed all the way up through physical evolution to social, and is just as true of the social body as of any other.

A comparatively inert primitive society reacts to injury or benefit as does a plant, but shows little evidence of pain or pleasure. Modern society, however, in proportion to its rapidly differentiating organism and its increase in swift, accurate, complex activity, manifests a corresponding increase in consciousness. We are now socially conscious to an acute degree; and this proves our equal ability to act, to avert injury, and seek benefit, not as individuals, but as a society.

Naturally pain is the most impressive fact, for pleasure is a normal condition and only felt in contrast to pain. Pain is some interference with natural law, and as such makes itself sharply felt. Man was led to the study of physiology through pathology; the ache introduced us to the stomach. So society feels first and most what hurts it, and our study of sociology is prefaced by social pathology. And as men, in their first gropings after relief from pain, practised all manner of tricks with fetich-worship, with wild, noisy dances, with filthy medicines, with murderous leeches and lances and poisonous pills; and as still, among the ignorant, any wide-blazoned patent medicine is sure of acceptance if it promises to cure the pain, felt but not understood; so society’s first efforts at relief are superstitious, empirical, and often deadly bad for its system.

We need the patient, scientific study of the social body, its structure and functions, anatomy, physiology, and pathology, as we have had it for the physical body; we need careful, recorded observation of the results of previous remedies, and of new ones as well, and all this is a new field of science. We have plenty of facts at hand; all history lies behind us with its glaring records; all life is before us to-day in every stage of development; but we have only begun to arrange and study those facts from the point of view of the sociologist. If a watch goes wrong, we examine its “works” for fracture, loss, misplacement, or some “foreign body”; but to do this successfully involves knowledge of what a watch is, what it is for, how it is made, and how it works. We must know the mechanics of the thing if we are to mend it. So if Society goes wrong we must examine its works, and we cannot tell if they are wrong, nor set them right, unless we have some knowledge of what Society is, what it is for, how it was made, and, above all, how it works.