Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Universe as we know it is occupied in transmitting energy. The amount seems inexhaustible and indestructible. It rolls on interminably, discharging warmth and light into blank spaces; and, whenever worlds have formed, getting tangled up in a thousand shapes and sputtering mightily as it finds its complicated way out through them.

A living creature has an elaborate system of receiving and discharging energy, more elaborate as the life-form grows higher.

Force in inorganic matter has a simple channel, varying the monotony by occasional explosions. Force in the vegetable world is freer and learns new tricks—building tall trees and flaming out in blossoms. Force in the animal kingdom has wider range; these life-forms can do more things. They have more ways to express energy, and more ways to receive it. With special senses tuned to catch various vibrations, they respond to light, heat, and sound, to touch, taste, and smell; their impressions are varied and their expressions equally so.

Here enters Consciousness, with its extremes of Pleasure and Pain; the director of action, but not its cause. This complex engine, receiving so many impressions, transmitting so many expressions, must feel, because it acts; must act, because it feels. An Action is a consciously directed expression of energy. A Sensation is a consciously recorded impression of energy. Both sensation and action, if normal, are pleasurable—the conscious transmission of energy is joy.

The pleasure in sensation increases in proportion to the extent and delicacy of the sensorium. The pleasure in action increases in proportion to the extent and delicacy of the executive mechanism. Pain, of course, is proportionate to pleasure at any stage; meaning only abnormal use of the same nerves, but the higher the development of the organism the greater its ability to avoid pain.

The course of evolution has been to develop more and more complicated instruments for the transmission of energy. Society, as the highest life-form, is the most exquisitely complex of all; it has a sensorium far larger, and more subtly sensitive, and an executive apparatus commensurate; it has a degree of consciousness highest of all, and a proportional capacity for joy and ability to avoid pain.

This social transmission of energy is Work. The forces of the universe flowing through humanity come in by all our highly cultivated powers of perception, and come out in our beautiful profusion of creative activities—in work. The conscious transmission of energy reaches in us a transcendent height of pleasure by virtue of our co-ordinate action. There is larger joy in “team-work” than in the individual play. The pleasure of dancing in companies, or the rhythmic motions of a drill, is not confined to those particular activities; but, in normal conditions, inheres in all smoothly co-operate exercise. The reasons why we do not feel it in those exercises we call work are not inherent, but purely associative; or else due to accompanying conditions of a painful nature.

Normal conditions of human work require, first, that the worker shall be well nourished physically and socially, well educated to his fullest height of ability, and well-placed in the work he likes best and does best—(these two being identical). A worker, so placed, is in no way overtaxing his own energy, but is merely giving expression to the social energy, and finds in that process an exhaustless joy. We are so used to consider work as a drain upon the strength of the individual—and indeed in our artificial conditions it so often is—that we may not at first appreciate the nature of this fund of social energy.

Let us observe its development, comparing the power at the disposal of a member of society with that of an individual animal. An individual animal is a mechanism adapted to the performance of certain activities, urged thereto by certain stimuli, and governed therein by certain instincts, and, perhaps, concepts. The activities of the animal are limited, of course, by his executive machinery; he has only the tools that grow on him.

These are ingenious and reasonably effective, but their development is slow, requiring many generations of heartless “elimination of the unfit” to gradually evolve the fit. If his claws are not good enough, he dies, those having somewhat better claws survive; slowly the claws improve. He cannot in one lifetime invent and manufacture better claws, but has to be tediously and expensively “selected,” the whole beast sacrificed to the defective claw.