Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Teacher is an exquisitely developed social functionary, wholly a transmitter, using various arts and sciences to help him, but his own art involving the subtlest psychological skill. When this temperament is charged with most radical truths, when the teaching is a religion,—then we have the great souls who have appeared again and again in history, so charged with social energy that nothing, not difficulty, danger, death itself, could stop them. They would teach and they did teach, to the immense benefit of the society whose unconscious laws evolved them, whose conscious laws destroyed them. The scientific discoverer has too frequently shared the same fate; the inventor, the pioneer in any change, has a hard time. “The Push” in Society is a place of honour, but not an easy one.

Even in the more ordinary kinds of work we occasionally see the strong, clear urgency of a specialised worker toward his special work, and his pleasure in it; an urgency and a pleasure not related to honour or payment, but to the work itself. The reason we see less of the natural impulse to work in the main fields of labour is partly because we have piled our ignorant contempt most particularly on the kind of work we most needed, and partly because we have added to our contempt the heaviest practical difficulties by careful cutting off the general worker from his full share of social nutrition. The rank and file of humanity, as a result of our misconceptions about work, are so drained of nervous energy from generation to generation by being overtaxed in labour, and so defrauded of social nourishment by our system of “payment” based on those misconceptions, that it is marvellous indeed to see the work they do under these conditions, and not marvellous at all to see their steady tendency toward pauperism, criminalism, and all disease.

Of London it is stated that when the labourer from the country comes into the city to work, the second generation of his line is inferior in health, strength, and ability, the third generation much crippled and diseased, and there is no fourth.

Under social conditions like these it is not to be expected that we shall find much evidence of man’s natural desire to work, either general or special. As well look for willing industry in a hospital. On the contrary, it is to be expected that this body of people shall be unwilling and largely unable to work, that they shall seek continually to avoid work and as continually seek to enlarge their supply of social nourishment so cruelly cut off. It will take several generations of right living to reimburse this part of our social stock and bring them up to the level of social energy required to enjoy work. But when the swift recuperative forces of physiology have rebuilt the individual animal, and the far swifter forces of Sociology have refilled them with their share of our vast resources of strength and inspiration, and their share of the social interest, pride, and love which mark the fully human creature, then we shall find our assumption, “no man will exert himself unless to gratify desire,” to lack even its present justification.

There is no pain, no waste, no loss to normal work; it is a free discharge of abundant social energy, either unconscious or accompanied by sensations of keenest pleasure.

Let us consider this Want theory a little further.

A solitary animal cannot get his dinner without exerting himself. If he could, he would not exert himself. This we observe, and then, considering man as an animal like the others, we assume similarly: A man cannot get his dinner without exerting himself; if he could, he would not exert himself. Why we are so anxious to see to it that every man shall exert himself, a thing which evidently cannot concern the public if he is merely getting his own dinner, is a bit puzzling. But on perceiving that unless he exerts himself we do not get our dinner, our interest is excused.

Let us restate the proposition. Mankind cannot get its dinner without exerting itself. If it could, it would not exert itself.

Granted at once. If agriculture, manufacture, and commerce were not essential to social life, they would not have been evolved. But there is an immediate difference introduced in the “exertion” involved and its causes. Our social nutritive processes being complex and collective, require the elaborate activities of many individuals in lines which bear no relation whatever to their own dinners.

Social evolution, wiser and more practical than we, has met the necessities of the case by developing those organic tendencies in man which urge him to his social activities, and that always-increasing fund of social nutrition and social energy which enables him to do his work. The difference between an architect dreaming great buildings and eager to build them and an animal struggling for his food, is as the difference between the action of the heart and the action of a hungry fox. The fox exerts himself to supply his wants, the heart exerts itself as a functional activity it cannot help and without any reference to its wants.