Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The social base being absolutely firm, and requiring less and less social energy as our agricultural and commercial processes improve, we grow in arithmetical progression—or in geometrical rather—as our increase in production and distribution multiplies our ability and our increase in ability multiplies our production and distribution. This assured base and wide room for variation is necessary to society in developing its higher functions. We can afford to feed and guard for several generations the slow-maturing genius, which, when it reaches the productive point, will richly benefit us all. We can give more rest and freedom to our members than any self-fed and self-guarded beast could dream of.

A thousand delicate and beautiful specialties are allowed to grow by our broad sure social base of supplies. So far we have seen this in conscious action only where a government has encouraged certain arts or sciences, or where an established church or endowed university has bred its kind of specialty, or again where some individual has contrived to enlarge his own “social base” enormously, and “varies” as he will, but we see its converse commonly enough where the individual is not allowed any hold on the social base, but kept at the self-feeding stage in development, thus effectually checking his “tendency to vary.”

Every advantage has its possible attendant evils, and Society offers a wide field for such. In the point we are treating, the evils are painfully prominent. As soon as we left the self-supplying stage, a man’s sins were no longer visited immediately on his own head. An animal gains or loses by his own behaviour. A man gains or loses by his society’s behaviour. In his assured position as a member of society a man can be wickeder and more foolish than is possible in any self-supported life, and he has taken advantage of his opportunities with great facility and zeal.

The peculiar treason involved in a social being’s offences we have not yet grown to recognise. It is as if your own teeth turned and gnawed you. Only a beneficent society could allow the growth of these powerful beings, and with that social power they sin against society.

As conspicuous an instance as can be given of this kind of sin is in the action of our misguided common carriers. Here is a function so glaringly social that one marvels at the power of the human brain in forcibly regarding it as a private business. On public land granted by the public, with rights and franchises granted by the public, with money subscribed by the public, and with elaborately co-ordinated labour performed by the public, this form of public service is established. Then one man, or group of men, is allowed to “own” this great piece of social machinery, and proceeds to administer it, not with regard to the public advantage, but with regard to the advantage of this managing group and of that small minority of the public who furnished the money for the enterprise.

Of course this could not be done if the social body as a whole recognised the organic character of its own processes, but, owing to the prevalence of our ancient ego concept and its derivatives, the poor social body says, “Of course; why should the arteries carry blood except to feed themselves, it is their business!” Against this evil comes the growing altruism of work, founded in mother love, in the anti-selfish instinct of reproduction; work, which, as it develops, carries with it an ever-developing good will.

Watch this in history. See the two forces as they affect society. See the primitive labour of the squaw holding the village together, the village which is the tiny seed of the state, while against it push the belligerent rivalries of the male. See the instinct to fight and to take, finding larger expression in organised warfare, constantly destroying the young societies which industry was building up, both in warring with one another and in the internal effects of the same misplaced instincts.

Here is productive industry steadily adding to the wealth of the world and developing distributive industry as inevitably as an overflowing spring makes a stream. And here are these destructive tendencies, with the primitive desire to get for one’s self, to get away from someone else, not only refusing to assist in industry, not only dishonourably living on its products, but so scorning and maltreating the real agents of social growth as to repeatedly destroy the societies that harboured them.

In the development of industry have grown the altruistic tendencies of mankind. Working together bred the social consciousness as surely as our physical organic relation bred our bodily consciousness. Peace, good will, mutual helpfulness are part and parcel of normal industrial growth. It is somewhat difficult to disentangle one current of social phenomena from the many crossing ones, some combining and some conflicting, but whenever any one trade can be studied in its effect on a group, certain associative psychic qualities are always found with it, and the general industrial progress of the world is accompanied by as general progress in social consciousness and the social virtues.

Agriculture brings us at least peace, an essential condition of its continuance. Trade brought the concept of justice, the market-place and its customs and its disputes evoking the early prototypes of our great courts of law, and extended peace. Commerce widened both still further.