Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The plain thief and pauper we recognise as social parasites, active and passive, and seek to remove; but our frank, general attitude of parasitism and predacity we do not recognise as an evil, the evil which necessarily tends to these ultimate forms. An individual animal has no productive power and skill, he simply takes what he wants when he finds it, if he can, and cheats, fights, or kills to get it. The collective animal produces wealth by co-ordinate labour. There is no faintest element of combat involved in the economic processes of society. The only “competition” legitimate in social life is the beneficent competition between constantly improving methods of service. For any collective animal to take advantage of his safe place in the broad-based social life, and from that vantage-point to take what he can from the social product without himself producing anything, is a treason so colossal as quite to paralyse our moral judgment.

Our little egoistic scheme of ethics, while it is big enough to grasp and blame an interpersonal fraud or theft, is incapable of comprehending this great field of social injury; and, if the social traitor keeps up the personal ethical standards we are acquainted with, we do not condemn his larger sin,—we don’t know how.

Here it is simply indicated that the initial error lies in looking at the world as a place to go out to and get things from by any necessary means, whereas in plain fact it is a place to go into and give things to—to labour in, to create in, to produce and distribute in, to exercise those social faculties which constitute our human life.

To work is to make something or distribute something; it has nothing to do with taking or fighting. The fighting and grabbing attitude comes from primitive animal egoism, a low rudimentary condition, and the morbid overplus of sex-energy in the male. The association of shame with work on account of the slave will pass when we see the orderly progression of human association and the place held in it by that early social functionary.

The Social organism requires a close and permanent connection between its myriad constituents. These constituents first began to combine sporadically, on lines of natural attraction, as in the family, and through the woman’s industry. For men to be drawn into the social relation,—men, whose whole nature was individual and combative, whose whole idea of exertion was to fight something,—required force. Only on pain of death, as the unkilled captive, did the slave learn to work, to apply his energy to the service of others. Most of the conscious associations of slavery were unpleasant, slavery and work were held as identical, and the slave hates work as he hates slavery. But they are not identical. Slavery is a transient, superficial relation, one of our telic processes, useful in its place, but soon outgrown. Work is a permanent, essential relation, a genetic social process increasing with our growth.

Men were first held together in exchange of labour by the force of the slave system as they are now held together in exchange of labour by the force of the contract system, an equally transient and superficial device. The real economic process going on is the gradual evolution of highly specialised and smoothly interrelated workers, with an abundant, easy circulation of their products, and the more arbitrary methods of developing this condition came first as more arbitrary political methods came first. The Owner was a primitive despot, the Employer is a constitutional monarch, and democracy is now working out a higher, subtler, freer relation—that of the true Co-operator—in economics as in politics.

The shame feeling, based on woman and slave, grew, rather than relaxed, in the period of serfdom. In fatuous ignorance of the source of their wealth and power, the fighting and governing class despised the hand that fed them, and the ancestral accumulation of this ungrateful idiocy gives us our ingrained contempt for “labour,” “trade,” “the working classes.”

The workers themselves, equally ignorant, though more excusably, accepted this feeling as correct, and strove to escape singly from the only honourable position on earth, that of Maker, Doer, Giver, to the supposed dignity of a Social Parasite. “The Theory of the Leisure Class” has been most luminously expounded by Veblen, but there is room for much more study in “the theory of the working class,” the glorious, irresistible, upward pressure of which, by its accumulating superfluity of rich product, has, besides all its good effects, made possible the morbid secretions and deleterious growths of society, the indolent ulcer of idle wealth, the waste of tissue in extreme poverty, the wide range of diseases, disgusting and terrible, with which Society is hampered in its economic processes.

This feeling of contempt for work, shame in work, once recognised as one of our evil inheritances from the black past, we should set ourselves to check and dismiss it as rapidly as possible. In the individual by consciously rebutting the old feeling and cultivating its opposite one of honour and pride, and in the race by an instant and thorough change in the education of children, through home, school, and church, book, picture, and story. It is gratifying to note that America is already far ahead of any other nation in its honour of work, and that even the woman-parasite, as well as the leisure-class parasite, is feeling it in this liveliest of societies.

Our aversion to work as being an expense of energy is quite right. Human work, as we have seen in the last chapter, should not constitute a draught on individual energy. When it does so there is something wrong. As in our constant analogy, the physical organism, we may be sure that when it is an effort to breathe something is wrong with one’s lungs.