Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The inevitable increase of specialisation has gone on, but under the disadvantage of this crude position it has carried with it a wholly unnecessary burden of evil. Specialisation in labour starts at the very beginning of our growth, at first being only an arrangement of whole men, each man making a whole thing.

To this stage of social evolution some are now wishing to revert—a sad waste of wishing! We might as well wish to be invertebrates again as to sigh for past periods of social development.

The lower the creature the less its organic specialisation. There are some so indeterminate and undivided that they do not know their heads from their tails; cut them in two and they promptly produce a new head and a new tail and go about their business as before. This beast is a fine example for the “all-around man.”

The higher the creature the more specialised. The more worthily a part fulfils one function the less worthily it can fulfil others. When the paw becomes a hand it ceases to be a paw. The more fit the hand for a hand’s use the less fit for a foot’s use. It would in no way benefit the body to have a set of loose, interchangeable organs capable of doing a little of everything and nothing very well. An “all-around” organ would not be as valuable as any single-hearted servant that gives its one regular contribution to the body’s good.

So in the social organism, our line of progress has been from the “all-around” savage to the absolutely one-sided activity of the specialised workman who contributes his best efforts to one line of service. “To learn to do one thing and do it well” is what makes the great artist, the great scientist, the great preacher, the great mechanic, the great electrician. Social service requires the steadily increasing specialisation of its constituents.

When you want a dentist you want to find him in his office, with the accumulated skill of long study and constant practice; you do not want to wait for him to come in from the plough and wash his hands. All this we know well enough, and yet we recognise the injurious effects to the individual of the kind of specialisation we see about us, and have not yet been able to reconcile the two.

If the individual is injured there must be evil somewhere, that is quite true. No society can prosper at the expense of its constituents. If the individual is reduced in physical strength and health, in personal happiness, or in the best social usefulness by his work, the process he is engaged in must be abnormal. Now let us see whether the evils so conspicuous in the lives of our highly specialised workers to-day are inherent in their degree of specialisation, or whether they are coincident rather than consequent and due to quite other causes.

What is it that injures the man who turns a crank all day? It is an evil both of omission and commission, involving a waste of cerebral energy in compelling the attention of the human brain to a point of execution so narrow and uninteresting, and also the lack of development involved in doing nothing else. To forcibly focus the attention on a detail for a long time is a ruinous expense of nerve force, and it is this which makes the employment of children in such work so doubly damnable. To concentrate and hold attention is not natural to childhood; that is why they fail to do it and are so frequently killed and injured by their machines. Accidents to working children happen mostly toward the end of the day’s work, as they grow more unequal to the unnatural strain.

And when the child does prematurely muster all his powers and display as a child the concentration of a man, he is thereby ruined for life, prematurely aged, a wasted and broken thing before he is grown. In the work of the Chicago Settlements a case was found where an honest, industrious man of thirty broke down and died, and the doctor’s verdict was that he died of old age; every part of him was used up by excessive labour from early childhood. It is bad enough for the adult. The paralysing effects of twelve hours’ repetition of some one small mechanical effort is painfully clear to any observer.

Does it follow, therefore, that we must discontinue the machine and go back to the period where “one man makes one thing,” the ideal of our well-meaning reversionists? Is it so much more noble for one man to make one canoe than for a thousand men to make an ocean steamer? Must we go without the ocean steamer and go back to the canoe period of civilisation because it is better to be an all-around savage than a man who makes rivets by machinery? Is there no way of saving the individual life of the rivet-maker without “giving up the ship”?