Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The individual savage is swift, alert, vigorous, sentinelled by the keenest of senses, served by prompt and varied abilities of many sorts. But his action, though more perfect, is on a lower grade in industrial evolution. He would not be capable, though under never so dreaded penalties, of working, his life long, in one fractional line of social service.

The more society develops the more widely differentiated become its labours. In its differentiation there comes to be an immense proportion of very simple things to do; simple because they are tiny parts of something extremely complex. The savage’s life is anything but “simple.” His elaborate and exciting monologue requires of him the whole gamut of individual capacity in constant shock and change. But in the peace and power of a great civilisation, in the organic spread of social functions, there are more and more kinds of labour which are so infinitely simplified that a dolt can do them.

It does not follow that a dolt must do them! It does not follow that we should hunt out all our inferior persons to do these unelevating things, and so remain inferior. It does not follow that we should keep the inferior person so long at his unelevating task as to further lower his inferiority; that we should pay him so little as to prevent any development from outside advantages; or that, worst of all, we should so condemn his children to their subminimum share of his “minimum wage” as to make them lower yet.

In our ignorance of the nature of society, and the nature of work; in our cheerful blindness to the lessons of history; with our poor choked and twisted brains, so crammed with the follies of our ancestors, and so weakened by what we have called education that they cannot think; we have taken for granted that society had to have about so much “unskilled labour” to provide for, and could only provide for it by “furnishing employment” suited to its powers.

If we can once recognise the facts in the case, we will change our behaviour fast enough. Observe the line of social growth. Here is a nascent society of a vague group of savages, feebly held together by the pressure of a common danger; feebly drawn together by the attraction of a common need. So held and drawn the same forces which grouped the cells and started the growth of physical organisms worked upon them, and they began to differentiate in function.

Follow one line of work, such as the clothing of society. The individual savage took a skin off another animal and put it on himself; that was the beginning. It required in him, and in his squaw, the highly exciting and agreeable exercise of the rudiments of many trades. He hunted, fought, killed, and skinned the beast. She tanned and dressed, cut and sewed, with elaborate decoration. All very interesting.

Now comes the evolution of that industry on inevitable lines. First, the division of trades; one hunted, another tanned, another sewed, and so on. Then, as society increased, as skill increased, as productivity increased, as commerce increased, we find these trades increasing in importance, in bulk, and in complexity; until now we have one garment going through a thousand hands between the wool or cotton fibre, and the wearer of the dress.

In this process, a perfectly healthy social process, the fractional details of the work become extremely small and simple, and our mechanical ingenuity has made them smaller and simpler yet; till no more skill or judgment is required than a factory child or poor dull sweated “garment worker” can apply.

In these familiar facts see the real principle involved. Social progress has so differentiated labour as to make infinitely short, easy, and simple to a thousand co-workers what was once long, difficult, and complicated for one. These beneficently simple processes make possible the use of “unskilled labour”; make it possible for society to maintain in its service individual working capacity lower than that of a savage, lower almost than the beast.

But here is our great error. Unskilled labour does not require the unskilled labourer. Unskilled labour can be performed equally well by skilled labourers of the highest sort, as mere play, as rest from these more exacting functions. In proportion to its simplicity and ease, its extreme mechanical perfection of adjustment, is, or should be, the saving of time involved.