Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The bicycle is perhaps a better instance. The effect of the making is not materially different from the effect of making watches. But the thing made has modified society by the reactive effects of its use. It has modified the dress, the activity, and so the physique and character of women, to their great improvement. It has modified roads—to the great material benefit of the regions affected. It has modified inn-keeping, livery-stabling, tailoring, the relative distance of residence—the effects of the bicycle on society are great, even upon the most superficial survey. But this is no reason why the maker of bicycles should be a better man than the maker of chronometers, or that either of them should be paid more than the maker of pianos, or less than the maker of poems.

The first effect of work, its result, return, or payment, is to the maker in the quality and quantity of his effort. No one can measure his pay or deny it. The second is to the user in the fulness of his use. This, alas! can be measured and denied, and has been, to our racial injury. No tyranny was ever able to prevent the steady development of man through the work he did. If he laboured faithfully and generously, he grew in the outputting of his strength, and his growth ultimately overthrew the tyranny. But tyranny of various sorts has withheld from the workers the reactive benefits of using the product of their work; and so hindered race development.

The builders of beautiful houses, working well, are necessarily benefited by their own working; but if they are forced to live in poor, ugly, unhealthy houses, they are not benefited by the results of the work. This is a grave limitation of a man’s income; and if his income is checked, his output is checked also. As an unwise farmer exhausts his soil in greedy harvesting without due fertilisation, so we have drawn upon the creative energies of humanity and denied the rich replenishment which would have made the product so much more prolific.

Here the mischievous effect of our Want theory comes in plainly. The man who is working merely for pay must cater to the purchaser. He must please existing tastes. Looking at his product, not as an end, to benefit society, but as a means to benefit himself, he must so produce as to secure a buyer. This is the “pot-boiler” again. The artist who paints to suit his patrons and get their money is not the true artist, and through him art does not grow. The maker of coats or hats or houses or dishes submits to this degrading pressure, and the result is seen in our debased and vulgar forms of manufacture everywhere.

The evil effects to the consumer are more manifest in some trades than in others, as, for instance, in the liquor trade. Here we have human beings producing what they know people will buy; and then, not content with the existing demand, using all possible means to excite and maintain a further demand—simply that they may make money.

Again, in our degraded press, we have a most conspicuous instance of this prostitution of a great social function to private ends. Under the mistaken idea that the distribution of news is a process for feeding owners of papers, and thus being led to arrange their news so as to please the most buyers, they rapidly descend along lines of least resistance to a wholesale catering to the worst tastes of the most people; and supplement that by elaborate efforts to foment and spread the low appetites they so obsequiously serve.

Naturally there is no growth and grandeur in a trade like this. To spread knowledge, sympathy, instant information of the world’s movements good and bad, is to take part in one of society’s chief functions; in the general nervous system of the world. But to ascertain that society enjoys certain sensations, and to force the general presentation of news into a special arrangement to give those desired sensations, is to turn healthy action into a loathsome disease. In any form of human production, the object is to serve the consumer by the best development of the product, not to use the consumer as a means of profit for the producer. The producer must, of course, be provided for; as must the soldier, artist, physician; but self-interest is not the object of the work.

In the production of shoes, again, the object should be a constant improvement in material, shape, wearing quality, and general utility and beauty. Deliberately to change the shape and size, the proportion and make of human footwear, merely to cater to low tastes, is the degrading “pot-boiler”; the prostituting of a social function to a private end.

All forms of cheap and dishonest production, of adulteration, of an artificially forced market, are directly traceable to our Want theory; to our persistent superstition which still crudely imagines this vast and intricate world of interservice to be a primeval forest, where beast and savage hunt for prey. The mistake in object degrades the product, and the degraded product degrades the man. Thus our immense field of production is not only checked in output and arrested in distribution, but weakened through and through by adulteration and bad workmanship; with evils in result, unending. The natural trend toward a wider, fuller, easier, and ever better production, accompanied at every step by growing pride and power and pleasure in the producer, is hindered and perverted to large degree by our prevalent economic fallacies.

Another conspicuous point where our errors touch production is seen in the arts especially; the particular mistake here being in the persistence of the ego concept; our confusion of self-expression with social service. The social consciousness, unrecognised, presents itself to our minds as a huger self-consciousness.