Human Work

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Want theory assumes that a man has a supply of energy which he may or may not discharge, but that he will not discharge it unless forced to by necessity. If you supply his needs he will discharge no energy whatever, he will not work. This does apply, fairly enough, to an animal’s effort to take things, but does not apply to man’s effort to make things. The fact is that a man has energy according to (a) his physical well-being, and (b) his access to social stimulus; and that, having it, he must discharge it or suffer in the forced retention. The practical question before existing Society is how to supply the most energy to its members and direct it to the most use.

In free education we do supply the young social factor with both energy and direction, so that he grows up better able to work and to work rightly than if left to the degrading influence of this pitiful theory, that the way to make a man work is not to give him anything until he does.

The real process of distribution is to circulate our stores of social nourishment as widely and freely as possible, that we may be always more and more able to work. We are quite consistent in this Pay theory of ours. We carry it out even in regulating the amount of our payment. We hold that not only shall a man have nothing unless he works, but that he shall in no case have more than the equivalent of his work, that no person shall receive anything unless he has “earned” it, given a full equivalent. We are forced to admit that in the life about us this principle is a conspicuous failure; we see those who work the most getting the least; we see those who have the most working the least; and we seek to explain this anomaly by a modification of the Pay concept to this effect: that a man should be paid not only in regard to the amount, but to the value of his work.

With this idea we thought we had reached the height of justice, yet we are forced to admit that this does not serve, either: that the men who do the most valuable work for Society are precisely those least paid, sometimes most punished, and that the men receiving the largest rewards are often the most ordinary functionaries and sometimes rascals. Does anyone presume to claim that selling kerosene oil is so precious a service to Society that the head pedlar should have more money than anybody on earth? Is the maker of steel rails or huge cannon a nobler servant than the maker of bread or the teacher of children? All these are forms of social service truly, but are they fairly paid? The facts do not bear out our theory at all, and we only attribute it to other malign influences, never dreaming that our basic idea is wrong. In sociological law there is no relation whatever, either in amount or quality, between normal human work and any possible “pay,” any more than there is between the work of an eye and a leg and the amount of blood they get. Normal human work is organic action. It is a result of previous good received, not an effort to obtain goods withheld.

That under the system of slave labour a man will work under fear of pain is true. That under the system of wage labour a man will work under hope of a reward is true. But both these systems are transient, superficial, soon outgrown by any live society; neither of them affects in the least the underlying organic law of human work. Our conscious minds have not kept pace with social growth. We are trying to administer the processes of an advanced society on lines of pre-social theories. If anyone seeks to point out these great sociological facts, we cry, “These are Utopian dreams, millennial visions; you are a thousand years ahead of your times!”

Whereas it is we—we, the general public, with all these hereditary heirlooms in our heads in place of facts—that are ten thousand years behind them! We try to explain and assist the highly developed and absolutely interdependent social processes by arguments from a long-outgrown era of individualism. Theories of individual effort, incentive, reward, competition, and “survival of the fittest,” we apply to our own organic functions. If they do not fit, so much the worse for the functions!

If we were individuals, like the beasts, it would all hang together well enough, thus: Here is a Bear. His business is the same old series, maintenance, reproduction, and improvement; to be, to re-be, and to be better. All of these ends he serves by the exercise of his own personal abilities. These abilities, being purely personal, are only called into exercise by personal wants or impulses. If the Bear found his food on a plate before his cave every day he would indeed suffer from fatty degeneration; his powers would decay, he would become less and less Bear because he did less and less Bear-ing.

And conversely, if suitable difficulties (not too great) intervene between him and his food, he develops the faculties to meet the difficulties, and improves. If he is not a smart or strong Bear, and cannot get much for himself and the little Bears, why, let them die; better Bears will survive them, and the race improve by their absence. If too much survival of the fittest left too much food for the survivors, so that they became less fit, why up would pop others less fit also to compete for the food, and thus a beautiful level of Bearishness is maintained. This method of evolution we see plainly and admire, perhaps unduly, as a “natural law.” All laws are natural. If not natural—they are not laws; we only thought they were.

The essential difference between us and the Bears is in our organic relation. The Bears have no common interests, common functions, common good; we have. A perfect balance of highly superior Humans, muscular and ferocious, with just food supply enough to keep up the fighting, and just fighting enough to keep down the food supply, is scarcely a social ideal. The social organism alters the matter completely. The human race improves through production and exchange of products—Work. The work of the human race improves under laws of organic evolution, of increasing specialisation and interdependence. As society advances a man profits less and less by what he does for himself, more and more by what others do for him.

The improvement of a human being is not in his own hands, but in the hands of other human beings. Our line of racial advance is in serving one another, like any other group of organs. This common profit in a common product leads us to wish to improve that product. The product of human beings is improved by supplying the needed energy, stimulus, direction; by putting into the individual in order that we may get out of him the pay first, the work afterwards.