Human Work

Part 1

HUMAN WORK

OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Women and Economics, Concerning Children

In This Our World

The Home

HUMAN WORK

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

NEW YORK

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

MCMIV

Copyright, 1904, by McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

Published, May, 1904, N

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY 5

II. MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION 19

III. CONCEPT AND CONDUCT 37

IV. SOME FALSE CONCEPTS 59

V. THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (I) 79

VI. THE NATURE OF SOCIETY (II) 99

VII. THE SOCIAL SOUL 125

VIII. THE SOCIAL BODY 157

IX. THE NATURE OF WORK (I) 179

X. THE NATURE OF WORK (II) 203

XI. SPECIALISATION 227

XII. PRODUCTION 249

XIII. DISTRIBUTION 275

XIV. CONSUMPTION (I) 299

XV. CONSUMPTION (II) 321

Part 2

XVI. OUR POSITION TO-DAY 341

XVII. THE TRUE POSITION 367

HUMAN WORK

I: INTRODUCTORY Summary

Common facts hard to understand. Social phenomena most important to modern life, yet least understood. Complexity no obstacle if system is known. Practical knowledge of sociology quite possible. Coexistence does not prove true association. Social rudiments cause pain. Human pain always conspicuous. “The Star of Suffering.” Religions rest on conception of essential pain. Suicide a human specialty. Pain a social condition, remediable and preventable. Physical environment largely mastered, present difficulties social. Past societies died of internal diseases. Social indigestion. Human nature progressive. Language retarded by ignorance and superstitions. Civilisation retarded by same things. Economic difficulties our principal ones to-day. “The root of all evil.” Innutrition, over-nutrition, mal-nutrition, wrong action in body politic. Difficulty lies in false ideas. Effect of woman labour and slave labour. Consciousness proof of power. Modern society increasingly conscious. Pain most conspicuous, pathology precedes physiology. Errors of early therapeutics, personal and social. Need of scientific social physiology, as base of treatment. Must understand works to mend watch, or society. Knowledge enough to begin. This book a study of the economic processes of Society.

I INTRODUCTORY

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand. This is described by Ward as “the illusion of the near.” Because of nearness we get no perspective; because of continual presence we become used to one view and fail to perceive others.

To the consideration of new facts we come with comparatively open minds, impressed by each item and its relation to the rest; but facts long known are supposed to be understood, and we resent the slight offered to our intelligence in the proposal to reconsider. Yet the most revolutionary discoveries have been made among precisely the most familiar facts; as in the nature and use of steam, or the endless potentialities of coal tar.

We had, and used, and supposed we knew, our own bodies, through long centuries of living and dying, yet our late-learned physiology was able to show us facts most vitally important which we had never dreamed of. Social phenomena have been going on about us since we began to be human; they are as familiar as physical or physiological phenomena, but even less understood. Yet the interaction of social forces and social conditions form increasingly prominent factors in human life.

Primitive man was most affected by physical conditions, he had to adjust himself mainly to the exigencies of climate, of the soil, of animal competitors. Modern man has to adjust himself mainly to social conditions; he is most affected by governments, religions, economic systems, education, general customs. Yet the study of this especially pressing and important environment is but little advanced. The smooth-worn commonplace facts slip through our fingers, and we fail to see the meaning of our most important surroundings simply because we have always had them. Also we allow ourselves to be discouraged by the extent and complexity of social conditions. This is quite needless.

Grass may be studied in any patch, regardless of the acreage of our prairies, or the height of the plumes of the Pampas. A tree would seem appallingly complex if we tried to understand it from a cross-section taken through the branching top; but from root to leaf it is not so hard to follow. Moreover, early writers on this subject have frightened us with technicalities. Mention some patent fact about our social composition, show a relation, suggest a law, and your alarmed hearer cries: “Oh, that is Political Economy! I cannot understand that, it is too difficult!” It is really a pity that such awe should be felt in the contemplation of our social processes; as though a man were afraid to learn anything about his digestion on the ground that it was “physiology.”

The statement, “Hens lay eggs,” expresses a fact in Ornithology, Zoölogy, and Biology—but it is none the more difficult to grasp. The special student may, if he so desires, amass enough knowledge in these lapping sciences to appall the uninitiated; but a mere practical farmer can learn enough of the nature and habits of hens to insure a profitable supply of eggs, without overtaxing his brain. There may be fields of sociological science quite beyond the average mind, and rightly left to the learned specialist; but that is no reason why we should not learn enough of the nature and habits of society to insure a more profitable and pleasant life.

With our fertility of resource and high attainments in skill, knowledge, power, and their material product, it is strange indeed that we have made so little progress in the management of our social processes. The civilisation natural to our age is conspicuously retarded by ignorance, disease, crime, poverty, and other disagreeable anachronisms. These things no more belong to this period of civilisation because they coexist with it than do the Bushman and Hottentot because they coexist with it, or than the vermiform appendix belongs to our stage of physiological development because it still exists in it—a mischievous rudiment. Our sociological rudiments cause us increasing pain.

The growing social consciousness of our times is most keenly stirred by a sense of pain. We are beginning to feel the great common processes of human life; but we feel them, at first, only when they hurt. Our individual distresses we have always felt; and have voiced our anguish and resentment more and more loudly as civilisation progressed. Earlier man—and in particular the unhappy savage, with his unavoidable privations, dangers, and mishaps, and his ingenious systems of self-torture—had more to hurt him, but made far less fuss about it. For many an age the pain of human life has formed so conspicuous a fact that we have called the earth “The Star of Suffering.” Our common illustrations of happiness are drawn from the lower animals: “as happy as a clam,” we say; “as gay as a lark”; “as merry as a cricket.”

The world’s greatest religions have rested on a conception of general human unhappiness. Divine curses are held to account for it, Divine blessings to allay it, and a future life to recompense us for it—if we are good; but the basic proposition is the unhappiness of human life. Again, we are given a theory of reincarnation; of a slow transmigration through many lines towards a plane where we do not feel, feeling being admitted to mean pain. In Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, from the Happy Hunting Grounds and Walhalla to our most refined conception of eternal progress, the bliss of a future life is advanced as some countercheck to the misery of this one, some hope to enable us to live.

So unbearable is the amount of human pain that we alone among all animals manifest the remarkable phenomenon of suicide—a deliberate effort of a form of life to stop living because living hurts so much. Social evolution does not proportionately abate social suffering; it improves external conditions and insures physical existence more and more reliably; but it does not make us commensurately happier. We die of different diseases, and we do not die so soon, but we continue to suffer while alive, we continue to refer to “the sea of human misery,” we continue to kill ourselves because we cannot bear the pain of being alive.

All this distress, formerly borne by each man as simply his “lot,”—his personal allowance,—was yet vaguely recognised by larger thinkers as “our common lot”; even physical diseases, those most personal facts, we have generalised as “the ills that flesh is heir to.” This generalising is a most legitimate social instinct; now grown keener, more accurate, felt by far more persons; and in its light we have begun to recognise many of those long-borne “ills” as not only remediable, but preventable. Yet, though we have done something, our condition remains lamentable. The general causes of our still-existing difficulties are internal rather than external.

Society has long since mastered the difficulties of adjustment with physical conditions, but cannot arrange its own intersocial conditions on a satisfactory basis. “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn”—not nature’s. From the Arctic Circle to the Tropics man gets along contentedly enough with natural obstacles; he may be checked and modified in development, but he is not unhappy; he strikes a balance with nature and is comparatively at rest. But in his progressive social development he has not yet been able to strike a balance; his interhuman relations are uncertain and mischievous. So far as history shows us, each social group seems to have carried within it the seeds of disease; to have grown worse as it progressed; and, while conquering all external difficulties, to have succumbed in the end to its own inward disorders. The suffering of an advanced society is not that of one struggling for subsistence, or in combat with enemies, but of one in the throes of disease. Society has safety, peace, shelter, warmth, enough to eat,—and chronic indigestion!

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