Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

A family unity which is only bound together with a table-cloth is of questionable value. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life-of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Life is a verb, not a noun. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!
It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!
I don't want to go outside. I won't even if Jennie asks me to.
For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.
But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot loose my way. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

(At the end of the nineteenth century, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman complained that housework was the only job that had not been modernized.) ~ Ann Jones

Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.
I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious! ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Our laws as we support them now are slow, wasteful, cumbrous systems, which require a special caste to interpret and another to enforce; wherein the average citizen knows nothing of the law, and cares only to evade it when he can, obey it when he must. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs MacAvelly suggested.
"Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em– nor God– nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman. ~ Kate Bolick

Woman in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairytales have some point to them--the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: the villains went to work with their brains and always accomplished something. To be sure they were "foiled" in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book--and they always tumbled.

It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn't they ever read anything? Couldn't they learn anything from what they read--ever? It appeared not. And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it.

"A good villain. That's what we need!" I said to myself. "Why don't they write about them? Aren't there ever any?"

I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Legitimate sex-competition brings out all that is best in man. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I want to marry you, Malda - because I love you - because you are young and strong and beautiful - because you are wild and sweet and - fragrant, and - elusive, like the wild flowers you love. Because you are so truly an artist in your special way, seeing beauty and giving it to others. I love you because of all of this, because you are rational and highminded and capable of friendship - and in spite of your cooking!"
"But - how do you want to live?"
"As we did here - at first," he said. "There was peace, exquisite silence. There was beauty - nothing but beauty. There were the clean wood odors and flowers and fragrances and sweet wild wind. And there was you - your fair self, always delicately dressed, with white firm fingers sure of touch in delicate true work. I loved you then. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed to men and forbidden to women. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world, Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power, The world must follow you! ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very violently taught that they owe all to their parents, and the parents are not slow in foreclosing the mortgage. But the home is not a debtor's prison - to girls any more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents calls for extermination. Do they in truth do all for their children; do their children owe all to them? Is nothing furnished in the way of safety, sanitation, education, by that larger home, the state? What could these parents do, alone, in never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity. These lingering vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be left behind. Ancestor-worship has had victims enough. Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and both have duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A man hits me--I hit the man a little harder--then he won't do it again.' Unfortunately he did do it again--a little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious cities to the ground. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Its time we woke up," pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. "Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but who's to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and what's more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes - and shoes - which of us wants to dance with her? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I ran against a Prejudice that quite cut off the view. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Women accept [man-made] conventions, repeat them, enforce them upon their daughters; but they originate with men. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"
That silenced him for a few moments.
Then he said - very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!"
"I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"
And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The most serious injury is done in childhood. Our cruel waste of the nerve force of children is only more pathetic than it is absurd. The mere business of growing up ... which should be a process unconscious or full of joy and rich accumulation, is made by our ignorant mishandling a confusing, irritating, exhausting process, often leaving permanent injuries to the machine, as well as waste of power. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Most men's eyes, when you look at them critically, are not like that. They may look at you very expressively, but when you look at them, just as features, they are not very nice. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

He says no one can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature; to make beautiful things has more. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In exact proportion as women grow independent, educated, wise and free, do they become less submissive to men-made fashions. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Beauty has laws, and an appreciation of them is not possessed equally by all. The more primitive and ignorant a race, or class, the less it knows of true beauty. The Indian basket-maker wove beautiful things but they did not know it; give them the cheap and ugly productions of our greedy "market" and they like them better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but they do not consciously select it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Society' consists mostly of women. Women carry on most of its processes, therefore women are its makers and masters, they are responsible for it, that is the general belief.

We might as well hold women responsible for harems--or prisoners for jails. To be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not prove that one has chosen it; much less made it.

No; in an androcentric culture "society," like every other social relation, is dominated by the male and arranged for his convenience. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The connection between our archaic system of punishment and our androcentric culture is two-fold. The impulse of resistance, while, as we have seen, of the deepest natural origin, is expressed more strongly in the male than in the female. The tendency to hit back and hit harder has been fostered in him by sex-combat till it has become of great intensity. The habit of authority too, as old as our history; and the cumulative weight of all the religions and systems of law and government, have furthermore built up and intensified the spirit of retaliation and vengeance.

They have even deified this concept, in ancient religions, crediting to God the evil passions of men. As the small boy recited; 'Vengeance. A mean desire to get even with your enemies: 'Vengeance is mine saith the Lord'--'I will repay. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If a man loves a girl who is in the first place young and inexperienced; who in the second place is educated with a background of caveman tradition, a middle-ground of poetry and romance, and a foreground of unspoken hope and interest all centering upon the one Event; and who has, furthermore, absolutely no other hope or interest worthy of the name - why, it is a comparatively easy manner to sweep her off her feet with a dashing attack. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress.We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

All social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society
more briefly, to find your real job, and do it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

F a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do? ...
So I take phosphates or phosphites - whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.
Personally, I disagree with their ideas ... ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A lifted world lifts women up,"
the Socalist explained.
You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,"
the Suffragist maintained.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
Your work is all the same;
Work together or work apart,
Work, each of you, with all your heart-
Just get into the game! ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire - and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period - has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

One new indulgence was to go out evenings alone. This I worked out carefully in my mind, as not only a right but a duty. Why should a woman be deprived of her only free time, the time allotted to recreation? Why must she be dependent on some man, and thus forced to please him if she wished to go anywhere at night?
A stalwart man once sharply contested my claim to this freedom to go alone. "Any true man," he said with fervor, "is always ready to go with a woman at night. He is her natural protector." "Against what?" I inquired. As a matter of fact, the thing a woman is most afraid to meet on a dark street is her natural protector. Singular ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gaveus relgions which coule not possible maintained without belief and obedience: ... we find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to swquare their beliefs with the laws of life. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It cannot be too strongly asserted that the insistence on blind, unreasoning faith is due mainly to the maintenance of a subject-matter upon which there was no knowledge, namely the 'other world'; and that this basis was assumed because of early man's preoccupation with death. It is, unfortunately, quite possible to believe a thing which is contradicted by facts, especially if the facts are not generally known; but if the whole position on which we rested our religions had been visibly opposed by what we did know, even the unthinking masses would, in time, have noticed it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We have always had war," Terry explained ... "It is human nature."
"Human?" asked Ellador.
...
"Are some of the soldiers women?" she inquired.
"Women! Of course not! They are men; strong, brave men ... "
...
"Then why do you call it 'human nature?' she persisted. "If it was human wouldn't they both do it?"
...
"Do you call bearing children 'human nature'? she asked him. "It's woman nature," he answered. "It's her work."
"Then why do you not call fighting 'man nature'
instead of human? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages
not alimony. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The people people have for friends
Your common sense appall
But the people people marry
Are the queerest folk of all. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Democratic government is no longer an exercise of arbitrary authority from one above, but is an organization for public service of the people themselves--or will be when it is really attained.

In this change government ceases to be compulsion, and becomes agreement; law ceases to be authority and becomes co-ordination. When we learn the rules of whist or chess we do not obey them because we fear to be punished if we don't, but because we want to play the game. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty - for growth. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them-on the race. You see, we are MOTHERS, she repeated, as if in that she had said it all. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.
I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Do you love him enough to do something to win him - to really put yourself out somewhat for that purpose? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

They were inconveniently reasonable, these women. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept the new. In social life, in all our social processes, we piously, valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

[Warfare is] maleness in its absurdest extremes. Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation, with the loudest accompaniment of noise. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant! ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We have built into the constitution of the human race the habit and desire of taking, as divorced from its natural precursor and concomitant of making. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There should be an end to the bitterness of feeling which has arisen between the sexes in this century. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

California is a state peculiarly addicted to swift enthusiasms. It is a seed-bed of all manner of cults and theories, taken up, and dropped, with equal speed. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We thought of them as "Women," and therefore timid; but it was two thousand years since they had had anything to be afraid of, and certainly more than one thousand since they had outgrown the feeling. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The more women writers I read, from Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Toni Morrison, the less alone I felt, and the more I began to see myself as part of something more. It wasn't about one woman toiling against the universe. It was about all of us moving together, crying out into some black, inhospitable place that we would not be quiet, we would not go silently, we would not stop speaking, we would not give in. * ~ Kameron Hurley

It's time we woke up, women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools- but who´s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and, what's more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes -and shoes- which of us wants to dance with her? Yes, we blame them for gratifying us, but are we willing to let our wives work? We are not. It hurts our pride, that's all. We are always criticizing them for doing mercenary marriages, but what do we call a girl who marries a chump with no money? Just a poor fool, that's all. And they know it.
As for Mother Eve- I wasn't there and I can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the loin's share of keeping it going ever since- how about that? ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Varium et mutabile! murmurs the man sagely - "A woman's privilege is to change her mind!" If the nature of his industry were such that he had to change his mind from cooking to cleaning, from cleaning to sewing, from sewing to nursing, from nursing to teaching, and so, backward, forward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night - he too would become adept in the lightning-change act. The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests - and so grows broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few more. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Love grows by service. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with what I supposed to be there. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place ... and the world waits while she powders her nose. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

[Christianity] is a religion for slaves and women!' said the warrior of old. (Slaves and women were largely the same thing.) 'It is a religion for slaves and women' says the advocate of the Superman.

Well? Who did the work of all the ancient world? Who raised the food and garnered it and cooked it and served it? Who built the houses, the temples, the aqueducts, the city wall? Who made the furniture, the tools, the weapons, the utensils, the ornaments--made them strong and beautiful and useful? Who kept the human race going, somehow, in spite of the constant hideous waste of war, and slowly built up the real industrial civilization behind that gory show?--Why just the slaves and women. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman