Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  The effect of the change upon Ethics and Religion is deep and wide. With the entrance of women upon full human life, a new principle comes into prominence; the principle of loving service. That this is the governing principle of Christianity is believed by many; but an androcentric interpretation has quite overlooked it; and made, as we have shown, the essential dogma of their faith the desire of an eternal reward and the combat with an eternal enemy.

  The feminine attitude in life is wholly different. As a female she has merely to be herself and passively attract; neither to compete nor to pursue; as a mother her whole process is one of growth; first the development of the live child within her, and the wonderful nourishment from her own body; and then all the later cultivation to make the child grow; all the watching, teaching, guarding, feeding. In none of this is there either desire, combat, or self-expression. The feminine attitude, as expressed in religion, makes of it a patient practical fulfillment of law; a process of large sure improvements; a limitless comforting love and care.

  This full assurance of love and of power; this endless cheerful service; the broad provision for all people; rather than the competitive selection of a few “victors;” is the natural presentation of religious truth from the woman’s viewpoint. Her governing principle being growth and not combat; her main tendency being to give and not to get; she more easily and naturally lives and teaches these religious principles. It is for this reason that the broader gentler teaching of the Unitarian and Universalist sects have appealed so especially to women, and that so many women preach in their churches.

  This principle of growth, as applied and used in general human life will work to far other ends than those now so painfully visible.

  In education, for instance, with neither reward nor punishment as spur or bait; with no competition to rouse effort and animosity, but rather with the feeling of a gardener towards his plants; the teacher will teach and the children learn, in mutual ease and happiness. The law of passive attraction applies here, leading to such ingenuity in presentation as shall arouse the child’s interest; and, in the true spirit of promoting growth, each child will have his best and fullest training, without regard to who is “ahead” of him, or her, or who “behind.”

  We do not sadly measure the cabbage-stalk by the corn-stalk, and praise the corn for getting ahead of the cabbage — nor incite the cabbage to emulate the corn. We nourish both, to its best growth — and are the richer.

  That every child on earth shall have right conditions to make the best growth possible to it; that every citizen, from birth to death, shall have a chance to learn all he or she can assimilate, to develop every power that is in them — for the common good — this will be the aim of education, under human management.

  In the world of “society” we may look for very radical changes.

  With all women full human beings, trained and useful in some form of work; the class of busy idlers, who run about forever “entertaining” and being “entertained” will disappear as utterly as will the prostitute. No woman with real work to do could have the time for such petty amusements; or enjoy them if she did have time. No woman with real work to do, work she loved and was well fitted for, work honored and well-paid, would take up the Unnatural Trade. Genuine relaxation and recreation, all manner of healthful sports and pastimes, beloved of both sexes to-day, will remain, of course; but the set structure of “social functions” — so laughably misnamed — will disappear with the “society women” who make it possible. Once active members of real Society; no woman could go back to “society,” any more than a roughrider could return to a hobbyhorse.

  New development in dress, wise, comfortable, beautiful, may be confidently expected, as woman becomes more human. No fully human creature could hold up its head under the absurdities our women wear to-day — and have worn for dreary centuries.

  So on through all the aspects of life we may look for changes, rapid and far-reaching; but natural and all for good. The improvement is not due to any inherent moral superiority of women; nor to any moral inferiority of men; men at present, as more human, are ahead of women in all distinctly human ways; yet their maleness, as we have shown repeatedly, warps and disfigures their humanness. The woman, being by nature the race-type; and her feminine functions being far more akin to human functions than are those essential to the male; will bring into human life a more normal influence.

  Under this more normal influence our present perversities of functions will, of course, tend to disappear. The directly serviceable tendency of women, as shown in every step of their public work, will have small patience with hoary traditions of absurdity. We need but look at long recorded facts to see what women do — or try to do, when they have opportunity. Even in their crippled, smothered past, they have made valiant efforts — not always wise — in charity and philanthropy.

  In our own time this is shown through all the length and breadth of our country, by the Woman’s Clubs. Little groups of women, drawing together in human relation, at first, perhaps, with no better purpose than to “improve their minds,” have grown and spread; combined and federated; and in their great reports, representing hundreds of thousands of women — we find a splendid record of human work. They strive always to improve something, to take care of something, to help and serve and benefit. In “village improvement,” in traveling libraries, in lecture courses and exhibitions, in promoting good legislation; in many a line of noble effort our Women’s Clubs show what women want to do.

  Men do not have to do these things through their clubs, which are mainly for pleasure; they can accomplish what they wish to through regular channels. But the character and direction of the influence of women in human affairs is conclusively established by the things they already do and try to do. In those countries, and in our own states, where they are already full citizens, the legislation introduced and promoted by them is of the same beneficent character. The normal woman is a strong creature, loving and serviceable. The kind of woman men are afraid to entrust with political power, selfish, idle, over-sexed, or ignorant and narrow-minded, is not normal, but is the creature of conditions men have made. We need have no fear of her, for she will disappear with the conditions which created her.

  In older days, without knowledge of the natural sciences, we accepted life as static. If, being born in China, we grew up with foot-bound women, we assumed that women were such, and must so remain. Born in India, we accepted the child-wife, the pitiful child-widow, the ecstatic suttee, as natural expressions of womanhood. In each age, each country, we have assumed life to be necessarily what it was — a moveless fact.

  All this is giving way fast in our new knowledge of the laws of life. We find that Growth is the eternal law, and that even rocks are slowly changing. Human life is seen to be as dynamic as any other form; and the most certain thing about it is that it will change. In the light of this knowledge we need no longer accept the load of what we call “sin;” the grouped misery of poverty, disease and crime; the cumbrous, inefficatious, wasteful processes of life today, as needful or permanent.

  We have but to learn the real elements in humanity; its true powers and natural characteristics; to see wherein we are hampered by the wrong ideas and inherited habits of earlier generations, and break loose from them — then we can safely and swiftly introduce a far nobler grade of living.

  Of all crippling hindrances in false ideas, we have none more universally mischievous than this root error about men and women. Given the old androcentric theory, and we have an androcentric culture — the kind we so far know; this short stretch we call “history;” with its proud and pitiful record. We have done wonders of upward growth — for growth is the main law, and may not be wholly resisted. But we have hindered, perverted, temporarily checked that growth, age after age; and again and again has a given nation, far advanced and promising, sunk to ruin, and left another to take up its task of social evolution; repeat its errors — and its failure.

  One major cause of th
e decay of nations is “the social evil” — a thing wholly due to the androcentric culture. Another steady endless check is warfare — due to the same cause. Largest of all is poverty; that spreading disease which grows with our social growth and shows most horribly when and where we are most proud, keeping step, as it were, with private wealth. This too, in large measure, is due to the false ideas on industry and economics, based, like the others mentioned, on a wholly masculine view of life.

  By changing our underlying theory in this matter we change all the resultant assumptions; and it is this alteration in our basic theory of life which is being urged.

  The scope and purpose of human life is entirely above and beyond the field of sex relationship. Women are human beings, as much as men, by nature; and as women, are even more sympathetic with human processes. To develop human life in its true powers we need full equal citizenship for women.

  The great woman’s movement and labor movement of to-day are parts of the same pressure, the same world-progress. An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy.

  THE END

  WHY I WROTE THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER

  Originally published in the October 1913 issue of ‘The Forerunner’

  Many and many a reader has asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story ought not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.

  Another physician, in Kansas I think, wrote to say that it was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and — begging my pardon — had I been there?

  Now the story of the story is this:

  For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia — and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.

  I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

  Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again — work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite — ultimately recovering some measure of power.

  Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wall Paper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

  The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate — so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.

  But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wall-Paper.

  It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

  The Autobiography

  Gilman, c. 1901

  THE LIVING OF CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography was published shortly after Gilman’s death in 1935, although it subsequently fell out of print for several decades, before coming to the attention of second wave feminists. It is an illuminating work, charged with vitality as Gilman chronicles her life as a novelist, sociologist, social activist, poet and lecturer. The author had a somewhat difficult childhood as her father abandoned the family home when she was young and her mother, though not unkind, found it difficult to be affectionate. Gilman recalls that the only time her mother was able to show her daughter any true warmth and love was while the child was sleeping. The author experienced the pain and censure of a failed first marriage and chose for her daughter to be primarily raised by her ex-husband and his new wife, with whom Gilman had a close friendship.

  The autobiography is perhaps not quite as candid as it could be and certainly Gilman appears to be keen to further facilitate her public image rather than refute it. This does necessitate a lack of honesty in the work, as she writes of the social activism and writing that dominated her life. One of the most striking parts of the book is the final chapter, which Gilman wrote at the end of her life, when she was suffering from terminal cancer. It is not only a farewell from the author but also a passionate and considered argument in favour of euthanasia; the author determined to end her own life shortly afterwards on August 17th 1935 stating she ‘chose chloroform over cancer’.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER I. BACKGROUND

  CHAPTER II. BEGINNINGS

  CHAPTER III. THE END OF CHILDHOOD

  CHAPTER IV. BUILDING A RELIGION

  CHAPTER V. GIRLHOOD — IF ANY

  CHAPTER VI. POWER AND GLORY

  CHAPTER VII. LOVE AND MARRIAGE

  CHAPTER VIII. THE BREAKDOWN

  CHAPTER IX. PASADENA

  CHAPTER X. OAKLAND

  CHAPTER XI. MOTHERHOOD

  CHAPTER XII. SAN FRANCISCO

  CHAPTER XIII. AT LARGE

  CHAPTER XIV. ENGLAND

  CHAPTER XV. WANDER YEARS

  CHAPTER XVI. COMING UP

  CHAPTER XVII. OVER THE TOP

  CHAPTER XVIII. THREE FLATS AND A HOUSE — 1900-1922

  CHAPTER XIX. CONVENTIONS, EDITORS AND THE “FORERUNNER”

  CHAPTER XX. HOME

  CHAPTER XXI. THE LAST TEN

  Gilman’s great uncle Henry Ward Beecher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  MANY a foreword gives thanks to various authorities for help in writing the book.

  I wish to offer gratitude, deep and warm and true, to those whose warmly expressed affection has made this closing year a happiness; to my more than sister, Grace Ellery Channing-Stetson; to my cousin, Lyman Beecher Stowe and his wife, Hilda Stowe, whose loving kindness and generous care have shouldered so much of the burden I was unable to lift; to Zona Gale, whose affectionate intent promoted this publication; to Amy Wellington, keen but gentle critic, who has arranged my second book of poems, Here Also;

  And to those close and tender friends, Martha Bensley Bruere and Robert Bruere; Dr. Edmund P. Shelby and his wife, Gertrude M. Shelby; to three generations of the family of Judge Charles Amidon; to Mary Hutchinson Page and her family; to Alexander Black and Mrs. Black, to the Reverend Alexander Abbott and Mrs. Abbott, to Mr. Edwin Higgins, whose extraordinary kindness and legal ability have cared for me so ably — I cannot give a list of the friends of a lifetime; but these, and more, have helped me through sudden widowhood and long illness to the end.

  CHAPTER I. BACKGROUND

  WHEN about fifteen years old I was told of our extremely remote connection with English royalty, and wrote eagerly to my learned father to inquire as to the facts — was I related to Queen Victoria? To which he solemnly replied, “It is quite true that you are related to Queen Victoria, but there are a great many persons between you and the throne and I should not advise you to look forward to it.”

  There are two tall yellow books in our public libraries, American Families of Royal Descent; almost any one who can trace back to England can hook onto a royal family or two, but I did not know this at the time and was much impressed by the genealogical outline he sent me. It was such fun to re
cognize names familiar in Scott; and faces sadly beautiful from Agnes Strickland’s Queens of England.

  We run up through a bunch of New Englanders, Perkins, Pitkin, Woodbridge, Wyllys, to Governor John Haynes of Connecticut, who was John Haynes of Copford Hall, England. “In Essex I think,” says father’s letter. Through this worthy, or rather his wife, up presently to one Catherine Fiennes, whose father was Thomas Fiennes, Lord Dacre of the South, and whose mother was daughter of Sir Humphrey Bourchier. Then the fun begins!

  Up goes one long line of names, through two more Bourchiers to Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, son of Edward III and Phillippa of Hainault; then it streams off to that universal progenitor, William the Conqueror; to Malcolm Canmore III of Scotland; to Edmund Ironsides and his less attractive father, Ethelred the Unready.

  Climbing another branch, through Edward II’s wife, Isabella of France, “the She-wolf,” it runs merrily on through Phillip the Fair and Phillip the Bold to Louis XIII and Alphonse of Castille; to Henry II, Duke of Brabant, Andrew II, of Hungary, and through his wife Yolande to her father, Peter de Courtenay, Emperor of Constantinople.

  More pleasing to my young eyes was the name of Fair Rosamund— “Henry II and Rosamund Clifford.” The Plantagenets are as thick as thieves, and there are whole rows of names out of novels and plays, Beauchamp, Neville, Le Zouch, Fitzhugh, Willoughby, Montecute, yes, and John of Gaunt — I do hope he was “Time-honored Lancaster.”