Charlotte Perkins Gilman
31 quotes
Biography
Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman, also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, early sociologist, and advocate for social reform. She was an early and leading figure in the women's rights movement in the United States.
"Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil."
"As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since."
"The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society � more briefly, to find your real job, and do it."
"The latest and highest form of Feminism has great promise for the world. It postulates womanhood free, strong, clean and conscious of its power and duty."
"A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world."
"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."
"The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."
"This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then."
"I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper."
"There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will."
"You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way 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 becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still."
"Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!"
"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."
"Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain."
"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver."
"To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship."
"Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized."
"The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now."
"To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something."
"Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil."
"Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman."
"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?"
"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."
"And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body."