Women and Economics - Charlotte Perkins Gilman (good books to read for teens TXT) 📗

and works for the State; the patriot, one who loves and labors for his country; the philanthropist, one who loves mankind. All these qualities, in their extreme and in their first beginnings, are a mere recognition of the equal right of the next man, common “fair play” and courtesy; they are but the natural product of social conditions acting on the individual through primal laws of economic necessity. The individual, in the absolute economic isolation of the beast, is profited by pure egoism, and he develops it. The individual, in the increasing economic interdependence of social relation, is profited by altruism; and he develops it.

All our virtues can be so traced and accounted for. The great main stem of them all, what we call “love,” is merely the first condition of social existence. It is cohesion, working among us as the constituent particles of society. Without some attraction to hold us together, we should not be able to hold together; and this attraction, as perceived by our consciousness, we call love. The virtue of obedience consists in the surrender of the individual will, so often necessary to the common good; and it stands highest in military organization, wherein great numbers of men must act together against their personal interests, even to the sacrifice of life, in the service of the community.

As we have grown into fuller social life, we have slowly and experimentally, painfully and expensively, discovered what kind of man was the best social factor. The type of a satisfactory member of society today is a man self-controlled, kind, gentle, strong, wise, brave, courteous, cheerful, true. In the Middle Ages, strong, brave, and true would have satisfied the demands of the time. We now require for our common good a larger range of qualities, a more elaborate moral organization. All this is a simple, evolutionary process of social life, and should have involved no more confusion, effort, and pain than any other natural process.

But the moral development of humanity is a most tempestuous and contradictory field of study. Some virtues we have developed in orderly fashion, hardly recognizing that they were virtues, because they came so easily into use. Accuracy and punctuality are qualities which were unknown to the savage, because they were not needed in his business. They have been developed in us, because they were required, and so have been gradually assumed under pressure of economic necessity. Obedience, even in its extreme form of self-sacrifice, has been produced in the soldier; and no quality is more altruistic, more unnatural, or more difficult of adoption by the sturdy individual will. The common, law-abiding citizen does not consider himself a hero; yet he is manifesting a high degree of social virtue, often at great personal sacrifice.

But in other virtues we have not progressed so smoothly. In the ordinary economic relations of life, and in our sex-relations, we are distinguished by peculiar and injurious qualities. Our condition may be described as consisting of a tenacious survival of qualities which we ought, on every ground of social good, to have long since outgrown; and an incessant struggle between these rudimentary survivals and the normal growth. This it is which has so forcibly assailed our consciousness since its awakening, and which we call the contest between good and evil. We have felt within ourselves the pull of diverse tendencies⁠—the impulse to do what was immediately good for ourselves, but which our growing social sense knew was bad for the community, and therefore wrong; and the impulse to do what might be immediately bad for ourselves, but which the same social sense knew was good for the community, and therefore right. This we felt, and cast about in our minds for an explanation of the way we behaved: we knew it was peculiar. The human brain is an organ that must have an explanation, if it has to make one. We made one.

The belated impulses of the individual beast⁠—good in him because he needed them, bad in us because we were becoming human and had other needs⁠—we lumped together, and, with our facile, dramatic, personifying tendency, called them “the devil.” And, as these evil promptings were usually along the lines of physical impulse, we considered our own bodies, and nature in general, as part and parcel of the wrong⁠—“the world, the flesh, and the devil.” We felt, also, within us the mighty stirrings of new powers and strange tendencies, that led us out of ourselves and toward each other, new loves and hopes and wishes, new desires to give instead of to take, to serve instead of to fight; and, realizing, with true social instinct, that this impulse tended to help us most, was really good for us, we called it the will of God, the voice of God, the way to God. The tearing contest between these ill-adjusted impulses and tendencies, with our growing power of self-conscious decision and voluntary adoption of one or another course of action⁠—this process in psychic evolution has given us the greatest world-drama ever conceived, the struggle between good and evil.

And, fumbling vaguely at the sources of our pain so far as we could trace them, judging always by persons, and not by conditions⁠—as a child strikes the chair he bumps his head upon⁠—race after race has located the cause of the trouble in woman. Not that she primarily invented all the evil, and brought it upon us⁠—our vague devil was the remoter cause⁠—but that woman let the trouble in. Pandora did not make the mischief-box; but she perversely opened it, even against the wise man’s advice. Eve did not plant that apple tree; but she ate of it, and tempted the superior man. It seems a childish and clumsy guess, but there is something in it. Nothing of the unspeakable blame and shame with which man has blackened the face of his mother through all these centuries, but a sociological truth for all that.

Not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of