115 Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an American writer and social activist born in 1860, is best known for her groundbreaking work, "The Yellow Wallpaper." This seminal short story confronts the stifling effects of 19th-century patriarchal society on women's mental health and agency. Gilman's writing exudes a profound sense of empathy and urgency, giving voice to the silent suffering of women confined to restrictive gender roles. Her approach to storytelling was imbued with an unflinching critique of traditional gender norms, calling for social and economic reforms that would empower women and create a more just society. Beyond her fiction, Gilman's essays and lectures played a significant role in advocating for women's rights and challenging prevailing notions of gender inequality. Her legacy as a writer and advocate continues to inspire modern discussions on feminism, mental health, and the importance of societal change in promoting equality and human flourishing.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes
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.
Life is a verb, not a noun.
We grovel and "worship" and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.
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.
To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.
Love grows by service.
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.
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
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.
A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.
[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.
If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages--not alimony.
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.
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.
Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.
But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.
What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?
It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.
In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.
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.
It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.
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.
The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.
The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.
Concepts antedate facts.
If we once admit that our life is here for the purpose of race-improvement, then we question any religion which does not improve the race, or the main force of which evaporates, as it were, directing our best efforts toward the sky.... Improvement in the human race is not accomplished by extracting any number of souls and placing them in heaven, or elsewhere. It must be established on earth, either through achievement in social service, or through better children.
Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.
The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain-the hardest and most iron-bound as well.
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.
Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.
What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.
In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.
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.
The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.
Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.
A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband.
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.
Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
A concept is stronger than a fact.
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.
Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.
So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more, I saw at last its meaning and its place; Not the blind passion of the brooding past, But Mother - the World's Mother - come at last, To love as she had never loved before -- To feed and guard and teach the human race.
Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.
However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.
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?
Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.
One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.
It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.
The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.
A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.
For men obsessed with women's underwear, a course in washing, ironing and mending is recommended.
If only religion could be brought to take an interest in this earthly future, what a help it would be! ... Think of the appeal to the less spiritual of us, to those who never did get enthusiastic about eternity, or care so tenderly about their own souls, yet who could rise to the thought of improving this world for the children they love, and their children after them.
The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.
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.
In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.
A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?
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.
Until mothers earn their livings, women will not
To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature; to make beautiful things has more.
To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.
Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.
But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.
To speak broadly, the troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse.
It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.
The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent.
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.
The female of genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.
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.
To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development - the full use of one's best faculties - this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.
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.
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.
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.
No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, 'This is our best thought, go on, think farther!' then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.
It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb and said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.
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.
I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.
A family unity which is only bound together with a table-cloth is of questionable value.
The difference is great between one's outside "life," the things which happen to one, incidents, pains and pleasures, and one's "living."
To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America ... 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.
At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.
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.
I do not want to be a fly, I want to be a worm!
Legitimate sex-competition brings out all that is best in man.
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.
There should be an end to the bitterness of feeling which has arisen between the sexes in this century.
The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.
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.
In great cities where people of ability abound, there is always a feverish urge to keep ahead, to set the pace, to adopt each new fashion in thought and theory as well as in dress - or undress.
It is not for nothing that a man's best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius.
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.
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!
Not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of evil.
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.
Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.
Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!
Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a partnership. The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor are her frugality and industry.
The religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so, but it demands a teaching which can be understood. Slowly an apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while application of that power-in the improvement of the world.
There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.
We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers.' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?
There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty - for growth.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The mother- poor invaded soul- finds even the bathroom door no bar to hammering little hands.
If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.
Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
