Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

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

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

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.

It does not do to trust people too much.

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.

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.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

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!

In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things

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.

I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.

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.

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.

A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.

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.

John doesn't know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

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.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

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.

All this talk, for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: ‘We are running short of children—make some more.

Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?” “Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.

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.

I always liked that Arab saying, 'First tie your camel and then trust in the Lord,

I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind.

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.

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.

They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.

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?

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

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

I really have discovered something at last. 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! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...

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.

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?

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!

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

But only this-that people who are utterly ignorant will believe anything-which you certainly knew before.

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.

The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.

Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.

This was not life, this was a nightmare.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once. But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time. And though I always see her, she may be able to creep faster than I can turn! I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

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. *

I am, unfortunately, one of those much-berated New England women who have learned to think as well as feel; and to me, at least, marriage means more than a union of hearts and bodies--it must mean minds, too.

[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

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

If 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 . . .

Woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body

Maleness means war.

Why, European visitors tell us, we don’t know what poverty is.” “Neither do we,” answered Zava. “Won’t you tell us?

And, as I traveled farther and farther, exploring the rich, sweet soul of her, my sense of pleasant friendship became but a broad foundation for such height, such breadth, such interlocked combination of feeling as left me fairly blinded with the wonder of it.

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 up my mind to be one.

John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster

That which is desirable in young girls means, naturally, that which is desirable to men. Of all cultivated accomplishments the first is 'innocence.' Beauty may or may not be forthcoming; but 'innocence' is 'the chief charm of girlhood.

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.

Will you excuse us all,” [Jeff] said, “if we admit that we find it hard to believe? There is no such-possibility-in the rest of the world.” Have you no kind of life where [asexual reproduction] is possible?” asked Zava. “Why, yes-some low forms, of course.” “How low-or how high, rather?

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.

There are the two of you - the two sexes- to love and help one another. It must be a rich and wonderful world

It is not true, always, my dear,' said he, 'that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; at least it’s not the only way.

[Suggesting an additional definition for 'politics':] The art of organizing and handling men in large numbers, manipulating votes, and, in especial, appropriating public wealth.

Only women there—and children," Jeff urged excitedly. "But they look—why, this is a CIVILIZED country!" I protested. "There must be men.

the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informed

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.

Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found--the female capering and prancing before the male. It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers.

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.

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

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. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

When I see them knit,' Terry said, 'I can almost call them feminine.' 'That doesn't prove anything,' Jeff promptly replied. 'Scotch shepherds knit --always knitting.

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

Why not? Why not be your own man for once in your life — do what you want to — not what other people want you to?

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

Punishment [is] applied like a rabbit's foot, with as little regard to its efficacy.

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?" (from According to Solomon)

We do things FROM our mothers—not FOR them. We don't have to do things FOR them—they don't need it, you know. But we have to live on—splendidly—because of them; and that's the way we feel about God.

We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women—why, they would be no obstacles at all. Jeff, with his gentle romantic old-fashioned notions of women as clinging vines. Terry, with his clear decided practical theories that there were two kinds of women—those he wanted and those he didn't; Desirable and Undesirable was his demarcation. The latter as a large class, but negligible—he had never thought about them at all.

it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of organism, the individual or social body requires use of all of our powers in four areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and social

Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?" "Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.

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?

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. 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.

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?

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.

Do you love him enough to do something to win him — to really put yourself out somewhat for that purpose?

Crime does not decrease in proportion to the severest punishment.

I want to do it as quickly as I can, for reasons," answered Diantha.

When we use our past merely as a guide-book, and concentrate our noble emotions on the present and future, we shall improve more rapidly.

The world's last prison will be simply a hospital for moral incurables.

ONE of the most distinctive features of the human mind is to forecast better things. “We look before and after And pine for what is not.

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!

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?

This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.

I see that I have not remarked that these women had pockets in surprising number and variety. They were in all their garments, and the middle one in particular was shingled with them.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls. The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off--the paper--in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. 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. The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

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.

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.

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.

You think you have mastered it, 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 is like a bad dream.

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.

Democracy calls for the understanding, recognition, and universal practise of social laws,—laws which are "natural," like those of physics and chemistry; but your religion—and your education, too— taught Authority—not real law.

[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.

The force of inertia acts in the domain of psychics as well as physics; any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable force will keep on going until some opposing force--or the slow resistance of friction--stops it at last.

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. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere "instinct," a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion.

She is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which has accumulated through the centuries; she is opposed from without by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if prejudice were made of anything real.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The "long suit" in most courtships is sex attraction, of course. Then gradually develops such comradeship as the two temperaments allow. Then, after marriage, there is either the establishment of a slow-growing, widely based friendship, the deepest, tenderest, sweetest of relations, all lit and warmed by the recurrent flame of love; or else that process is reversed, love cools and fades, no friendship grows, the whole relation turns from beauty to ashes.

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.

This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process. But Terry came to no such conclusion.

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.

We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted maternal activities which make our wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our own decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way.

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

there are some things one takes for granted, supposes are mutually understood, and to which both parties may repeatedly refer without ever meaning the same thing.

And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.

There are many who think in one syllable, who say, 'women don't dress to please men--they dress to please themselves--and to outshine other women.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time. Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.

Às vezes eu acho que se ao menos eu estivesse bem o suficiente para escrever um pouco, aliviaria a pressão das ideias e eu poderia descansar. - O papel de parede amarelo

I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!

What do we find, here in America, in the field of 'politics?' We find first a party system which is the technical arrangement to carry on a fight. It is perfectly conceivable that a flourishing democratic government be carried on without any parties at all; public functionaries being elected on their merits, and each proposed measure judged on its merits; though this sounds impossible to the androcentric mind. 'There has never been a democracy without factions and parties!" is protested. There has never been a democracy, so far--only an androcracy.

It is the old masculine spirit of government as authority which is so slow in adapting itself to the democratic idea of government as service. That it should be a representative government they grasp, but representative of what? of the common will, they say; the will of the majority;--never thinking that it is the common good, the common welfare, that government should represent.

The adjectives and derivatives based on woman's distinctions are alien and derogatory when applied to human affairs; "effeminate"--too female, connotes contempt, but has no masculine analogue; whereas "emasculate"--not enough male, is a term of reproach, and has no feminine analogue. 'Virile'--manly, we oppose to 'puerile'--childish, and the very world 'virtue' is derived from 'vir'--a man.

There you have it. 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. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere “instinct,” a wholly personal feeling; it was—a religion.

Ele disse que, com o poder de imaginação que tenho e minha rotina de inventar histórias, uma debilidade dos nervos como a minha só pode resultar em fantasias, e que devo usar minha força de vontade e meu bom senso para controlar essa propensão

and sometimes this daily disappointment, this constant agony of hope deferred, would bring me to my knees by that door begging her to open to me, crying to her in every term of passionate endearment and persuasion that tortured heart of man could think to use.

What do you study?" "As much as we know of the different sciences. We have, within our limits, a good deal of knowledge of anatomy, physiology, nutrition—all that pertains to a full and beautiful personal life. We have our botany and chemistry, and so on—very rudimentary, but interesting; our own history, with its accumulating psychology." "You put psychology with history—not with personal life?" "Of course. It is ours; it is among and between us, and it changes with the succeeding and improving generations. We are at work, slowly and carefully, developing our whole people along these lines. It is glorious work—splendid! To see the thousands of babies improving, showing stronger clearer minds, sweeter dispositions, higher capacities—don't you find it so in your country?

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.

It took some time to make clear to those three sweet-faced women the process which robs the cow of her calf, and the calf of its true food; and the talk led us to further discussion of the meat business. They heard it out. looking very white, and presently begged to be excused.

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.

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. 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.

In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy. "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. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother. We looked for nervousness—there was none. For terror, perhaps—there was none. For uneasiness, for curiosity, for excitement—and all we saw was what might have been a vigilance committee of women doctors, as cool as cucumbers, and evidently meaning to take us to task for being there.

It comes from the Greek and Latin word hyster, which means womb. In the nineteenth century, hysteria was the word men gave to a disease defined as insanity as a result of being female. They’d lock women away for it, women who wanted to do things like write books, or study science. Or play music. The prescribed treatment was rest—by which they meant having no mental life whatsoever. There’s a whole novella about it, in fact, called “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s the story of a woman who’s confined to her bed by her husband, a wife who winds up being driven insane by the cure he has inflicted on her. I told Mom that we didn’t live in the nineteenth century, and that if anybody could prove that it was possible to redefine gender, it was me.

where they went far beyond us was in the special application of religious feeling to every field of life. They had no ritual, no little set of performances called "divine service," save those religious pageants I have spoken of, and those were as much educational as religious, and as much social as either. But they had a clear established connection between everything they did—and God. Their cleanliness, their health, their exquisite order, the rich peaceful beauty of the whole land, the happiness of the children, and above all the constant progress they made—all this was their religion. They applied their minds to the thought of God, and worked out the theory that such an inner power demanded outward expression. They lived as if God was real and at work within them.

Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?” “Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.” This set me thinking in good earnest. I had always imagined—simply from hearing it said, I suppose—that women were by nature conservative. Yet these women, quite unassisted by any masculine spirit of enterprise, had ignored their past and built daringly for the future.

Tomorrow is just as real a thing as yesterday. So is day after next, and the rest of them. Because you cannot see the future, it does not follow that it is not there. Your own path may vary widely, but the piece of country you are to travel is solid and real. We have been most erroneously taught not to think of the future; to live only in the present: and at the same time we have been taught to guide our lives by an ideal of the remotest possible future - a postmortem eternity. Between the contradictory ideals of this paradox, most of us drag along, forced by the exigencies of business to consider some future, but ignoring most of it. A single human life is short enough to be well within range of anybody's mind. Allow for it eighty years: if you don't have eight you are that much in - so much less to plan for. Sit down wherever you happen to be; under twenty, over fifty, anywhere on the road; lift your eyes from your footsteps, and "look before and after." Look back, see the remarkable wiggling sort of path you have made; see the places where you made no progress at all, but simply tramped up and down without taking a step. Ask yourself: "If I had thought about what I should be feeling toady, would I have behaved as I did then?" Quite probably not. But why not? Why not, in deciding on own's path and gait at a given moment, consider that inevitable advancing future? Come it will; but how it comes, what it is, depends on us. Then look ahead; not merely just before your nose, but way ahead. It is a good and wholesome thing to plan out one's whole life; as one thinks it is likely to be; as one desires it should be; and then act accordingly. Suppose you are about twenty-five. Consider a number of persons of fifty or sixty, and how they look. Do you want to look like that? What sort of a body do you want at fifty? It is in your hands to make. In health, in character, in business, in friendship, in love, in happiness; your future is very largely yours to make. Then why not make it? Suppose you are thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. So long as you have a year before you it is worth while to consider it in advance. Live as a whole, not in disconnected fractions.

It is the inextricable masculinity in our idea of government which so revolts at the idea of women as voters. 'To govern:' that means to boss, to control, to have authority; and that only, to most minds. They cannot bear to think of the woman as having control over even their own affairs; to control is masculine, they assume. Seeing only self-interest as a natural impulse, and the ruling powers of the state as a sort of umpire, an authority to preserve the rules of the game while men fight it out forever; they see in a democracy merely a wider range of self interest, a wider, freer field to fight in.

The care of babies involves education, and is entrusted only to the most fit,” she repeated. “Then you separate mother and child!” I cried in cold horror, something of Terry’s feeling creeping over me, that there must be something wrong among these many virtues. “Not usually,” she patiently explained. “You see, almost every woman values her maternity above everything else. Each girl holds it close and dear, an exquisite joy, a crowning honor, the most intimate, most personal, most precious thing. That is, the child-rearing has come to be with us a culture so profoundly studied, practiced with such subtlety and skill, that the more we love our children the less we are willing to trust that process to unskilled hands—even our own.” “But a mother’s love—” I ventured. She studied my face, trying to work out a means of clear explanation. “You told us about your dentists,” she said, at length, “those quaintly specialized persons who spend their lives filling little holes in other persons’ teeth—even in children’s teeth sometimes.” “Yes?” I said, not getting her drift. “Does mother-love urge mothers—with you—to fill their own children’s teeth? Or to wish to?” “Why no—of course not,” I protested. “But that is a highly specialized craft. Surely the care of babies is open to any woman—any mother!” “We do not think so,” she gently replied. “Those of us who are the most highly competent fulfill that office; and a majority of our girls eagerly try for it—I assure you we have the very best.” “But the poor mother—bereaved of her baby—” “Oh no!” she earnestly assured me. “Not in the least bereaved. It is her baby still—it is with her—she has not lost it. But she is not the only one to care for it. There are others whom she knows to be wiser. She knows it because she has studied as they did, practiced as they did, and honors their real superiority. For the child’s sake, she is glad to have for it this highest care.

That we never allowed," answered Somel quietly. "Allowed?" I queried. "Allowed a mother to rear her own children?" "Certainly not," said Somel, "unless she was fit for that supreme task." This was rather a blow to my previous convictions. "But I thought motherhood was for each of you--" "Motherhood--yes, that is, maternity, to bear a child. But education is our highest art, only allowed to our highest artists." "Education?" I was puzzled again. "I don't mean education. I mean by motherhood not only child-bearing, but the care of babies." "The care of babies involves education, and is entrusted only to the most fit," she repeated. "Then you separate mother and child!" I cried in cold horror, something of Terry's feeling creeping over me, that there must be something wrong among these many virtues. "Not usually," she patiently explained. "You see, almost every woman values her maternity above everything else. Each girl holds it close and dear, an exquisite joy, a crowning honor, the most intimate, most personal, most precious thing. That is, the child-rearing has come to be with us a culture so profoundly studied, practiced with such subtlety and skill, that the more we love our children the less we are willing to trust that process to unskilled hands--even our own." "But a mother's love--" I ventured. She studied my face, trying to work out a means of clear explanation. "You told us about your dentists," she said, at length, "those quaintly specialized persons who spend their lives filling little holes in other persons' teeth--even in children's teeth sometimes." "Yes?" I said, not getting her drift. "Does mother-love urge mothers--with you--to fill their own children's teeth? Or to wish to?" "Why no--of course not," I protested. "But that is a highly specialized craft. Surely the care of babies is open to any woman --any mother!" "We do not think so," she gently replied. "Those of us who are the most highly competent fulfill that office; and a majority of our girls eagerly try for it--I assure you we have the very best." "But the poor mother--bereaved of her baby--" "Oh no!" she earnestly assured me. "Not in the least bereaved. It is her baby still--it is with her--she has not lost it. But she is not the only one to care for it. There are others whom she knows to be wiser. She knows it because she has studied as they did, practiced as they did, and honors their real superiority. For the child's sake, she is glad to have for it this highest care.

The only thing they can think of about a man is Fatherhood!” said Terry in high scorn. “Fatherhood! As if a man was always wanting to be a father!

It took some time to make clear to those three sweet-faced women the process which robs the cow of her calf, and the calf of its true food; and the talk led us to further discussion of the meat business. They heard it out, looking very white, and presently begged to be excused.

Ele disse que, com o poder de imaginação que tenho e meu hábito de inventar histórias, uma debilidade dos nervos como a minha só pode resultar em fantasias exaltadas, e que devo usar minha força de vontade e meu bom senso para controlar essa propensão.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform.

What Diantha Did was first published in serialised form in Gilman’s magazine The Forerunner between late 1909 and October 1910.

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

relations and marriage. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose writing emphasized the crucial question of economic equality between the sexes, wrote a poem called “The Socialist and the Suffragist,” ending with: “A lifted world lifts women up,” The Socialist 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

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose writing emphasized the crucial question of economic equality between the sexes, wrote a poem called “The Socialist and the Suffragist,” ending with: “A lifted world lifts women up,” The Socialist 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!

Action: Tell your husband how much you love him.   Today’s Wisdom: Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now. —CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

It is not sufficient to be a mother: an oyster can be a mother. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

O que me levou à convicção de que os “charmes femininos” que apreciamos não são nada femininos, mas apenas reflexos da masculinidade — desenvolvidos para nos agradar porque elas precisam nos agradar —, nem um pouco essenciais ao desempenho.

Life is a Verb

But I find I get pretty tired when I try.

I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.

They were much surprised that we were still burying—asked our reasons for it, and were much dissatisfied with what we gave. We told them of the belief in the resurrection of the body, and they asked if our God was not able to resurrect from ashes as from long corruption. We told them of how people thought it repugnant to have their loved ones burn, and they asked if it was less repugnant to have them decay. They were inconveniently reasonable, those women.

He never seemed to recognize the quiet background of superiority. When she dropped an argument he always thought he had silenced her; when she laughed he thought it tribute to his wit.

In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy. “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. Yet these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother. We looked for nervousness—there was none. For terror—there was none. For unease, for curiosity, for excitement—and all we saw was what might have been a vigilance committee of women doctors, as cool as cucumbers, and evidently meaning to take us to task for being there.

We found a friendly nut-tree, those large, satisfying nuts we already knew so well, and filled our pockets. I see that I have not remarked that these women had pockets in surprising number and variety. They were in all their garments.

They were inconveniently reasonable, those women.

They all wore short hair, some few inches at most; some curly, some not; all light and clean and fresh-looking. “If only their hair was long,” Jeff would complain, “they would look so much more feminine.” I rather liked it myself, after I got used to it. Why should we admire a “woman’s crown of hair” and not admire a Chinaman’s queue is hard to explain, except that we are so convinced that long hair “belongs” to a woman. Whereas the “mane” in horses is on both, and on lions, buffaloes, and such creatures only on the male.

I find it quite beyond me to describe what this woman was to me. We talk fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are limited beings—most of them. We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted maternal activities which make wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to use for life with the wages wholly at our decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we value them, all right, “in their place,” which place is the home, where they perform that mixture of duties so ably described by Mrs. Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, in which the services of “a mistress “ are carefully specified.

I find it quite beyond me to describe what this woman was to me. We talk fine things about women, but in our hearts we know that they are limited beings—most of them. We honor them for their functional powers, even while we dishonor them by our use of it; we honor them for their carefully enforced virtue, even while we show by our own conduct how little we think of that virtue; we value them, sincerely, for the perverted maternal activities which make wives the most comfortable of servants, bound to us for life with the wages wholly at our decision, their whole business, outside of the temporary duties of such motherhood as they may achieve, to meet our needs in every way. Oh, we value them, all right, “in their place,” which place is the home, where they perform that mixture of duties so ably described by Mrs. Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, in which the services of “a mistress “ are carefully specified.

It was the eager happiness of the children and the young people which first made me see the folly of that common notion of ours—that if life was smooth and happy, people would not enjoy it. As I studied these youngsters, vigorous, joyous, eager little creatures, and their voracious appetite for life, it shook my preconceived ideas so thoroughly that they had never been re-established. The steady level of good health gave them all that natural stimulus we used to call “animal spirits” —an odd contradiction in terms. They found themselves in an immediate environment which was agreeable and interesting, and before them stretched the years of learning and discovery, the fascinating, endless process of education. As I looked into these methods and compared them with our own, my strange uncomfortable sense of race-humility grew apace.

We can at least give them our names,” Jeff insisted. They were very sweet about it, quite willing to do whatever we asked, to please us. As to the names, Alima, frank soul that she was, asked what good it would do. Terry, always irritating her, said it was a sign of possession. “You are going to be Mrs. Nicholson,” he said, “Mrs. T.O. Nicholson. That shows everyone that you are my wife.” “What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye. “A wife is a woman who belongs to a man,” he began. But Jeff took it up eagerly: “And a husband is the man who belongs to a woman. It is because we are monogamous, you know. And marriage is a ceremony, civil and religious, that joins the two together—“until death do us part,” he finished, looking at Celia with unutterable devotion. “What makes us feel foolish,” I told the girls, “is that here we have nothing to give you—except, of course, our names.” “Do your women have no names before they are married?” Celis suddenly demanded. “Why, yes,” Jeff explained. “They have their maiden names—their father’s names, that is.” “And what becomes of them?” asked Alima. “They change them for their husband’s, my dear,” Terry answered her. “Change them? Do the husbands then take the wives’ ‘maiden names’?” “Oh no,” he laughed. “The man keeps his own and gives it too her, too.” “Then she just loses hers and takes a new one—how unpleasant! We won’t do that!” Alima said decidedly.

It was not a pleasant evening. She tried to read, but the insistent gnawing thought that her life was done, and not very well done at that, appeared on every page. She tried to sew—but the work she had at hand was unsatisfactory. “It’s only another failure!” she said to herself, and laid it down. She had no fancy work. If her books failed her she was lonely indeed.

But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows that there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

I think sometimes that if only I were well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. But I find that I get pretty tired when I try.

Do you know you are a real comfort,” she told him suddenly. “I never knew a man before who could—well, leave off being a man for a moment and just be a human creature.

I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better. I feel really much easier about you." "I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening, when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away." "Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug; "she shall be as sick as she pleases!

I don’t know why I should write this. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able. And I know John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief.