Perkins Gilman Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Perkins Gilman. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Women and Economics)
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But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way β€” it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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It does not do to trust people too much.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper)
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There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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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!
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings)
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I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper)
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To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World)
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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 suicideβ€”plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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All this talk, for and against and about babies, ” wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, β€œis 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: β€˜We are running short of childrenβ€”make some more.
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Andrea Dworkin (Right-Wing Women)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (If I Were a Man)
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I always liked that Arab saying, 'First tie your camel and then trust in the Lord,
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?” β€œWhy, no,” she said. β€œWhy should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of themβ€”and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Women and Economics)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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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?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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:...
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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Those β€œfeminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinityβ€”developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Its time we woke up,” pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. β€œWomen 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?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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But only this-that people who are utterly ignorant will believe anything-which you certainly knew before.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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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!
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader)
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The front pattern does moveβ€”and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with what I supposed to be there.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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This was not life, this was a nightmare.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Women accept [man-made] conventions, repeat them, enforce them upon their daughters; but they originate with men.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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Woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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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 depressionβ€”a slight hysterical tendencyβ€”what is one to do? . . . So I take phosphates or phosphitesβ€”whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to β€œwork” until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas . . .
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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. *
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Kameron Hurley (The Geek Feminist Revolution)
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Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Maleness means war.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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I’ve got out at last,” said I, β€œin spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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We do things FROM our mothersβ€”not FOR them. We don't have to do things FOR themβ€”they don't need it, you know. But we have to live onβ€”splendidlyβ€”because of them; and that's the way we feel about God.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Benigna Machiavelli)
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Will you excuse us all,” [Jeff] said, β€œif 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. β€œWhy, yes-some low forms, of course.” β€œHow low-or how high, rather?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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There are the two of you - the two sexes- to love and help one another. It must be a rich and wonderful world
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture)
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Why, European visitors tell us, we don’t know what poverty is.” β€œNeither do we,” answered Zava. β€œWon’t you tell us?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland)
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[Suggesting an additional definition for 'politics':] The art of organizing and handling men in large numbers, manipulating votes, and, in especial, appropriating public wealth.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland)
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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. β€œAny true man,” he said with fervor, β€œis always ready to go with a woman at night. He is her natural protector.” β€œAgainst 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
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography))
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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?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (With Her in Ourland)
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They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs. MacAvelly suggested. "Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'emβ€”nor Godβ€”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)
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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This led me very promptly to the conviction that those β€œfeminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinityβ€”developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland / The Yellow Wallpaper)
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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?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?" "Why, no,” she said. β€œWhy should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of themβ€”and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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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
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only womenβ€”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 womenβ€”those he wanted and those he didn't; Desirable and Undesirable was his demarcation. The latter as a large class, but negligibleβ€”he had never thought about them at all.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland)
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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 suicideβ€”plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wall-Paper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Home: Its Work and Influence (Volume 1) (Classics in Gender Studies, 1))
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World)
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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!” β€œBut - how do you want to live?” β€œAs we did here - at first,” he said. β€œThere 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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland (The Herland Trilogy, #2))
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World)
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[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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Man-Made World)
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It's time we woke up, women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools- but whoΒ΄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?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland / The Yellow Wallpaper)
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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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.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Home: Its Work and Influence (Volume 1) (Classics in Gender Studies, 1))