“Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”
Source: Collected Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Short Stories, Novels, Poems and Essays: The Yellow Wallpaper, What Diantha Did, Women and Economics, The Crux, Moving the Mountain, Herland and other works from the prominent American feminist, sociologist and novelist
“A million million worlds that move in peace;A million mighty laws that never cease;And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.They sleep beneath the sodAnd trust in God.”
Source: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's In this Our World and Uncollected Poems
“Said I, in scorn all burning hot,In rage and anger high,"You ignominious idiot,Those wings are made to fly!”
Source: The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings
“I do not want to be a fly,I want to be a worm!”
Source: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's In this Our World and Uncollected Poems
“To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America ... who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship.”
Source: Women and Economics - A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution: From the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and a respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, well-known for her stories The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland
“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”
“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”
“The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.”
Source: The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
“The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gaveus relgions which coule not possible maintained without belief and obedience: ... we find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to swquare their beliefs with the laws of life.”
“If we once admit that our life is here for the purpose of race-improvement, then we question any religion which does not improve the race, or the main force of which evaporates, as it were, directing our best efforts toward the sky.... Improvement in the human race is not accomplished by extracting any number of souls and placing them in heaven, or elsewhere. It must be established on earth, either through achievement in social service, or through better children.”
“Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?”
“One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.”
Source: His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers
“A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.”
Source: His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers
“What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?”
Source: Herland and Related Writings
“We grovel and "worship" and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.”
Source: His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers
“The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.”
“But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.”
Source: His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers
“There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty - for growth.”
Source: The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman - An Autobiography
“A family unity which is only bound together with a table-cloth is of questionable value.”
Source: Collected Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Short Stories, Novels, Poems and Essays: The Yellow Wallpaper, What Diantha Did, Women and Economics, The Crux, Moving the Mountain, Herland and other works from the prominent American feminist, sociologist and novelist
“Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.”
Source: The Humanness of Women: Theory and Practice of Feminism (Essays and Sketches): Studies and thoughts by the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and deeply respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, known for The Yellow Wallpaper story
“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.”
Source: The Yellow Wall-paper
“If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages--not alimony.”
Source: Families, Marriages, and Children
“It is not for nothing that a man's best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius.”
Source: Women and Economics
“Legitimate sex-competition brings out all that is best in man.”
Source: Women and Economics - A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution: From the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and a respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, well-known for her stories The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland
“Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.”
Source: The Humanness of Women: Theory and Practice of Feminism (Essays and Sketches): Studies and thoughts by the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and deeply respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, known for The Yellow Wallpaper story
“The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.”
Source: Women and Economics - A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution: From the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and a respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, well-known for her stories The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland
“The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent.”
Source: Women and Economics
“Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.”
Source: Women and Economics - A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution: From the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and a respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, well-known for her stories The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland
“We have built into the constitution of the human race the habit and desire of taking, as divorced from its natural precursor and concomitant of making.”
Source: Women and Economics - A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution: From the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and a respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, well-known for her stories The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland
“Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world, Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power, The world must follow you!”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Illustrated)
“The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Illustrated)
“California is a state peculiarly addicted to swift enthusiasms. It is a seed-bed of all manner of cults and theories, taken up, and dropped, with equal speed.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Illustrated)
“We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers.' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?”
Source: The Home
“In great cities where people of ability abound, there is always a feverish urge to keep ahead, to set the pace, to adopt each new fashion in thought and theory as well as in dress - or undress.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Illustrated)
“In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept the new. In social life, in all our social processes, we piously, valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old.”
Source: Human Work
“In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. ... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.”
“As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.”
Source: The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
“The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.”
Source: Human Work
“It cannot be too strongly asserted that the insistence on blind, unreasoning faith is due mainly to the maintenance of a subject-matter upon which there was no knowledge, namely the 'other world'; and that this basis was assumed because of early man's preoccupation with death. It is, unfortunately, quite possible to believe a thing which is contradicted by facts, especially if the facts are not generally known; but if the whole position on which we rested our religions had been visibly opposed by what we did know, even the unthinking masses would, in time, have noticed it.”
Source: His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers
“all social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not.”
Source: Human Work
“A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?”
Source: Collected Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Short Stories, Novels, Poems and Essays: The Yellow Wallpaper, What Diantha Did, Women and Economics, The Crux, Moving the Mountain, Herland and other works from the prominent American feminist, sociologist and novelist
“The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.”
Source: The Humanness of Women: Theory and Practice of Feminism (Essays and Sketches): Studies and thoughts by the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and deeply respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, known for The Yellow Wallpaper story
“The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire - and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period - has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.”
Source: The Humanness of Women: Theory and Practice of Feminism (Essays and Sketches): Studies and thoughts by the famous American writer, feminist, social reformer and deeply respected sociologist who holds an important place in feminist fiction, known for The Yellow Wallpaper story
“The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.”
Source: Collected Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Short Stories, Novels, Poems and Essays: The Yellow Wallpaper, What Diantha Did, Women and Economics, The Crux, Moving the Mountain, Herland and other works from the prominent American feminist, sociologist and novelist
“At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.”
Source: Human Work
“Concepts antedate facts.”
Source: Human Work
“It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Illustrated)
“[Warfare is] maleness in its absurdest extremes. Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation, with the loudest accompaniment of noise.”
Source: Collected Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Short Stories, Novels, Poems and Essays: The Yellow Wallpaper, What Diantha Did, Women and Economics, The Crux, Moving the Mountain, Herland and other works from the prominent American feminist, sociologist and novelist
“Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!”
Source: The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
“If only religion could be brought to take an interest in this earthly future, what a help it would be! ... Think of the appeal to the less spiritual of us, to those who never did get enthusiastic about eternity, or care so tenderly about their own souls, yet who could rise to the thought of improving this world for the children they love, and their children after them.”
Source: His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers
