Home & Work

Rereading Charlotte Gilman

From sociology, management and organisation studies, to specialised inquiries in psychology and medicine, there are many empirical studies documenting the “boundary work” that individuals are required to perform in order to function well enough at work and at home.

The separations and interactions between the life worlds of work and of home are particularly important from a feminist point of view. Few women writers have analysed more thoroughly the history, “mythology”, and oppressive nature of the gendered division between home and work, than American feminist thinker and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). And few feminist writers have written more decisively about work as an instrument of emancipation for women.

As workers today are encouraged to retreat to the relative safety of their homes, it is time to reread Gilman’s insightful analyses of the confinement of women in history and in modern society. The passage below, taken from The Home (1903), gives a good sense of the radicality of her views, and her wit:

“All industry began at home. All industry was begun by women.

Where the patient and laborious squaw once carried on her back the slaughtered game for her own family, now wind and steam and lightning distribute our provisions around the world. Where she once erected a rude shelter of boughs or hides for her own family, now mason and carpenter, steel and iron worker, joiner, lather, plasterer, glazier, plumber, locksmith, painter, and decorator combine to house the world. Where she chewed and scrape the hides, wove bark and grasses, made garments, made baskets, made pottery, made all that was made for her own family, save the weapons of slaughter, now the thousand manufactures of a million mills supply our complex needs and pleasures. Where she tamed and herded a few beasts for her own family, now from ranchman to packer move the innumerable flocks and herds of the great plains; where she ploughed with a stick and reaped with a knife, for her own family, now gathered miles of corn across continent and ocean to feed all nations. Where she prepared the food and reared the child for her own family – what! Has the world stopped? Is history a dream? Is social progress mere imagination? – there she is yet! Back of history, at the bottom of civilization, untouched by a thousand whirling centuries, the primitive woman, in the primitive home, still toils at her primitive tasks.

What conditions, social and economic, what shadowy survival of oldest superstitions, what iron weight of custom, law, religion, can be adduced in explanation of such a paradox as this? Talk of Siberian mammoths handed down in ice, like some crystallised fruit of earliest ages! What are they compared with this antediluvian relic!”

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Library of Congress.