Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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.Collection: Society
Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.Collection: Home
The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.Collection: Men
Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.Collection: Death
To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.Collection: Happiness
The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.Collection: Food
There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.
When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.
To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.
But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.
Eternity is not something that begins after you're dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.
A concept is stronger than a fact.
The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.
Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.
Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.
New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.
Life is a verb, not a noun.Collection: Love
Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.Collection: Steps
And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.Collection: Men
What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.Collection: Done
A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?Collection: Home
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.Collection: Years
In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.Collection: Sick
I have preferred chloroform to cancerCollection: Cancer
To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature; to make beautiful things has more.Collection: Beauty
To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development - the full use of one's best faculties - this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.Collection: Work
It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.Collection: Inspiring
Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.Collection: Girl
The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.Collection: Work
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.Collection: Death
But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.Collection: Believe
A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Children
Love grows by service.Collection: Love
What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Suicide
Until mothers earn their livings, women will notCollection: Mother
I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.Collection: Cry
However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.Collection: Cups
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.Collection: Atheism
One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.Collection: Mother
It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Faith
Concepts antedate facts.Collection: Ideas
In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed to men and forbidden to women.Collection: Sex
For men obsessed with women's underwear, a course in washing, ironing and mending is recommended.Collection: Men
The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.Collection: Mother