Women and Economics quotes

In view of these facts, attention is now called to a certain marked and peculiar economic condition affecting the human race, and unparalleled in the organic world.

We are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation.

With us an entire sex lives in a relation of economic dependence upon the other sex, and the economic relation is combined with the sex-relation. The economic status of the human female is relative to the sex-relation.

But the salient fact in this discussion is that, whatever the economic value of the domestic industry of women is, they do not get it.

The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.

Their labor is neither given nor taken as a factor in economic exchange. It is held to be their duty as women to do this work; and their economic status bears no relation to their domestic labors, unless an inverse one.

To him this field of special activity is but part of life—an incident. The whole world remains besides. To her it is the world. This has been well stated in the familiar epigram of Madame de Staël—

“Love with man is an episode, with woman a history.”

It is in woman that we find most fully expressed the excessive sex-distinction of the human species—physical, psychical, social. See first the physical manifestation.

Boys and girls are expected, also, to behave differently to each other, and to people in general—a behavior to be briefly described in two words.

To the boy we say, “Do”; to the girl, “Don’t.”

The little boy must “take care” of the little girl, even if she is larger than he is. “Why?” he asks. Because he is a boy. Because of sex.

To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more. To live among beautiful surroundings and make ugly things is more directly lowering than to live among ugly surroundings and make beautiful things.

What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.

The freedom of expression has been more restricted in women than the freedom of impression, if that be possible. Something of the world she lived in she has seen from her barred windows.

But all that she may wish to have, all that she may wish to do, must come through a single channel and a single choice.

Wealth, power, social distinction, fame⁠—not only these, but home and happiness, reputation, ease and pleasure, her bread and butter⁠—all, must come to her through a small gold ring.

This is a heavy pressure. It has accumulated behind her through heredity, and continued about her through environment.

Because of our abnormal sex-development, the whole field has become something of an offence—a thing to be hidden and ignored, passed over without remark or explanation.

Hence this amazing paradox of mothers ashamed of motherhood, unable to explain it, and⁠—measure this well⁠—lying to their children about the primal truths of life⁠—mothers lying to their own children about motherhood!

The pressure under which this is done is an economic one. The girl must marry: else how live? The prospective husband prefers the girl to know nothing. He is the market, the demand. She is the supply.

Not at all! Marriage is the woman’s proper sphere, her divinely ordered place, her natural end. It is what she is born for, what she is trained for, what she is exhibited for. It is, moreover, her means of honorable livelihood and advancement.

But⁠—she must not even look as if she wanted it!

She must not turn her hand over to get it. She must sit passive as the seasons go by, and her “chances” lessen with each year.

who?” cried, “Anybody, good Lord!” There is still a pleasant ditty afloat as to the “Three Old Maids of Lynn,” who did not marry when they could, and could not when they would.

The cruel and absurd injustice of blaming the girl for not getting what she is allowed no effort to obtain seems unaccountable; but it becomes clear when viewed in connection with the sexuo-economic relation.

Although marriage is a means of livelihood, it is not honest employment where one can offer one’s labor without shame, but a relation where the support is given outright, and enforced by law in return for the functional service of the woman, the “duties of …

We follow it with our blame and scorn up to the very doors of marriage—the mercenary bride—but think no harm of the mercenary wife, filching her husband’s pockets in the night. Love sanctifies it, we say: love must go with it.

Love never yet went with self-interest.

The deepest antagonism lies between them: they are diametrically opposed forces. In the beautiful progress of evolution we find constant opposition between the instincts and processes of self-preservation and the instinct and processes of race-preservation.

… to produce and distribute enough wealth for its maintenance, but some maladjustment of internal processes which checks that production and distribution, and develops such irregular and morbid processes of innutrition, malnutrition, and over-nutrition as continually to injure the health and activity of the social organism.

Our difficulty about wealth is not in getting it out of the earth, but in getting it away from one another.

We have phenomena before us in the development of social economic relations analogous to those accompanying our development in sex-relation.

On the man’s side the same effect is produced through another feature of the relation. The tendency to individualism with sex-advantage is developed in man by an opposite process to that operating on the woman.

She gets her living by getting a husband. He gets his wife by getting a living.

It is to her individual economic advantage to secure a mate. It is to his individual sex-advantage to secure economic gain. The sex-functions to her have become economic functions. Economic functions to him have become sex-functions.

This higher degree of individualization means a sharp personal consciousness of the evils of a situation hitherto little felt. With this higher growth of individual consciousness, and forming a part of it, comes the commensurate growth of social consciousness.

We have grown to care for one another.

The woman’s movement rests not alone on her larger personality, with its tingling sense of revolt against injustice, but on the wide, deep sympathy of women for one another.

Not only our pupils, but our teachers, are mainly women. And the clearness and strength of the brain of the woman prove continually the injustice of the clamorous contempt long poured upon what was scornfully called “the female mind.”

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

Woman’s progress in the arts and sciences, the trades and professions, is steady; but it is most unwise to claim from these relative advances the superiority of women to men, or even their equality, in these fields.

More sacred than religion, more binding than the law, more habitual than methods of eating, we are each and all born into the accepted idea of motherhood and trained in it; and in maturity we hand it down unquestioningly.

A man may question the purposes and methods of his God with less danger of outcry against him than if he dare to question the purposes and methods of his mother.

This matriolatry is a sentiment so deep-seated, widespread, and long-established as to be dominant in every class of minds.

The pathos of the popular tale today is in bringing the prodigal back to his mother, not to his father. If the original prodigal had a mother, she was probably busy in cooking the fatted calf.

If today’s prodigal has a father, he is merely engaged in paying for the veal.

Our tenderest love, our deepest reverence, our fiercest resentment of insult, all centre about the mother today rather than about the father;

The human mother, in the processes of reproduction, shows no gain in efficiency over the lower animals, but rather a loss, and so far presents no evidence to prove that her specialization to sex is of any advantage to her young.

The mother of a dead baby or the baby of a dead mother; the sick baby, the crooked baby, the idiot baby; the exhausted, nervous, prematurely aged mother⁠—these are not uncommon among us; and they do not show much progress in our motherhood.

Since we cannot justify the human method of maternity in the physical processes of reproduction, can we prove its advantages in the other branch, education?

The over-development of sex caused by her economic dependence on the male reacts unfavorably upon her essential duties.

She is too female for perfect motherhood!

Her excessive specialization in the secondary sexual characteristics is a detrimental element in heredity. Small, weak, soft, ill-proportioned women do not tend to produce large, strong, sturdy, well-made men or women.

to make better people. This being done, it is then the duty of the mother, the human mother so to educate her children as to complete what bearing and nursing have only begun.

She carries the child nine months in her body, two years in her arms, and as long as she lives in her heart and mind.

The education of the young is a tremendous factor in human reproduction. A right motherhood should be able to fulfil this great function perfectly.

They are fitted to attract the other sex for economic uses or, at most, for mutual gratification, but not for motherhood. They are reared in unbroken ignorance of their supposed principal duties, knowing nothing of these duties till they enter upon them.

This is as though all men were to be soldiers with the fate of nations in their hands; and no man told or taught a word of war or military service until he entered the battlefield!

The education of young women has no department of maternity. It is considered indelicate to give this consecrated functionary any previous knowledge of her sacred duties.

they bring merely the intense accumulated force of a brute instinct—the blind devoted passion of the mother for the child.

Maternal love is an enormous force, but force needs direction.

Simply to love the child does not serve him unless specific acts of service express this love. What these acts of service are and how they are performed make or mar his life forever.

So far as they give it a thought, they fondly imagine that this mysterious “maternal instinct” will see them through. Instruction, if needed, they will pick up when the time comes: experience they will acquire as the children appear.

“I guess I know how to bring up children!” cried the resentful old lady who was being advised: “I’ve buried seven!”

The record of untrained instinct as a maternal faculty in the human race is to be read on the rows and rows of little gravestones which crowd our cemeteries. The experience gained by practising on the child is frequently buried with it.

cried the resentful old lady who was being advised: “I’ve buried seven!” The record of untrained instinct as a maternal faculty in the human race is to be read on the rows and rows of little gravestones which crowd our cemeteries.

The experience gained by practising on the child is frequently buried with it.

No, the maternal sacrifice theory will not bear examination.

It could never rise till it found a new spirit and a new expression in human life outside the home, until it found a common place of worship, a ceremonial and a morality on a human basis, not a family basis.

Science, art, government, education, industry⁠—the home is the cradle of them all, and their grave, if they stay in it.

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

But they do not. On the contrary, those nations in which home and family worship most prevail, as in China, present a melancholy proof of the result of the domestic virtues without the social.

A noble home life is the product of a noble social life.

The home does not produce the virtues needed in society. But society does produce the virtues needed in such homes as we desire today. The members of the freest, most highly civilized and individualized nations, make the most delightful members of the home and family.

and, as an art, it has developed under the peculiar stimulus of its position as a sex-function into a voluptuous profusion as false as it is evil.

Our innocent proverb, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” is a painfully plain comment on the way in which we have come to deprave our bodies and degrade our souls at the table.

On the side of knowledge it is permanently impossible that half the world, acting as amateur cooks for the other half, can attain any high degree of scientific accuracy or technical skill.

No, the human race is not well nourished by making the process of feeding it a sex-function. The selection and preparation of food should be in the hands of trained experts.

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

This will require large changes in our method of living. To feed the world by expert service, bringing to that great function the skill and experience of the trained specialist, the power of science, and the beauty of art, is impossible in the sexuo-economic relation.

Individuals require to be fed and cleaned from birth to death, quite irrespective of their family relations. The orphan, the bachelor, the childless widower, have as much need of these nutritive and excretive processes as any patriarchal parent.

Eating is an individual function. Cooking is a social function.

Neither is in the faintest degree a family function.

Any housewife knows the difficulty of always getting a family together at meals. Why try? Then arises sentiment, and asserts that family affection, family unity, the very existence of the family, depend on their being together at meals.

A family unity which is only bound together with a tablecloth is of questionable value.

There are several professions involved in our clumsy method of housekeeping. A good cook is not necessarily a good manager, nor a good manager an accurate and thorough cleaner, nor a good cleaner a wise purchaser.

As we learn to appreciate a wider and higher range of cooking, we shall also learn to care for simplicity in this art. Neither is attainable under our present system by the average person.

As cooking becomes dissociated from the home, we shall gradually cease to attach emotions to it; and we shall learn to judge it impersonally upon a scientific and artistic basis.

This will not, of course, prevent some persons’ having peculiar tastes; but these will know that they are peculiar, and so will their neighbors.

… even if he had large books to read (when he had time to read them) and improving conversation, still the economic efforts of his life, the steady daily pressure of what he had to do for his living, would check the growth of higher powers.

If all men had to be hunters from day to day, the world would be savage still. While all women have to be house servants from day to day, we are still a servile world.

A home life with a dependent mother, a servant-wife, is not an ennobling influence. We all feel this at times.

Many fear this movement, and vainly strive to check it. There is no cause for alarm. We are not going to lose our homes nor our families, nor any of the sweetness and happiness that go with them.

But we are going to lose our kitchens, as we have lost our laundries and bakeries.

The cookstove will follow the loom and wheel, the wool-carder and shears. We shall have homes that are places to live in and love in, to rest in and play in, to be alone in and to be together in;

There is no cause for alarm. We are not going to lose our homes nor our families, nor any of the sweetness and happiness that go with them. But we are going to lose our kitchens, as we have lost our laundries and bakeries.

The cookstove will follow the loom and wheel, the wool-carder and shears.

We shall have homes that are places to live in and love in, to rest in and play in, to be alone in and to be together in; and they will not be confused and declassed by admixture with any industry whatever.

But we are going to lose our kitchens, as we have lost our laundries and bakeries. The cookstove will follow the loom and wheel, the wool-carder and shears.

We shall have homes that are places to live in and love in, to rest in and play in, to be alone in and to be together in; and they will not be confused and declassed by admixture with any industry whatever.

In homes like these the family life will have all its finer, truer spirit well maintained; and the cares and labors that now mar its beauty will have passed out into fields of higher fulfilment.

In reconstructing in our minds the position of woman under conditions of economic independence, it is most difficult to think of her as a mother.

We are so unbrokenly accustomed to the old methods of motherhood, so convinced that all its processes are inter-relative and indispensable, and that to alter one of them is to endanger the whole relation, that we cannot conceive of any desirable change.

When definite plans for such change are suggested—ways in which babies might be better cared for than at present—we either deny the advantages of the change proposed or insist that these advantages can be reached under our present system.

If our families are so relatively uncomfortable under present conditions, are there not conditions wherein the same families could be far more comfortable? No: we are afraid not. We think it is right to have things as they are, wrong to wish to change them.

We think that virtue lies largely in being uncomfortable, and that there is special virtue in the existing family relation.

Virtue is a relative term. Human virtues change from age to age with the change in conditions. Consider the great virtue of loyalty—our highest name for duty.

We all dimly recognize this in our praise of large families, and in our saying that “an only child is apt to be selfish.”

So is an only family.

The earlier and more easily a child can learn that human life means many people, and their behavior to one another, the happier and stronger and more useful his life will be.

Many women there are, and many men, who, though able to bring forth fine children, are unable to educate them properly. Simply to bear children is a personal matter—an animal function.

Education is collective, human, a social function.

As we now arrange life, our children must take their chances while babies, and live or die, improve or deteriorate, according to the mother to whom they chance to be born.

We may think too well of ourselves or we may think too ill of ourselves; but we think always too much of ourselves, because of this untrained and unmodified concentration of maternal feeling.

Our whole attitude toward the child is too intensely personal.

Through all our aching later life we labor to outgrow the false perspective taught by primitive motherhood.

After all is said of loving gratitude to our unfailing mother-nurse, we must have a most exalted sense of our own personal importance so to canonize the service of ourselves.

The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.

She will love her child as well, perhaps better, when she is not in hourly contact with it, when she goes from its life to her own life, and back from her own life to its life, with ever new delight and power.

he would find life a place in which to spread out, unhindered, getting acquainted with his own unfolding powers of body and mind in an atmosphere of physical warmth and ease and of quiet peace of mind.

Direct, concentrated, unvarying personal love is too hot an atmosphere for a young soul.

Variations of loneliness, anger, and injustice, are not changes to be desired.

We are absurdly afraid that, if men or women can meet these needs of life by other means, they will cheerfully renounce the marriage relation.

And yet we sing adoringly of the power of love!

In reality, we may hope that the most valuable effect of this change in the basis of living will be the cleansing of love and marriage from this base admixture of pecuniary interest and creature comfort, and that men and women, eternally drawn together by …

… 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.

Humanity means being together, and our unutterably outgrown way of living keeps us apart.

How many people, if they dare face the fact, have often hopelessly longed for some better way of seeing their friends, their own true friends, relatives by soul, if not by body!

No human distinction is more absolutely and exclusively social than the moral sense.

Ethics is a social science.

There is no ethics for the individual. Taken by himself, man is but an animal; and his conduct bears relation only to the needs of the animal—self-preservation and race-preservation. Every virtue, and the power to see and strive for it, is a social quality.

To love and serve one another, to care for one another, to feel for and with one another—our racial adjective, “humane,” implies these qualities. The very existence of humanity implies these qualities in some degree, and the development of humanity is commensurate with their development.

Our one great blunder in studying these things lies in our failure to appreciate the organic necessity of such moral qualities in human life.

We have assumed that the practice of these social virtues involved a personal effort and sacrifice, and that there is an irreconcilable contest between the cosmic process of development and the ethical process, as Huxley puts it.