Women and Economics

Women and Economics (1898) is a work of feminist social theory by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published under her earlier name Charlotte Perkins Stetson. Organized as a sustained philosophical argument across 15 chapters, the book contends that women's economic dependence on men is the central problem of social evolution, producing distortions in both sex and economic relations that harm individuals, families, and civilization as a whole.

Gilman opens by establishing a foundational claim: Humans are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, making the sex-relation simultaneously an economic relation. She notes that in no other species is the female supported by the male throughout her life. Even working peasant women and women in preindustrial societies, she argues, resemble domesticated horses: Both labor strenuously, but what they receive depends not on their own effort but on the power and will of another. She rejects three justifications for this arrangement: Marriage is not a true business partnership, since a wife cannot advise in her husband's profession without training; domestic labor does not explain women's economic status, since the women who work hardest in the home receive the least money; and motherhood cannot be the basis of women's support, since childless wives are maintained as readily as mothers. The female of the human species, Gilman concludes, is fed by the male: "He is her food supply" (11).

From this foundation, Gilman introduces her key concept: the sexuo-economic relation, the arrangement in which women's dependence on men makes the sexual relationship also an economic one. This relation, she argues, produces an excessive degree of sex-distinction, or difference between men and women in traits, roles, and behavior. She defines "excessive" by analogy: Just as normal hunger is proportioned to the body's need for food, normal sex-attraction should be proportioned to reproductive needs, but humans exhibit a degree of attraction and indulgence far beyond what reproduction requires. The mechanism, she explains, is that when the female depends economically on the male, natural selection no longer checks sexual selection but cooperates with it. Sex-distinction becomes not merely a means of attracting a mate but a means of securing a livelihood, a condition found in no other species. This excessive modification is then transmitted to children of both sexes, perpetuating a morbid tendency to excess across generations.

Gilman illustrates this excessive sex-distinction in detail. She contrasts the wild cow, a strong and swift animal, with the domestic "milch cow," selectively bred until she has become "a walking milk-machine" (23), arguing that women have been similarly overdeveloped in feminine characteristics at the expense of their general human capacities. Women's physical weakness, their confinement to the domestic sphere, and their intense emotional investment in the sex-relation are not natural conditions but products of their economic position. Virtually all human activities have been claimed as masculine, leaving women confined to sex-functions alone.

Tracing the historical origins of this arrangement, Gilman describes primitive humans as relatively equal animals until the male discovered it was easier to subdue a female than to fight rival males. Once enslaved, the woman could no longer obtain her own food, forcing the man to become her provider. As man became woman's economic environment, she was modified to respond to him rather than to the natural world. Her physical range, voluntary activity, and creative expression were all curtailed. Gilman notes the countervailing force of heredity: Each girl inherits human development from her father, preventing the complete divergence of the sexes but also adding to the pain of each generation of women confined to lives of restriction. For the young woman, all goods must come through a single channel: marriage.

Gilman then explains why this pervasive condition goes unnoticed. Two laws of brain action obstruct recognition: Habituation causes people to stop noticing constant conditions, and the tendency to personalize prevents people from perceiving general causes behind individual experiences. She draws parallels to historically entrenched customs, from the divine right of kings to chattel slavery, that went unquestioned for centuries. She provides a concrete example: The nearly universal failure of mothers to educate their daughters about sex and reproduction is traceable not to individual fault but to economic pressure requiring girls to be prepared for the marriage market, where the prospective husband prefers ignorance.

Expanding the analysis to broader economic effects, Gilman argues that the sexuo-economic relation corrupts society's natural evolution from individual competition toward collective cooperation. Because a man secures a wife by securing a livelihood, economic functions become sex-functions for him, confounding natural economic competition with sex-competition and producing inordinate greed in the industrial world. Women, meanwhile, function as non-productive consumers who, denied free productive expression, create a market for luxury, sensuous decoration, and waste.

Gilman then makes a surprising turn, arguing that this harmful relation once served a necessary evolutionary purpose. When the male assumed the role of provider, he was forced to develop qualities he did not naturally possess: the capacity to love, care for others, and cooperate. Gilman calls this process the maternalizing of man, in which male energy, naturally destructive and individualistic, was redirected into constructive channels by the pressure of maintaining dependents. She designates the resulting role "man-mother" (62), the male coerced by necessity into expressing maternal energy. She insists that women's historical subjection was not a sign of natural inferiority but a temporary evolutionary inversion, since the female had been dominant or equal through most of the history of life on earth. However, this relation has now outlived its usefulness. The growing social consciousness in both men and women, the twin struggles of the women's movement and the labor movement, and increasing individualization all signal the time for change.

Gilman surveys the evidence that this change is already underway, particularly in America, pointing to women's increasing physical strength, expanding education, entry into the workforce, and the rise of women's clubs as the first steps toward social organization. She notes changes in literature, where fictional heroines are no longer passive but active characters with ideas and purposes of their own.

Challenging the claim that women's economic dependence benefits motherhood, Gilman argues that it instead produces pathological maternity. Human motherhood, she contends, is more morbid and defective than that of any other species. She employs a satirical thought experiment: An imaginary extraterrestrial sociologist, expecting to find society training and honoring its mothers for their supreme function, would find no such preparation and would marvel at the paradox. Maternal instinct alone, she argues, is insufficient for human child-rearing, and the untrained mother is no better than an impostor practicing on her own children.

Gilman then proposes practical reforms. She distinguishes marriage from the family, arguing that marriage is evolving toward higher companionate forms while the family as a patriarchal economic unit is declining. She advocates the professionalization of cooking and cleaning, envisioning apartment houses with communal kitchen services and professional childcare. She proposes that children would benefit from spending part of their time in professionally managed environments alongside peers, supplementing rather than replacing maternal care: "The mother would not be excluded, but supplemented, as she is now, by the teacher and the school" (142).

In her final chapters, Gilman envisions a transformed social life in which individuals can associate freely on the basis of common interests rather than family obligation, and she examines the moral effects of the sexuo-economic relation. By dividing the economic conditions of men and women, she argues, humanity has created a divided psychic nature, with women trained in the narrow personal virtues of dependence and men trained in broader social virtues through economic participation. The economic independence of women, she concludes, will harmonize the human soul, allowing both sexes to develop naturally into the virtues they have long struggled to attain. Moral progress will flow smoothly when, as Gilman writes, "the mother of the race is free" (167).