24 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotes

1. 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.

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

3. 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.

4. 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.

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

6. 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 sod And trust in God.

7. Said I, in scorn all burning hot, In rage and anger high, 'You ignominious idiot, Those wings are made to fly!'

8. I do not want to be a fly, I want to be a worm!

1. Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur's work.

2. In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

3. The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress. We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers.

4. Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.

5. Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

6. The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.

7. The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.

8. Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.

9. No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, 'This is our best thought, go on, think farther!' then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

10. A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband.

11. The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

12. 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.

13. I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

14. It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.

15. 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.

16. New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.