Customer Reviews

Women and Economics

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Gilman's book and her ideas on the role of women in the struggles of all humans for equality and liberty are as relevant in the 21st century as they were in the 19th. The book should be on the reference shelf of every policy maker and used as a basic book on government and political science. Her personal struggles are shared by many women and men who face the devastating effects of inequality and the abuse of liberty by others who seek the "four creatures of greed and power: fame, fortune, lust, and luxury". Gilman's message is that women (and men) should be careful to not copy the behavior of other men and other women who have sought these "four creatures".

Women and economics, is even today a hundred years later still the best work ever written on the economic relationship between men and women. The ideals that Ms, Gillman put forward are clear and honest, the steps needed to make women and men equal economically, most of which have happened, just not in the social and communal way she invisioned them, have as a testament to her brilliance come to pass and as each one did women and men have started to converge economically.

I could not recommend this book more. Note this version is a photo copy of the original so does have the original layout and is very readable, the pages are not sized to fit the page very well but still better then some relayed out version I have seen.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, lecturer for social reform, and utopian feminist; her most famous book is The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics).

She wrote in the Preface to this 1898 book, "This book is written to offer a simple and natural explanation of one of the most common and most perplexing problems of human life... To show how some of the worst evils under which we suffer, evils long supposed to be inherent and ineradicable in our natures, are but the result of certain arbitrary conditions of our own adoption, and how, by removing those conditions, we may remove the evils resultant... To reach in especial the thinking women of to-day, and urge upon them a new sense, not only of their social responsibility as individuals, but of their measureless racial importance as makers of men."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"Although not producers of wealth, women serve in the final processes of preparation and distribution. Their labor in the household has a genuine economic value." (Pg. 13)

"...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." (Pg. 14-15)

"Because of the economic dependence of the human female on her mate, she is modified to sex to an excessive degree. This excessive modification she transmits to her children..." (Pg. 38-39)

"Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain." (Pg. 86-87)

"The mercenary marriage is a perfectly natural consequence of the economic dependence of women." (Pg. 93)

"The women's movement rests not alone on her larger personality, with its tingling sense of revolt against justice, but on the wide, deep sympathy of women for one another." (Pg. 139)

"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver." (Pg. 149)

"Simply to bear children is a personal matter---an animal function. Education is collective, human, a social function." (Pg. 283)

"When parents are less occupied in getting food and cooking it, in getting furniture and dusting it, they may find time to give new thought and new effort to the care of their children." (Pg. 301)

"In our besotted exaggeration of the sex-relation, we have crudely supposed that a wish for wider human relationship was a wish for wider sex-relationship..." (Pg. 304)

"Not woman, but the condition of woman, has always been a doorway of evil." (Pg. 329)

Gilman shows the reader she is going with men in the workplace , but wants to show women are just as hard or harder workers at home than the men outside of the house. She wants to show how men think women are weaklings and she shows them wrong with her strong words against the put down of a man.