Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

• His dominance is not that of one chosen as best fitted to rule…but it is sovereignty based on the accident of sex.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The economic status of women generally depends on that of men generally, and…the economic status of women individually depends upon that of men individually, those men to whom they are related.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women

• To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Only, Another

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

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in City

• It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. “They all eat one another!” he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, “They all feed one another,” and called it good.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Connections, Evil

• 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.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Evil

• Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Belief

  Tags in Habit

• However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Ideals

  Tags in Illusions, Common Sense, Hope

• Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Tags in Now

• But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feeling, Reason

• So when the great word “Mother!” rang once more,
  I saw at last its meaning and its place;
  Not the blind passion of the brooding past,
  But Mother — the World’s Mother — come at last,
  To love as she had never loved before —
  To feed and guard and teach the human race.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Mother

  Tags in Sacred

• Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But 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.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Death, Service

  Tags in Heart

• There was a time when Patience ceased to be a virtue. It was long ago.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Virtue, Patience

• The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain the altar fire — and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period — has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women, Presence

• There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of s*x. Might as well speak of a female liver.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women, Mind

• “A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband.” (on the term “housewife”)

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women

• 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.

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Service, Work

  Tags in Roles, Relationships, Community

• Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Topics in Future, Ideals, Religion

  Tags in Reverence, Worship, Creed, Credo

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (20)

Birth:	3rd July, 1860
Death:	17th August, 1935
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Feminist, Lecturer, Novelist, Sociologist, Writer

About

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She was an American feminist, sociologist, novelist, lecturer and writer. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. Published in the Nationalist magazine, her poem, "Similar Cases" was a satirical review of people who resisted social change and she received positive feedback from critics for it. Throughout that same year, 1890, she became inspired enough to write fifteen essays, poems, a novella, and the short story The Yellow Wallpaper. Her career was launched when she began lecturing on Nationalism and gained the public's eye with her first volume of poetry, In This Our World, published in 1893.

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