Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Human Work Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Human evolution involves the development of a number of individual animals into specialisedfunctionaries of organic social life. This requires the gradual assumption of new faculties, newdesires, new instincts, and new activities; and the gradual disuse and discarding of older ones. Theegoistic mental make-up of a solitary animal, of a low savage, of any reversionary self-supportinghuman hermit, is advantageous to him as a separate creature; but disadvantageous to a society towhich he might become attached, and, if he was so attached, to himself. A given society, in any age, possesses certain dominant ideas and feelings proper to it; and theindividuals manifesting most of those ideas and feelings are most beneficial to that society and so tothemselves. But if members of a given society persist in maintaining and acting upon social ideals ofa previous age, they are injurious to their society and so to themselves. Social evolution, in any givenplace and time, is visibly checked by the number of persons who do not keep up with it; but insiston feeling and thinking after long-past standards, and trying to act on that basis. This peculiar persistence of social rudiments in all stages of our progress requires some specialexplanation. When a given social process, once useful, then useless, then increasingly injurious, continues toforce itself upon a growing civilisation, there must be some strong agency to account for it. Naturally, it would have been gradually eliminated by proven undesirability, as cartwheels of solidwood were eliminated. In our material development we have moved steadily on, growing into evernewer and better methods, simplifying, cheapening, quickening, easing, following nature's methodsexactly-the conservation of energy-the line of least resistance. Our American industrialsupremacy is attributed to precisely this willingness to grow, to discard the old things, to ourconstant resort to the scrap-heap. But in social development we seem to have no scrap-heap, ornever to use one unless compelled to, making history a sort of sacred junk-shop. In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept the new. In social life, in all oursocial processes, we piously, valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old.