Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Human Nature
By Nava Atlas | On May 15, 2017 | Updated July 23, 2026 | Comments (0)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935), an American author of fiction and nonfiction, is considered ahead of her time for her feminist works that pushed for women’s social and economic independence. Here is a selection of quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on human nature.
Best known for the 1892 semi-autobiographical work of short fiction, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman was one of the leading voices of the late 19th and early 20th century American women’s movement.
Her nonfiction works, including Women and Economics (1898) and The Man-Made World (1911) detail how women’s lives were impacted by social and economic bias. Sadly they’re still relevant, which is why they’re still read and studied.
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The human race is a unit. It is one body, one living thing, whose separate parts are bound together by an intricate network of functional relations. Every kind of creature is developed by the exercise of its functions. If denied the exercise of its functions, it can not develop in the fullest degree. Women are human beings, and as human beings they need the exercise of all human functions for their own proper development and the good of society. (From Gilman’s testimony before the Committee on the Judiciary in the U.S. House of Representatives on behalf of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, January 28, 1896)
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We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private “home” of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison. (Women and Economics, 1898)
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As the queen bee, modified entirely to maternity, is supported, not by the male, to be sure, but by her co-workers, the “old maids,” the barren working bees, who labor so patiently and lovingly in their branch of the maternal duties of the hive, so would the human female, modified entirely to maternity, become unfit for any other exertion, and a helpless dependent. Is this the condition of human motherhood? Does the human mother, by her motherhood, thereby lose control of brain and body, lose power and skill and desire for any other work? (Women and Economics, 1898)
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See also: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Feminist Ideals
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It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.”(The Home: Its Work and Influence, 1903)
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The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain – the hardest and most iron-bound as well. Given a sufficiently deep conviction, and facts are but as dreams before its huge reality. Our convictions about the home go down to the uttermost depths . . . (The Home: Its Work and Influence, 1903)
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A house does not need a wife any more than it does a husband. Are we never to have a man-wife? A really suitable and profitable companion for a man instead of the bond-slave of a house? There is nothing in the work of a house which requires marital or maternal affection. It does require highly developed skill and business sense—but these it fails to get. (The Home: Its Work and Influence, 1903)
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We have been so long accustomed to accept authority, to follow precedent, to take our opinions ready-made from past generations or present leaders, that the power of independent thought is dangerously underdeveloped. So long as the mind is taught to submit rather than to analyze—to accept dogma rather than to seek truth—human progress must drag its chains. The habit of passive acceptance is a mental disease; it makes us victims to every ancient fallacy and every modern delusion. (Human Work, 1904)
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Instead of accepting “human nature” as a fixed condition of mingled pain and pleasure, goodness and badness, with the pain and badness preponderating, we are now recognising that human nature grows and changes like the rest of created forms; that it has already greatly changed and improved, and will continue to do so. (Human Work, 1904)
Literature is the most powerful and necessary of the arts, and fiction is its broadest form. If art “holds the mirror up to nature” this art’s mirror is the largest of all, the most used. Since our very life depends on some communication; and our progress is in proportion to our fullness and freedom of communication; since real communication requires mutual understanding; so in the growth of the social consciousness, we note from the beginning a passionate interest in other people’s lives. (The Man-Made World, 1911)
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The art which gives humanity consciousness is the most vital art. Our greatest dramatists are lauded for their breadth of knowledge of “human nature,” their range of emotion and understanding; our greatest poets are those who most deeply and widely experience and reveal the feelings of the human heart; and the power of fiction is that it can reach and express this great field of human life with no limits but those of the author. (The Man-Made World, 1911)
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Human life is a very large affair; and literature is its chief art. We live, humanly, only through our power of communication. Speech gives us this power laterally, as it were, in immediate personal contact. For permanent use speech becomes oral tradition – a poor dependence. Literature gives not only a infinite multiplication to the lateral spread of communion but adds the vertical reach. Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future. (The Man-Made World, 1911)
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See also:
Feminist Quotes by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil. (His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers, 1923)
We must learn to study normal human life as the outcome of feminine nature, and to see that many features we have assumed to be natural to humanity are merely natural to masculinity, which is quite another thing. (His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers, 1923)
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This is the woman’s century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place, her transcendental power to remake humanity, to rebuild the suffering world—and the world waits while she powders her nose.” (The Living of Charlott Perkins Gilman, an Autobiography, 1935)
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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.”(The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an Autobiography, 1935)
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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. (The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1935)
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Further reading on Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Yellow Wallpaper (full text)
- “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”
- The Yellow Wallpaper — an analysis
- Women and Economics (1898) — an excerpt
- The Giant Wistaria — an analysis
- Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- The Giant Wistaria
- Gilman’s 1911 Version of “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
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