Charlotte Perkins Gilman quotes

“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

— Spoken by a character

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able—to dress and entertain, and order things.

I never saw a worse paper in my life.

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.

This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down.

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

I was madly in love with not so much what was there as with what I supposed to be there.

The home in its essential nature is pure good, and in its due development is progressively good; but it must change with society's advance; and the kind of home that was wholly beneficial in one century may be largely evil in another.

So long as the home is the workshop the housewife cannot, and the housemaid will not, even if she could, properly do this work for the neglected world.

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.

But the salient fact in this discussion is that, 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.

Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a partnership. The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor are her frugality and industry.