The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-11-06
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Apostle of Work for Women

housekeeper and seamstress all in ons than that every man should make hfa own clothes, hats and shoes and build
 his own house. says this vigorous thinker. Take the farmers wife
 whose toll and whose fate are tns hardest of all The farmer pays S1o week for cooking and houseworh resents what his wife could earn al
 beekeeping, dairying, poultry raisina or some other of the many lines of productive rural work if the wife were free and not overwrought anz exhausted by trying to conduct thre1 or four special trades at once. Mrs. Gilman holds that every wo- man and girl should have some money gaining occupation and work at 1t.
 Let the house be kept clean by thosa
 whose trade it is to keep house in order and who are paid for the work.
 Let the cooking. the sewing. the
 nursing be done in like manner by the specialist who thereby gains liv-
 ing.
 Motherhood, the instinct of woman
 to feed. clothe and shelter her chi1- dren. was in the primitive age the source of all human industries Now
 woman sits back and says because oe
 motherhood she cannot work. wom-
 en are today doing less than they did
 in the year 1. This being the case. let us not blame men If they hold women as inferior. Men are at present mora civilized than women because men are the human workers. In all the animal kingdom woman is the only female
 that is fed by the male. Tn conse- cuence of this through the ages wso-
 man has become oversexed.
 Such are a few of the strikingly original thoughts advanced in the book. Women and Economical" 1t has been translated into seven of the different languages of Europe. In Mrs. Gilman's bookcase in her pretty New York flat is 6 copy of 1t in Rus sian. Throughout Europe 1t has sek and nations blessed be he or she who makes people think. Such an indi- viduai comes to us like a whin of the
 sparkling salt sea breeze in an inland desert
 As 1t Is Mrs. Gilman calculates that our present method of taking care of
 the family wastes two-thirds of our means of living and forty-seven per cent. of the worlds productive labor.
 Yet is she strong in faith and hope.
 She sees the world moving smoothly l and rapidly on toward the time when woman, too, will engage in product i've industry More and more girls of all grades are taking up work for .re
 world instead of house. work As a re-
 suit this enthusiast says it is not im-
 possible to hope that home may be-
 come happier than 1t is now or that motherhood may yet be strong and splendid.
 Mrs. Gilman has written six booKs The last one. Human Work.'' is class ed by scientists and scholars as an important contribution to sociology.
 Its keynote is heard in It's name. She sings the ever increasing joy and gio- ry of work and through 1t human de-
 velopment. "To do, to take part in that huge. thrilling. organic life in which the in- dividual thrives unconscious, of which the soul Is lodged in each of us. and in the ceaseless development of that measureless vitality. this svast, i ever increasing social life. to- feel
 now and again--always oftener-1the
 distant music of the universe grow
 clearer-that Is happiness'
 ELIzABETH LEE.