Top 150 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them-on the race. You see, we are MOTHERS, she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

52. “As for mother Eve – I wasn’t there and can’t deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion’s share of keeping it going ever since.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

53. “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious!”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

54. “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

55. “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency – what is one to do?”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

56. “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

57. “He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

58. “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

59. “We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women – why, they would be no obstacles at all. Jeff, with his gentle romantic old-fashioned notions of women as clinging vines. Terry, with his clear decided practical theories that there were two kinds of women – those he wanted and those he didn’t; Desirable and Undesirable was his demarcation. The latter as a large class, but negligible – he had never thought about them at all.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

60. “There are many who think in one syllable, who say, ’women don’t dress to please men – they dress to please themselves – and to outshine other women.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

61. “When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

62. “This was not life, this was a nightmare.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

63. “Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

64. “The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

65. “I am, unfortunately, one of those much-berated New England women who have learned to think as well as feel; and to me, at least, marriage means more than a union of hearts and bodies – it must mean minds, too.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

66. “They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

67. “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

68. “Woman” in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

69. “I ran against a Prejudice that quite cut off the view.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

71. “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

72. “To speak broadly, the troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

73. “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

74. “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

75. “It is not true, always, my dear,′ said he, ’that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; at least it’s not the only way.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

76. “For men obsessed with women’s underwear, a course in washing, ironing and mending is recommended.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

77. “The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life-of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

78. “The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

79. “Those who too patiently serve as props sometimes underrate the possibilities of the vine.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

80. “While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

81. “I’m sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

82. “One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man’s original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

83. “The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

84. “Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

85. “To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one’s powers is necessary for human development – the full use of one’s best faculties – this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

86. “Until mothers earn their livings, women will not.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

87. “The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged “truth” which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

88. “We grovel and “worship” and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

89. “Do you love him enough to do something to win him – to really put yourself out somewhat for that purpose?”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

90. “Why, European visitors tell us, we don’t know what poverty is.” “Neither do we,” answered Zava. “Won’t you tell us?”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

91. “That which is desirable in young girls means, naturally, that which is desirable to men. Of all cultivated accomplishments the first is ‘innocence.’ Beauty may or may not be forthcoming; but ‘innocence’ is ’the chief charm of girlhood.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

92. “I want to do it as quickly as I can, for reasons,” answered Diantha.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

93. “The adjectives and derivatives based on woman’s distinctions are alien and derogatory when applied to human affairs; “effeminate” – too female, connotes contempt, but has no masculine analogue; whereas “emasculate” – not enough male, is a term of reproach, and has no feminine analogue. ‘Virile’ – manly, we oppose to ‘puerile’ – childish, and the very world ‘virtue’ is derived from ‘vir’ – a man.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

94. “The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

95. “Architecture might be more sportive and varied if every man built his own house, but it would not be the art and science that we have made it; and while every woman prepares food for her own family, cooking can never rise beyond the level of the amateur’s work.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

96. “And, as I traveled farther and farther, exploring the rich, sweet soul of her, my sense of pleasant friendship became but a broad foundation for such height, such breadth, such interlocked combination of feeling as left me fairly blinded with the wonder of it.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

97. “The best proof of man’s dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

98. “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

99. “The difference is great between one’s outside “life,” the things which happen to one, incidents, pains and pleasures, and one’s “living.””

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman

100. “If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it.”

— Charlotte Perkins Gilman