Explore "Human Work" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The Social Organism is as natural a life-form as fish, flesh, or fowl. It has been naturally evolved, its processes and appearances are as natural as those of any other part of creation. We do not recognise it because of the interference of that ancestral brain; and we are further confused in looking at it by our arbitrary classification, resting on old and false ideas.
As physical geography is confused to a child's mind by the demarcations and contrasted colours of the map of political geography; so is the natural organic relation of Society confused in our minds by our superficial and artificial "social distinctions. " We have established social distinctions and relations on lines of physical connection, such as birth; whereas physical relationship has no similitude with social relationship; or of political connection, as nation or party; whereas, again, there is no resemblance; or on even more fantastic lines of sex, of caste, of creed, or of the amount of money possessed.