Explore "Human Work" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The difference between our real position in social development, and that maintained in our minds, is very great. It is as if a strong, capable, rich man suffered from mania, had a delusion that he was a puny, feeble, evil-minded wretch, and acted like one. Could the delusion be removed, he would act like what he really was and be happy.
Taking our own country as a type of social progress, what do we find to be its real conditions? In the first place, it has every material requisite for health and growth. It occupies a piece of the earth's surface big enough and varied enough to supply all the physical elements of triumphant advance. It has, second, not only a base of the best human stock, but a large and steady influx of all human stocks; it represents the blended blood of all races, a world-people truly, prototype of that cosmopolitan race which will ultimately cover the globe. This gives a chance for all possible development in stock and manifests it. It allows also all religions to contribute their best, all arts, all sciences; every line of special usefulness known to man is known to us.