Explore "Women and Economics" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Since we have learned to study the development of human life as we study / the evolution of species throughout the animal kingdom, some peculiar / phenomena which have puzzled the philosopher and moralist for so long, / begin to show themselves in a new light. We begin to see that, so far / from being inscrutable problems, requiring another life to explain, / these sorrows and perplexities of our lives are but the natural results / of natural causes, and that, as soon as we ascertain the causes, we can / do much to remove them.
In spite of the power of the individual will to struggle against / conditions, to resist them for a while, and sometimes to overcome them, / it remains true that the human creature is affected by his environment, / as is every other living thing. The power of the individual will to / resist natural law is well proven by the life and death of the ascetic. / In any one of those suicidal martyrs may be seen the will, misdirected / by the ill-informed intelligence, forcing the body to defy every natural / impulse,-even to the door of death, and through it.