Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Having seen the disproportionate degree of sex-distinction in humanity / and its greater manifestation in the female than in the male, and having / seen also the unique position of the human female as an economic / dependant on the male of her species, it is not difficult to establish a / relation between these two facts. The general law acting to produce this / condition of exaggerated sex-development was briefly referred to in the / second chapter. It is as follows: the natural tendency of any function / to increase in power by use causes sex-activity to increase under the / action of sexual selection. This tendency is checked in most species by / the I force of natural selection, which diverts the energies into other / channels and developes race-activities. Where the female finds her / economic environment in the male, and her economic advantage is directly / conditioned upon the sex-relation, the force of natural selection is / added to the force of sexual selection, and both together operate to / develope sex-activity. In any animal species, free from any other / condition, such a relation would have inevitably developed sex to an / inordinate degree, as may be readily seen in the comparatively similar / cases of those insects where the female, losing economic activity and / modified entirely to sex, becomes a mere egg-sac, an organism with no / powers of self-preservation, only those of race-preservation. With these / insects the only race-problem is to maintain and reproduce the species, / and such a condition is not necessarily evil; but with a race like ours, / whose development as human creatures is but comparatively begun, it is / evil because of its check to individual and racial progress. There are / other purposes before us besides mere maintenance and reproduction.

It should be clear to any one accustomed to the working of biological / laws that all the tendencies of a living organism are progressive in / their development, and are held in check by the interaction of their / several forces. Each living form, with its dominant characteristics, / represents a balance of power, a sort of compromise. The size of earth's / primeval monsters was limited by the tensile strength of their material. / Sea monsters can be bigger, because the medium in which they move offers / more support. Birds must be smaller for the opposite reason. The cow / requires many stomachs of a liberal size, because her food is of low / nutritive value; and she must eat large quantities to keep her machine / going. The size of arboreal animals, such as monkeys or squirrels, is / limited by the nature of their habitat: creatures that live in trees / cannot be so big as creatures that live on the ground. Every quality of / every creature is relative to its condition, and tends to increase or / decrease accordingly; and each quality tends to increase in proportion / to its use, and to decrease in proportion to its disuse. Primitive man / and his female were animals, like other animals. They were strong, / fierce, lively beasts; and she was as nimble and ferocious as he, save / for the added belligerence of the males in their sex-competition. In / this competition, he, like the other male creatures, fought savagely / with his hairy rivals; and she, like the other female creatures, / complacently viewed their struggles, and mated with the victor. At other / times she ran about in the forest, and helped herself to what there was / to eat as freely as he did.