Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it."

"Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil."

"The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses."

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

"To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something."

"Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power The world must follow you!"

"Human life consists in mutual service. No grief pain misfortune or 'broken heart' is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But 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."

"New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American"

"Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized."

"It's time we woke up, women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools- but who´s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and, what's more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes -and shoes- which of us wants to dance with her? Yes, we blame them for gratifying us, but are we willing to let our wives work? We are not. It hurts our pride, that's all. We are always criticizing them for doing mercenary marriages, but what do we call a girl who marries a chump with no money? Just a poor fool, that's all. And they know it. As for Mother Eve- I wasn't there and I can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the loin's share of keeping it going ever since- how about that?"

"But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter."

"[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked."

"And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body."

"You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People."

"They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they" Mrs Mac Avelly suggested. "Why should we" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em– nor God– nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?"

"Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal: chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman."

"In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy. "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. We looked for nervousness—there was none. For terror, perhaps—there was none. For uneasiness, for curiosity, for excitement—and all we saw was what might have been a vigilance committee of women doctors, as cool as cucumbers, and evidently meaning to take us to task for being there."

"Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil."