XVI

LINES OF ADVANCE

It will be helpful and encouraging for us to examine the development of the home to this date, and its further tendencies; that we may cease to regret here, and learn to admire there; that we may use our personal powers definitely to resist the undertow of habit and prejudice, and definitely to promote all legitimate progress.

There is a hopelessness in the first realisation of this old-world obstacle still stationary in our swift to-day; but there need not be. While apparently as strong as ever, it has in reality been undermined on every side by the currents of evolution; its whilom prisoners have been stimulated and strengthened by the unavoidable force of those same great currents, and little remains to do beyond the final opening of one's own eyes to the facts—not one's grandmother's eyes, but one's own—and the beautiful work of reconstruction.

Examine the main root of the whole thing—the exclusive confinement of women to the home, to their feminine functions and a few crude industries; and see how rapidly that condition is changing. The advance of women, during the last hundred years or so, is a phenomenon unparalleled in history. Never before has so large a class made as much progress in so small a time. From the harem to the forum is a long step, but she has taken it. From the ignorant housewife to the president of a college is a long step, but she has taken it. From the penniless dependent to the wholly self-supporting and often other-supporting business woman, is a long step, but she has taken it. She who knew so little is now the teacher; she who could do so little is now the efficient and varied producer; she who cared only for her own flesh and blood is now active in all wide good works around the world. She who was confined to the house now travels freely, the foolish has become wise, and the timid brave. Even full political equality is won in more than one country and state; it is a revolution of incredible extent and importance, and its results are already splendidly apparent.

This vast number of human beings, formerly as separate as sand grains and as antagonistic as the nature of their position compelled, are now organising, from house to club, from local to general, in federations of city, state, nation, and world. The amount of social energy accumulated by half of us is no longer possible of confinement to that half; the woman has inherited her share, and has grown so large and strong that her previous surroundings can no longer contain or content her.

The socialising of this hitherto subsocial, wholly domestic class, is a marked and marvellous event, now taking place with astonishing rapidity. That most people have not observed it proves nothing. Mankind has never yet properly perceived historic events until time gave him the perspective his narrow present horizon denied.

Where most of our minds are home-enclosed, like the visual range of one sitting in a hogshead, general events make no impression save as they impinge directly on that personal area. The change in the position of woman, largely taking place in the home, is lost to general view; and so far as it takes place in public, is only perceived in fractions by most of us.

To man it was of course an unnatural and undesired change; he did not want it, did not see the need or good of it, and has done all he could to prevent it. To the still inert majority of women, content in their position, or attributing their growing discontent to other causes, it is also an unnatural and undesired change. Ideas do not change as fast as facts, with most of us. Mankind in general, men and women, still believe in the old established order, in woman's ordination to the service of bodily needs of all sorts; in the full sufficiency of maternal instinct as compared with any trivial propositions of knowledge and experience; in the noble devotion of the man who spends all his labours to furnish a useless woman with luxuries, and all the allied throng of ancient myths and falsehoods.

Thus we have not been commonly alive to the full proportions of the woman's movement, or its value. The facts are there, however. Patient Griselda has gone out, or is going, faster and faster. The girls of to-day, in any grade of society, are pushing out to do things instead of being content to merely eat things, wear things, and dust things. The honourable instinct of self-support is taking the place of the puerile acceptance of gifts, and beyond self-support comes the still nobler impulse to give to others; not corrupting charity, but the one all-good service of a life's best work. Measuring the position of woman as it has been for all the years behind us up to a century or so ago with what it is to-day, the distance covered and the ratio of progress is incredible. It rolls up continually, accumulatively; and another fifty years will show more advance than the past five hundred.

This alone is enough to guarantee the development of the home. No unchanging shell can contain a growing body, something must break; and the positive force of growth is stronger than the negative force of mere adhesion of particles. A stronger, wiser, nobler woman must make a better home.

In the place itself, its customs and traditions, we can also note great progress. The "domestic industries" have shrunk and dwindled almost out of sight, so greedily has society sucked at them and forced them out where they belong.

The increasing difficulties which assail the house-keeper, either in trying to occupy the primeval position of doing her own work, or in persuading anyone else to do it for her, are simply forcing us, however reluctantly, to the adoption of better methods. Even in the most neglected field of all, the care and education of the little child, some progress has been made. Education in the hands of men, broad-minded, humanly loving men, has crept nearer and nearer to the cradle; and now even women, and not only single women, but even mothers, are beginning to study the nature and needs of the child. The more they study, the more they learn, the more impossible become the home conditions. The mother cannot herself alone do all that is necessary for her children, to say nothing of continuing to be a companion to her husband, a member of society, and a still growing individual.

She can sacrifice herself in the attempt,—often does,—but the child has a righteous indifference to such futile waste of life. He does not require a nervous, exhausted, ever-present care, and it is by no means good for him. He wants a strong, serene, lovely mother for a comfort, a resource, an ideal; but he also wants the care of a trained highly qualified teacher, and the amateur mama cannot give it to him. Motherhood is a common possession of every female creature; a joy, a pride, a nobly useful function. Teacherhood is a profession, a specialised social function, no more common to mothers than to fathers, maids, or bachelors. The ceaseless, anxious strain to do what only an experienced nurse and teacher can do, is an injury to the real uses of motherhood.

Why do we dread having children, as many of our much-extolled mothers so keenly do? Partly the physical risk and suffering, which are not necessary to a normal woman,—and more the ensuing care, labour, and anxiety,—and oh,—"the responsibility!" The more modern the mother is, the more fit for a higher plane of execution, the more unfit she is for the lower plane, the old primitive plane of home-teaching.

If your father is a combination of all college professors you may get part of a college training at home—but not the best part. If your mother is a born teacher, a trained teacher, an experienced teacher, you may get part of your schooling at home—but not the best part. There would never have been a school or college on earth, if every man had remained content with teaching his boys at home. There will never be any proper standard of training for little children while each woman remains content with caring for her own at home. But the house-wife is changing. These ways no longer satisfy her. She insists on more modern methods, even in her ancient labours.

Then follows the equally different attitude of the housemaid; her rebellion, refusal, retirement from the field; and the immense increase in mechanical convenience seeping in steadily from outside, and doing more to "undermine the home" than any wildest exhortations of reformers. The gas range, the neat and perfect utensils, these have in themselves an educational reaction; we cannot now maintain the atmosphere "where greasy Joan doth keel the pot." The pot is a white enamelled double boiler, and Joan need not be greasy save of malice prepense. Besides the improvement of utensils, we have in our cities and in most of the smaller towns that insidious new system of common supply of domestic necessities, which webs together the once so separate homes by a network of pipes and wires.

Our houses are threaded like beads on a string, tied, knotted, woven together, and in the cities even built together; one solid house from block-end to block-end; their boasted individuality maintained by a thin partition wall. The tenement, flat, and apartment house still further group and connect us; and our claim of domestic isolation becomes merely another domestic myth. Water is a household necessity and was once supplied by household labour, the women going to the wells to fetch it. Water is now supplied by the municipality, and flows among our many homes as one. Light is equally in common; we do not have to make it for ourselves.

Where water and light are thus fully socialised, why are we so shy of any similar progress in the supply of food? Food is no more a necessity than water. If we are willing to receive our water from an extra-domestic pipe—why not our food? The one being a simple element and the other a very complex combination makes a difference, of course; but even so we may mark great progress. Some foods, more or less specific, and of universal use, were early segregated, and the making of them became a trade, as in breadstuffs, cheese, and confectionery. Where this has been done we find great progress, and an even standard of excellence. In America, where the average standard of bread-making is very low, we regard "baker's bread" as a synonym for inferiority; but even here, if we consider the saleratus bread of the great middle west, and all the sour, heavy, uncertain productions of a million homes, the baker bears comparison with the domestic cook. It is the maintenance of the latter that keeps the former down; where the baker is the general dependence he makes better bread.

Our American baker's bread has risen greatly in excellence as we make less and less at home. All the initial processes of the food supply have been professionalised. Our housewife does not go out crying, "Dilly-dilly! Dilly-dilly! You must come and be killed"—and then wring the poor duck's neck, pick and pluck it with her own hands; nor does the modern father himself slay the fatted calf—all this is done as a business. In recent years every article of food which will keep, every article which is in common demand, is prepared as a business.

The home-blinded toiler has never climbed out of her hogshead to watch this rising tide, but it is nearly up to the rim, ready to pour in and float her out. Every delicate confection, every pickle, sauce, preserve, every species of biscuit and wafer, and all sublimated and differentiated to a degree we could never have dreamed of; all these are manufactured in scientific and business methods and delivered at our doors, or our dumb-waiters. Breakfast foods are the latest step in this direction; and the encroaching delicatessen shop with its list of allurements. Even the last and dearest stronghold, the very core and centre of domestic bliss—hot cooked food—is being served us by this irreverent professional man.

The sacred domestic rite of eating may be still performed in the sanctuary, but the once equally sacred, subsidiary art of cooking is swiftly going out of it. As to eating at home, so dear a habit, so old a habit, old enough to share with every beast that drags her prey into her lair, that she and her little ones may gnaw in safety; this remains strongly in evidence, and will for some time yet. But while it reigns unshaken in our minds let us follow, open-eyed, the great human distinction of eating together. To share one's food, to call guest and friend to the banquet, is not a custom of any animal save those close allies in social organisation, the ants and their compeers. Not only do we permit this, but it is our chiefest joy and pride. From the child playing tea-party to the Lord Mayor's Banquet, the human race shows a marked tendency to eat together. It is our one great common medium—more's the pity that we have none better as yet! To share food is the first impulse of true hospitality, the largest field of artificial extravagance. Moreover, in actual fact, in the working world, food is eaten together by almost all men at noon; and by women and men in what they call "social life" almost daily. In recent years, in our cities, this habit increases widely, swiftly; men, women, and families eat together more and more; and the eating-house increases in excellence commensurately.

Whatever our opinion of these two facts, both are facts—that we like to eat in "the bosom of the family" and that we equally like to eat in common. Why, then, do we so fear a change in this field? "Because of the children!" most people will reply triumphantly. Are the children, then, perfectly fed at home? Is the list of dietary diseases among our home-fed little ones a thing to boast of? May it be hinted that it is because child-feeding has remained absolutely domestic, while man-feeding has become partially civilised, that the knowledge of how to feed children is so shamefully lacking? Be all this as it may, it is plainly to be seen that our domestic conditions as to food supply are rapidly changing, and that all signs point to a steady rise in efficiency and decrease in expense in this line of human service. There remains much to be done. In no field of modern industry and business opportunity is there a wider demand to be met than in this constantly waxing demand for better food, more hygienic food, more reliable food, cheaper food, food which shall give us the maximum of nutrition and healthy pleasure, with the minimum of effort and expense. At this writing—May, 1903—there is in flourishing existence a cooked-food supply company, in New Haven (Conn.), in Pittsburgh (Pa.), and in Boston (Mass.), with doubtless others not at present known to the author.

Turning to the other great domestic industry, the care of children, we may see hopeful signs of growth. The nursemaid is improving. Those who can afford it are beginning to see that the association of a child's first years with low-class ignorance cannot be beneficial. There is a demand for "trained nurses" for children; even in rare cases the employment of some Kindergarten ability. Among the very poor the day-nursery and Kindergarten are doing slow, but beautiful work. The President of Harvard demands that more care and money be spent on the primary grades in education; and all through our school systems there is a healthy movement. Child-study is being undertaken at last. Pedagogy is being taught as a science. In our public parks there is regular provision made for children; and in the worst parts of the cities an incipient provision of playgrounds.

There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day than this new thought about the child. In what does it consist? In recognising "the child," children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal ownership—the unchecked tyranny, or as unchecked indulgence, of the private home. Children are at last emerging from the very lowest grade of private ownership into the safe, broad level of common citizenship. That which no million separate families could give their millions of separate children, the state can give, and does. Our progress, so long merely mechanical, is at last becoming personal, touching the people and lifting them as one.

Now what is all this leading to? What have we to hope—or to dread—in the undeniable lines of development here shown? What most of us dread is this: that we shall lose our domestic privacy; that we shall lose our family dinner table; that woman will lose "her charm;" that we shall lose our children; and the child lose its mother. We are mortally afraid of separation.

The unfolding and differentiation of natural growth is not separation in any organic sense. The five-fingered leaf, closely bound in the bud, separates as it opens. The branches separate from the trunk as the trees grow. But this legitimate separation does not mean disconnection. The tree is as much one tree as if it grew in a strait-jacket. All growth must widen and diverge. If natural growth is checked, disease must follow. If allowed, health and beauty and happiness accompany it.

The home, if it grows on in normal lines, will not be of the same size and relative density as it was in ancient times; but it will be as truly home to the people of to-day. In trying to maintain by force the exact limits and characteristics of the primitive home, we succeed only in making a place modern man is not at home in.

The people of our time need the home of our time, not the homes of ancient barbarians. The primitive home and the home-bound woman are the continually acting causes of our increasing domestic unhappiness. By clinging to unsuitable conditions we bring about exactly the evils we are most afraid of. A little scientific imagination well based on existing facts, well in line with existing tendencies, should be used to point out the practical possibilities of the home as it is to be.

Try to consider it first with the woman out for working hours. This is an impassable gulf to the average mind. "Home, with the woman out—there is no such thing!" cries it. The instant assumption is that she will never be in, in which case I am willing to admit that there would be no home. Suppose we retrace our steps a little and approach the average mind more gradually. Can it imagine a home, a real happy home, with the woman out of it for one hour a day? Can it, encouraged by this step, picture the home as still enduring while the woman is out of it two hours a day? Is there any exact time of attendance required to make a home? What is, in truth, required to make a home? First mother and child, then father; this is the family, and the place where they live is the home.

Now the father goes out every day; does the home cease to exist because of his hours away from it? It is still his home, he still loves it, he maintains it, he lives in it, only he has a "place of business" elsewhere. At a certain stage of growth the children are out of it, between say 8.30 and 3.30. Does it cease to be home because of their hours away from it? Do they not love it and live in it—while they are there? Now if, while the father was out, and the children were out, the mother should also be out, would the home disappear into thin air?

It is home while the family are in it. When the family are out of it it is only a house; and a house will stand up quite solidly for some eight hours of the family's absence. Incessant occupation is not essential to a home. If the father has wife and children with him in the home when he returns to it, need it matter to him that the children are wisely cared for in schools during his absence; or that his wife is duly occupied elsewhere while they are so cared for?

Two "practical obstacles" intervene; first, the "housework"; second, the care of children below school age. The housework is fast disappearing into professional hands. When that is utterly gone, the idle woman has but one excuse—the babies. This is a very vital excuse. The baby is the founder of the home. If the good of the baby requires the persistent, unremitting care of the mother in the home, then indeed she must remain there. No other call, no other claim, no other duty, can be weighed for a moment against this all-important service—the care of the little child.

But we have already seen that if there is one thing more than another the home fails in, it is just this. If there is one duty more than another the woman fails in, it is just this. Our homes are not planned nor managed in the interests of little children; and the isolated home-bound mother is in no way adequate to their proper rearing. This is not disputable on any side. The death rate of little children during the years they are wholly in the home and mother's care proves it beyond question. The wailing of little children who live—or before they die—wailing from bodily discomfort, nervous irritation, mental distress, punishment—a miserable sound, so common, so expected, that it affects the price of real estate, tenants not wishing to live near little children on account of their cries—this sound of world-wide anguish does not seem to prove much for the happiness of these helpless inmates of the home.

Such few data as we have of babies and young children in properly managed day nurseries, give a far higher record of health and happiness. Not the sick baby in the pauper hospital, not the lonely baby in the orphan asylum; but the baby who has not lost his mother, but who adds to mother's love, calm, wise, experienced professional care.

The best instance of this, as known to me, is that of M. Godin's phalanstère in Guise, France. An account of it can be found in the Harper's Monthly, November, 1885; or in M. Godin's own book, "Social Solutions," translated by Marie Howland, now out of print. This wise and successful undertaking had been going on for over twenty years when the above article was written. Among its features was a beautifully planned nursery for babies and little children, and the results to child and parent, to home and state were wholly good. Better health, greater peace and contentment, a swift, regular, easy development these children enjoyed; and when, in later years, they met the examinations of the public schools, they stood higher than the children of any other district in France.

A newborn baby leads a far happier, healthier, more peaceful existence in the hands of the good trained nurse, than it does when those skilled hands are gone, and it is left on the trembling knees of the young, untrained mother.

"But the nurse does not love it!" we wildly protest. What if she does not? Cannot the mother love it while the nurse takes care of it? This is the whole position in a nutshell. Nothing is going to prevent the mother from loving her children in one deep, ceaseless river of calm affection, with such maternal transports as may arise from time to time in addition; but nothing ought to prevent the child's being properly taken care of while the love is going on. The mother is not ashamed to depend on the doctor if the child is ill, on the specialist if the child is defective, on the teacher when the child is in school. Why should she so passionately refuse to depend on equally skilled assistance for the first five years of her babies' lives—those years when iron statistics remorselessly expose her incapacity?

The home that is coming will not try to be a workshop, a nursery, or a school. The child that is coming will find a more comfortable home than he ever had before, and something else besides—a place for babies to be happy in, and grow up in, without shrieks of pain. The mother that is coming, a much more intelligent person than she has ever been before, will recognise that this ceaseless procession of little ones requires some practical provision for its best development, other than what is possible in the passing invasion of the home. "How a baby does tyrannise over the household!" we complain, vaguely recognising that the good of the baby requires something different from the natural home habits of adults. We shall finally learn to make a home for the babies too.

This involves great changes in both our idea of home, and our material provision for it. Why not? Growth is change, and there is need of growth here. Slowly, gradually, by successive experiments, we shall find out how to meet new demands; and these experiments are now being made, in all the living centres of population.

  XVII

RESULTS

To us, who have for so many unbroken generations been wholly bound to the home, who honestly believe that its service and maintenance constitute the whole duty of men and women, the picture of a world in which home and its affairs takes but a small part of life's attention gives rather a blank outlook. What else are we to do! What else to love—what else to serve eternally! What else to revere, to worship! How shall we occupy the hands of man if but a tithe of his labour supports him in comfort; how fill the heart of woman, when her family are happily and rightly served without sacrificing her in the operation! It is hard, at first—we being so accustomed to spend all life in merely keeping ourselves alive—to see what life might be when we had some to spare. We find it difficult to imagine this "world of trouble" as rid of its troubles; as rationally and comfortably managed; peaceful, clean, safe, healthy, giving everyone room and time to grow. Nor need we labour to forecast events too accurately; especially the material details which must be decided by long experiment. No rigid prescription is needed; no dictum as to whether we shall live in small separate houses, greenly gardened, with closely connected conveniences for service and for education, for work and play; or in towering palaces with shaded flower-bright courts and cloisters. All that must work out as have our great modern wonders in other lines, little by little, in orderly development. But what we can forecast in safety is the effect on the human body and the human soul.

A peaceful, healthy, happy babyhood and childhood, with such delicate adjustment of educational processes as we already see indicated, will give us a far better individual. The full-grown mother, contributing racial advance in both body and mind, will add greatly to this gain. We can be better people everywhere, better born, bred, fed, educated in all ways. But quite beyond this is the rich growth of our long aborted social instincts, which will rapidly follow the reduction of these long artificially maintained primitive and animal instincts.

Where now trying to meet general needs by personal efforts, modern needs by ancient methods, we must perforce manifest an intense degree of self-interest to keep up the struggle; as soon as we meet these needs easily, swiftly, inexpensively, by modern methods and common efforts, less self-interest will be necessary.

When sidewalks were narrow and streets foul, great was the jostling, keen the resentment—"You take the wall of me, sir!" Where all is broad, clean, safe, no such hot feeling exists. We do not truly prefer to be always sharply looking out for ourselves; it is much more interesting to look out for each other; but this method of handicapping each man with his own affairs, in such needless weight, keeps up a selfishness which true civilisation tends steadily to eliminate. Social instincts in social conditions are as natural as animal instincts in animal conditions.

Starving, shipwrecked sailors, robbed of all social advantages, are reduced sometimes even to cannibalism. Polite people at a banquet show no hint of such fierce, relentless greed. Relieved of the necessity for spending our whole time taking care of ourselves, we shall deliciously launch forward into the much larger pleasure of taking care of one another. Relieved of the ceaseless, instant pressure of purely physical needs, we shall be able to put forth the true demands of human life at last. The mind, no longer penned in its weary treadmill of private affairs, will spread into its legitimate area—public affairs. We shall be able to see a greater number of things at once, and care about them. That larger-mindedness will be an immediate result; for we have already far more capacity than we use.

We have developed the modern civilised mind, the social mind, through the world's work; but we bury it, enslave it, stultify it, in the home's work. A new power—a new sense of range—freedom, growth, as of a great stream flowing freely; plenty of force to work with, plenty of room to work in—this is what will follow as we learn to properly relate the home to the rest of life.

Once the mind rises, free, outside those old enclosing, crushing walls, it will see life with different eyes. Our common good will appear to us as naturally as our private good does now. At present the average mind does not seem able to grasp a great general fact, be it for good or evil.

To make a man appreciate the proposed advantage, realise the impending or existing evil, we must "bring it home to him," make him feel it "where he lives." When his home does not occupy most of his mind, tax his strength, reduce his range of interest and affection, he can see the big things more easily. When he "lives" in the whole city—i.e., thinks about it, cares about it, works for it, loves it—then he will promptly feel anything that affects it in any part. This common love and care are just as possible to human beings as love and care for one's own young are possible to the beasts. It is possible; it is natural; it is a great and increasing joy; but its development is checked by a system which requires all our love and care for our own, and even then does not properly provide for them.

The love of human beings for each other is not a dream of religion, it is a law of nature. It is bred of human contact, of human relation, of human service; it rests on identical interest and the demands of a social development which must include all, if it permanently lift any. Against this perfectly natural development stands this opposing shell; this earlier form of life, essential in its place, most mischievous out of it; this early cradle of humanity in which lie smothered the full-grown people of to-day.

Must we then leave it—lose it—go without it? Never. The more broadly socialised we become, the more we need our homes to rest in. The large area is necessary for the human soul; the big, modern, civilised social nature. But we are still separate animal beings as well as collective social beings. Always we need to return to the dear old ties, to the great primal basis, that we may rise refreshed and strengthened, like Antæus from the earth. Private, secluded, sweet, wholly our own; not invaded by any trade or work or business, not open to the crowd; the place of the one initial and undying group of father, mother, and child, will remain to us. These, and the real friend, are all that belong to the home.

It should be the recognised base and background of our lives; but those lives must be lived in their true area, the world. And so lived, by both of us, all of us; shared in by the child, served in by the woman as well as the man; that world will grow to have the sense of intimacy, of permanent close attachment, of comfort and pleasure and rest, which now attaches only to the home.

So, living, really living in the world and loving it, the presence there of father, mother, and child will gradually bring out in it all the beauty and safety, the refreshment and strength we so vainly seek to ensure in our private home. The sense of duty, of reverence, of love, honestly transferred to the world we live in, will have its natural, its inevitable effect, and make that world our home at last.

THE END

BOOKS BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

The Man-made World,
or:
Our Androcentric Culture.

By

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Many books have been written about women, as such; women as females.

This is a book about men, as such; men as males.

Women have been considered as a sex, and their character and actions so discussed.

This book considers men as a sex; and their character and actions are so discussed.

Too much of women's influence is dreaded as "feminization"—as likely to render our culture "effeminate."

Too much of men's influence is here studied as "masculization" and as having rendered our culture—there is no analogue for "effeminate."

We have heard much of the "eternal womanly;" this book treats of the eternal manly.

"Cherchez la femme!" is the old hue and cry; this book raises a new one: "Cherchez l'homme!"

By mail of Charlton Co., $1.00.

What Diantha Did.

A Novel by

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

We have had military novels, and marine novels; novels of adventure, of mystery and crime; religious novels, historic novels, novels of business life, trades unions and the labor question; novels of "local color," dialect novels; and romances pure and simple—also impure and complicated. This novel deals with the most practical problem of women's lives today—and settles it—NOT by cooperation.

By mail of Charlton Co., $1.00.

"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER"

Worthy of a place beside some of the weird masterpieces of Hawthorne and Poe.—Literature.

As a short story it stands among the most powerful produced in America.—Chicago News.

By mail of Charlton Co., $0.50.

"HUMAN WORK"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman has added a third to her great trilogy of books on economic subjects as they affect our daily life, particularly in the home. Mrs. Gilman is by far the most brilliant woman writer of our day, and this new volume, which she calls "Human Work," is a glorification of labor.—New Orleans Picayune.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman has been writing a new book, entitled "Human Work." It is the best thing that Mrs. Gilman has done, and it is meant to focus all of her previous work, so to speak.—Tribune, Chicago.

In her latest volume, "Human Work," Charlotte Perkins Gilman places herself among the foremost students and elucidators of the problem of social economics.—San Francisco Star.

It is impossible to overestimate the value of the insistence on the social aspect of human affairs as Mrs. Gilman has outlined it.—Public Opinion.

By mail of Charlton Co., $1.00.

"IN THIS OUR WORLD"

There is a joyous superabundance of life, of strength, of health, in Mrs. Gilman's verse, which seems born of the glorious sunshine and rich gardens of California.—Washington Times.

The freshness, charm and geniality of her satire temporarily convert us to her most advanced views.—Boston Journal.

The poet of women and for women, a new and prophetic voice in the world. Montaigne would have rejoiced in her.—Mexican Herald.

By mail of Charlton Co., $1.25.

"THE HOME"

Indeed, Mrs. Gilman has not intended her book so much as a treatise for scholars as a surgical operation on the popular mind.—The Critic, New York.

Whatever Mrs. Gilman writes, people read—approving or protesting, still they read.—Republican, Springfield, Mass.

Full of thought and of new and striking suggestions. Tells what the average woman has and ought not keep, what she is and ought not be.—Literature World.

But it is safe to say that no more stimulating arraignment has ever before taken shape and that the argument of the book is noble, and, on the whole, convincing.—Congregationalist, Boston.

The name of this author is a guarantee of logical reasoning, sound economical principles and progressive thought.—The Craftsman, Syracuse.

By mail of Charlton Co., $1.00.

"The Home" has been translated into Swedish.

"WOMEN AND ECONOMICS"

Since John Stuart Mill's essay there has been no book dealing with the whole position of women to approach it in originality of conception and brilliancy of exposition.—London Chronicle.

The most significant utterance on the subject since Mill's "Subjection of Women."—The Nation.

It is the strongest book on the woman question that has yet been published.—Minneapolis Journal.

A remarkable book. A work on economics that has not a dull page,—the work of a woman about women that has not a flippant word.—Boston Transcript.

This book unites in a remarkable degree the charm of a brilliantly written essay with the inevitable logic of a proposition of Euclid. Nothing that we have read for many a long day can approach in clearness of conception, in power of arrangement, and in lucidity of expression the argument developed in the first seven chapters of this remarkable book.—Westminster Gazette, London.

Will be widely read and discussed as the cleverest, fairest, most forcible presentation of the view of the rapidly increasing group who look with favor on the extension of industrial employment to women.—Political Science Quarterly.

By mail of Charlton Co., $1.50.

"Women and Economics" has been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Russian and Japanese.

"CONCERNING CHILDREN"

Wanted:—A philanthropist, to give a copy to every English-speaking parent.—The Times, New York.

Should be read by every mother in the land.—The Press, New York.

Wholesomely disturbing book that deserves to be read for its own sake.—Chicago Dial.

By mail of Charlton Co., $1.25.

"Concerning Children" has been translated into German, Dutch and Yiddish.

CHARLTON COMPANY, 67 Wall St., New York

THE FORERUNNER

A monthly magazine; written,
edited, owned and published by

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

67 Wall Street, New York City,
U.S.A.

SUBSCRIPTION PER YEAR:

This magazine carries Mrs. Gilman's best and newest work; her social philosophy, verse, satire, fiction, ethical teaching, humor, and opinion.

It stands for Humanness in Women, and in Men; for better methods in Child-culture; for the New Ethics, the New Economics, the New World we are to make—are making.

ORDERS TAKEN FOR

Bound Vols. of first year, $1.25

Books by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

CHARLTON COMPANY, 67 Wall St., New York