Top 15 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.

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

To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries, who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship.

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.

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.

I do not want to be a fly,
I want to be a worm!

Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
"You ignominious idiot,
Those wings are made to fly!"

A million million worlds that move in peace;
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.
They sleep beneath the sod
And trust in God.

Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

It becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.

You think you have mastered it [the wallpaper pattern], but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you.

There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will.

I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.

This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.