The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Author:Charlotte Perkins Gilman [Gilman, Charlotte Perkins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

COMPARISONS ARE ODIOUS

I had always been proud of my country, of course. Everyone is. Compared with the other lands and other races I knew, the United States of America had always seemed to me, speaking modestly, as good as the best of them.

But just as a clear-eyed, intelligent, perfectly honest, and well-meaning child will frequently jar one’s self-esteem by innocent questions, so did these women, without the slightest appearance of malice or satire, continually bring up points of discussion which we spent our best efforts in evading.

Now that we were fairly proficient in their language, had read a lot about their history, and had given them the general outlines of ours, they were able to press their questions closer.

So when Jeff admitted the number of “women wage earners” we had, they instantly asked for the total population, for the proportion of adult women, and found that there were but twenty million or so at the outside.

“Then at least a third of your women are—what is it you call them—wage earners? And they are all poor. What is poor, exactly?”

“Ours is the best country in the world as to poverty,” Terry told them. “We do not have the wretched paupers and beggars of the older countries, I assure you. Why, European visitors tell us we don’t know what poverty is.”

“Neither do we,” answered Zava. “Won’t you tell us?”

Terry put it up to me, saying I was the sociologist, and I explained that the laws of nature require a struggle for existence, and that in the struggle the fittest survive, and the unfit perish. In our economic struggle, I continued, there was always plenty of opportunity for the fittest to reach the top, which they did, in great numbers, particularly in our country; that where there was severe economic pressure the lowest classes of course felt it the worst, and that among the poorest of all, the women were driven into the labor market by necessity.

They listened closely, with the usual note-taking.

“About one-third, then, belong to the poorest class,” observed Moadine gravely. “And two-thirds are the ones who are—how was it you so beautifully put it?—‘loved, honored, kept in the home to care for the children.’ This inferior one-third have no children, I suppose?”

Jeff—he was getting as bad as they were—solemnly replied that, on the contrary, the poorer they were, the more children they had. That too, he explained, was a law of nature: “Reproduction is in inverse proportion to individuation.”

“These ‘laws of nature,’ ” Zava gently asked, “are they all the laws you have?”

“I should say not!” protested Terry. “We have systems of law that go back thousands and thousands of years—just as you do, no doubt,” he finished politely.

“Oh no,” Moadine told him. “We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty. In a few weeks more,” she continued, “we are going to have the pleasure of showing you over our little land and explaining everything you care to know about. We want you to see our people.

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