Philosophy of Social Evolution

3. Philosophy of Social Evolution

Gilman’s human philosophy was envisioned in terms of social evolu-tion. As a Reform Darwinist she believed that human beings could understand and play an active role in their evolutionary course, taking issue with the deterministic stance of Herbert Spencer and the Social Darwinists. As a feminist, she believed that social evolution required the liberation of women for the race to truly advance. As a socialist, she held that “progress” entailed the advancement of the whole, through collective action.

Gilman’s theory of social evolution is, by her own admission, largely indebted to the sociologist Lester F. Ward, whose gynocentric theory provided a suitable alternative to androcentric thinking. Gilman called his theory “the greatest single contribution to the world’s thought since Evolution,”22 and in her dedication of Man-Made World, she said of Ward that “nothing so important to women has ever been given to the world.”23 Ward’s gynocentric theory appeared in an article, “Our Better Halves,” 

(1888), where he claimed that the female human was superior to the male, and her capacities for nurturance and altruism would be necessary for preserving the human race:

Woman is the unchanging trunk for the great genealogical tree; while man, with all his vaunted superiority, is but a branch, a grafted scion, as it were, whose acquired qualities die with the individual, while those of woman are handed on to futurity. Woman is the race, and the race can be raised up only as she is raised up.24

Inspired by Ward, Gilman believed that the oppression of women was the greatest obstacle to social progress, yet was, for a time, neces-sary. Like Ward, she claimed that it was natural to the course of social evolution that a sex distinction be established, making a wide gap between males and females. The male evolved for sex only, having but one function, to fertilize the female. “The superiority of men to women is not a matter of sex at all; it is a matter of race.” Yet social evolution brought about a reversal in the relationship between the sexes. It was necessary for the male to rule over the female for a long period of evolutionary history. In order for the male, the inferior sex, to achieve race equality with the female, the superior sex, males needed to advance which meant becoming more like females and to incorporate female traits in their nature. This could only be accomplished by restricting the abilities of females. By encroaching steadily upon women’s freedom, men reduced women to economic dependence elevating themselves to be women’s providers. As such, men were compelled to completely provide for women’s needs, “to fulfill in his own person the thwarted uses of maternity.”25 Hence men began evolving female characteristics, becoming men-mothers and partaking in the most powerful of female qualities, creativity, creating the social world. Gilman claimed that “the subjection of woman has involved to an enormous degree the maternalizing of man. Under its bonds he has been forced into new functions, impossible to male energy alone. He has had to learn to work, to serve, to be human.”26 Thus, the greatest source of productivity in the world, maternal energy, was usurped by men closing the major gap between the sexes by adopting the feminine capacity for self-preservation and race preservation to balance out the masculine capacity for destruction. “The naturally destructive tendencies of the male have been gradually subverted to the conservative tendencies of the female”.27 Through natural selection and training, superior habits of females have been bred into males. 

Contemporary feminists are not only critical of the sociobiological assumptions of Gilman’s philosophy of social evolution, but many find cause for anger at the oppression of women. Gilman left the assumption of social evolution unchallenged and saw female oppression as a source of pride. Women have been patient through the ages. Superior from the beginning, “she has waited and suffered, that man might slowly rise to full racial equality with her. She could afford to wait. She could afford to suffer.”28 The positive result of female oppression is the evolution of a civilized man. Hence, while women were in a state of slavery and treated with injustice and cruelty, nature was blending opposing sex-tendencies of females into the males for a triumphant race. Again by Gilman’s account, the blending has not been reciprocal. Women, the race archetype have remained unchanged, but allowed their own oppression by men to enable men to evolve to beyond merely fragile, sexual beings.

Gilman’s philosophy of social evolution provided an economic analysis of androcentric culture. Androcentric economics has made the relation between the sexes an unequal sexuo-economic relation, based on men as primary to production in the social world, and women as non-productive consumers. Marriage was central to the maintenance of the sexuo-economic relation. It demanded that a man support a woman. Marriage was shameful employment for women for in it, they must fulfill wife-and-mother duties in exchange for being provided for. Marriage was therefore a form of economic beggary. The causes and uses of marriage under the sexuo-economic relation have become outgrown. Gilman believed that it was detrimental to humanity to continue confining women to the home and domestic service. One sign of the outdatedness of marriage as an instution of male rule over the female, was the emergence of the woman’s movement, which for Gilman also emerged under the forces of social evolution. She claimed that every woman born into this oppressive structure, “has had to live over again in her own person the same process of restriction, repression, denial; the smothering ‘no’ which crushed down all her human desire to create, to discover, to learn, to express, to advance.”29 Gilman’s analysis of the economics of the sex-based system showed how the sexual market and the economic market were one and the same.

The girl must marry: else how live? The prospective husband prefers

the girl to know nothing. He is the market, the demand. She is the

supply. And with the best intentions the mother serves her child’s 

economic advantage by preparing her for the market. This is an excellent instance. It is common. It is most evil.30

The social institutions of marriage, the family, and the home would need to be revised if female oppression were to be eradicated. Gilman’s most original contribution to social philosophy is her critical analysis of these current social institutions and her proposals for reform. She believed in marriage, finding the monogamous relationship the most advanced. Yet, she did not believe that marriage ought to be directly tied to the home. The comfort of humanity and shelter should not be dependent on marriage. Many men, women, and children may choose not to be married either temporarily or as a permanent choice. Under the current institutions of marriage, the family and the home, single people are, she claimed, unfairly deprived the comforts of home. The family is suffering in modern times, requiring a sort of military rule to function at all. In her view, many tasks should be replaced by professionals. Most specifically, motherhood needs rethinking.

According to Gilman, the goal of motherhood ought to be the progress of civilization. However, she found that the practice of motherhood had been thoroughly domesticated. The domestication of mothers, she argued, was outdated and inefficient. The mother has been primarily a domestic servant, cooking, cleaning, educating the children. Yet, to leave these duties in the hands of individual mothers is inefficient for society because mothers are untrained, confined to private industry, and society is deprived of their talents for social service. Gilman gave three reasons why mothers are unfit to take care of children: not every woman has the special talents for child-rearing; no women get any professional training for child-rearing; and each mother, if she takes care of only her own children, is inexperienced. Children, which are an important resource for transmitting social advances, “pass under the well-meaning experiments of an endless succession of amateurs.”31 The home would be a place for the development of human relations among family members provided that cooking, cleaning, and education of children were specialized tasks for professionals:

When parents are less occupied in getting food and cooking it, in getting furniture and dusting it, they may find time to give new thought and new effort to the care of their children.32

Though women are taught that their maternal instinct warrants a sacrifice of all their social service to their ill-trained abilities with 

children, humanity does not profit from their sacrifice. Instead, trained professionals should clean the home and assist mothers in the care of children.

Gilman was highly critical of the home which epitomized the sexuo- economic relation. Man’s world was the market place, woman’s the home. The home became a private industry in which women were confined. Gilman advocated the elimination of “housework” freeing women up for social service. The occupation of the home should not be housekeeping but rest. She proposed that the kitchen should be taken out of the home, leaving a room available for other pursuits. The home “costs three times what is necessary to meet the same needs. It involves the further waste of nearly half the world’s labor. It does not fulfill its functions to the best advantage, thus robbing us again.”33

If it were not for her socialist theory of work, Gilman’s theory of the “undomesticated home” could appear classist, available only to the middle and upper class while enslaving the working class into domestic duties. Gilman was not in favor of domestic service for wages, because she knew that since most domestic servants were young girls, the same problems would ensue as for mothers. Further, she supported the ideas of Thorstein Veblen against class distinctions because they were ineffi-cient for society. She believed that work itself was evolving in stages: first, female labor; second, slave labor; third, wage labor; and the fourth stage would be free labor.

Work, for Gilman, ought to be a matter of social-cooperation, not competition and exploitation. She redefined private property believing that what an individual needs, he or she should have a right to. Each person should be entitled to all the clothing, food, education, tools, he or she could consume. The products of labor belong to the consumers, not the producers, and should be distributed to them as widely, swiftly, and freely as possible; so adding to the social good. The mistake has been to attach ownership rights to the producer. Gilman advocated an economic system of cooperative exchange in which the workers would “own” the means of production but not the products they produce, i.e., a weaver would own her own loom but the wearer would own the cloth.34

The activity of work needed reform as well. The worker should be well-nourished, physically and socially, well-educated, and aligned with work he or she prefers. Work should be a joy, a source of strength for the individual and the society, not a physical drain. Work ought to be social service. Women and men should share in work equally.