Women and Economics

A book-length essay, subtitled A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, by the American writer and lecturer best known for 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. Gilman starts from a striking observation: humans are the only species in which the female depends on the male for food. She calls this the sexuo-economic relation. Women, she argues, obtain their living through marriage and pay for it with housework and sex, and this dependence has exaggerated the differences between the sexes, narrowed women's lives and distorted marriage, motherhood and the economy alike. Framing her case in the language of Darwinian evolution, she holds that women's economic independence would benefit men, children and society as a whole. She proposes practical reforms: professional cooking and cleaning, kitchenless homes, cooperative apartment buildings and trained childcare. Later readers have also examined the racial assumptions carried by her evolutionary talk of 'the race'.

It was one of the first works to treat unpaid domestic labour and women's financial dependence as an economic question, and its arguments about housework and childcare still frame debates today.