Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”

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

“They say women have no conscience about laws, don't they?" Mrs MacAvelly suggested. "Why should we?" answered her friend. "We don't make 'em– nor God– nor nature. Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?”

“To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.”

“I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.”

“Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.”

“The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.”

“Its time we woke up,” pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. “Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but who’s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and what’s more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes - and shoes - which of us wants to dance with her?”

“It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”

“Death? Why all this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition to life, not an evil.”

“When the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.”

“But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.”

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

“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.”

“The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.”

“[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”

“Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.”

“To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.”

“And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.”

“I really have discovered something at last. 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! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very ' bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so:...”