Charlotte Perkins Gilman Home Quotations

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

The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire - and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period - has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.

The home is the center and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.

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.

The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.

A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.