Women and Economics
Glossary
A
- Abnormal Sex-Tendency
- Gilman's phrase for the excessive, constant, rather than seasonal, sexual attraction and indulgence she identifies as distinctively human, which she traces not to human nature itself but to the economic relation that makes sex-function the means by which one sex secures its living from the other. She distinguishes this abnormal tendency sharply from the normal, periodic sex-instinct common to other animals.
- Related: The Sexuo-Economic Relation, Sex-Function
- Arrested Development
- Gilman's diagnosis of woman's historical condition: kept from acquiring the qualities needed for full human, or 'racial,' advance, she has instead 'maintained the virtues and the vices' appropriate to a much earlier stage of evolution because her environment stayed static while men's expanded. The chapter argues restricted environment, not restricted innate capacity, produces this arrest.
- Related: Race-Development, The Four Walls of the Home
B
- Belief in Motherhood Versus Its Results
- Gilman's Chapter 10 argument that society's reverence for maternity is not backed up by evidence — she cites high infant mortality and poor child health as proof that untrained mothers, however loving, are not actually equipped to raise children well. She calls mothers 'domestic servants by trade' who have never been given professional training for the work society assumes they perform naturally.
- Related: Maternal Sacrifice, Motherhood Under Economic Independence
C
- Confinement
- Gilman's general term, examined across several chapters, for the restriction of women's environment and activity — not merely physical confinement to the house, but restriction of occupation, education, and social contact. She distinguishes restricted environment from restricted expression, arguing both operate on women simultaneously and compound each other's effects.
- Related: The Four Walls of the Home, Arrested Development
D
- Domestic Industries
- Gilman's term for cooking, cleaning, and childcare treated as genuine economic trades rather than as an inherent extension of womanliness. She argues these tasks are currently performed by untrained amateurs working in isolated households and could instead be organized, professionalized, and paid — much as commercial cooking and laundry already demonstrate is possible.
- Related: The Home as Undeveloped Industry, Economic Independence
E
- Economic Effects on Society
- Gilman's Chapter 6 extension of her argument from the individual household to the market as a whole, examining why women organize less effectively than men economically and how the sexuo-economic relation ends up sexualizing industry and commercializing sex on a social scale. She treats the isolated, competing economic interests of individual wives as a structural weakness with market-wide costs.
- Related: The Family We Know, The Sexuo-Economic Relation
- Economic Independence
- Gilman's proposed remedy for the sexuo-economic relation: women earning their own living rather than receiving support in exchange for domestic and sexual services within marriage. She is careful to define it precisely in her first chapter as a relative condition — everyone depends on others economically — but insists women's dependence specifically on individual men, rather than on society generally, is the abnormal feature to be corrected.
- Related: The Sexuo-Economic Relation, Domestic Industries
- Excessive Sex-Distinction
- Gilman's diagnosis, laid out in Chapter 3, that human sexual differentiation between men and women has been pushed far beyond what serves reproduction, becoming disadvantageous to individual and social progress. She argues the effect lands harder on women because their economic survival depends on being attractive and 'feminine,' while men's does not depend equally on being attractive to women.
- Related: Sex-Distinction, Over-Sexed
G
- Genus Homo
- Gilman's clinical, species-level framing for humanity, used to strip away sentiment and examine human arrangements the way a naturalist would examine any other species. Her key observation is blunt: 'the female of genus homo is supported by the male... He is her food supply' — a condition true of almost no other species, where females of both predator and grazing animals typically forage for themselves.
- Related: The Sexuo-Economic Relation, Race-Development
H
- How the Relation Arose
- Gilman's Chapter 7 account of the historical origins and past social usefulness of the sexuo-economic relation, arguing that confining women's energy served an early evolutionary purpose — the 'coiled spring' driving civilization forward — even though it has since become an obstacle rather than an engine of progress. She anticipates a freer union between the sexes once that early function is no longer needed.
- Related: The Coiled Spring, Toward a Wider Social Life
M
- Maternal Sacrifice
- The conventional justification for women's subordination — that mothers willingly surrender their own development for their children's sake — which Gilman subjects to scrutiny in Chapters 9 and 10. She reframes it provocatively as 'paternal sacrifice' instead, arguing men are the ones who benefit from and enforce a system that channels female energy into unpaid domestic service.
- Related: The Coiled Spring, Belief in Motherhood Versus Its Results
- Motherhood Under Economic Independence
- Gilman's Chapter 13 vision of what child-rearing could look like once mothers are not economically dependent on marriage — organized, collective, and professionalized care that she argues would strengthen rather than threaten the bond between mother and child. She anticipates and directly rebuts the fear that economic independence for women would mean the end of motherhood as a valued role.
- Related: Belief in Motherhood Versus Its Results, Economic Independence
- Mothers' Silence with Daughters
- Gilman's observation, made in her chapter on the ordinary family, that mothers characteristically avoid honest conversation with their daughters about the economic realities of marriage — leaving daughters to enter marriage with the same unexamined assumptions their mothers held. She treats this silence as one small but telling symptom of how deeply naturalized the sexuo-economic relation has become.
- Related: The Family We Know
O
- Objections to Women Working
- The set of common arguments against women's paid employment that Gilman catalogs and answers directly in her survey of contemporary change, including claims about health, propriety, and the effect on marriage and children. She treats the uneven pace at which women themselves accept or resist these arguments as evidence of how deeply internalized the old economic relation still was.
- Related: Signs of the Times, Economic Independence
- Over-Sexed
- Gilman's technical term for any organism that manifests sex-linked traits in excess of what reproduction requires, borrowed from the animal kingdom, as when a peacock's tail becomes too large and ornate for its own good. She applies it to human women as a class, arguing the sexuo-economic relation makes overemphasis on sex-traits an economic necessity rather than a personal excess.
- Related: Excessive Sex-Distinction, Abnormal Sex-Tendency
R
- Race-Development
- Gilman's term (using 'race' in the period sense of the human species as a whole) for the general human traits and capacities — as opposed to sex-specific traits — that mark humanity's evolutionary and social advance. She argues women have been arrested in race-development because their energies were diverted into sex-development instead, making them 'over-sexed' rather than fully human.
- Related: Genus Homo, Arrested Development
S
- Sex-Distinction
- Gilman's term for the visible, cultivated differences between men and women in dress, manner, and behavior — as opposed to 'sex-union,' the reproductive function itself. She argues human sex-distinction has been carried to an excessive, 'morbid' degree compared to other species, because economic dependence rewards women for emphasizing femininity rather than developing general human capacities.
- Related: Excessive Sex-Distinction, The Sexuo-Economic Relation
- Sex-Function
- Gilman's precise term for reproductive/sexual activity as distinct from the 'race-functions' — eating, working, thinking — that occupy most of an organism's life. She observes that sex-functions are naturally used only occasionally while race-functions are used constantly, and argues the sexuo-economic relation unnaturally inflates the importance of the occasional function in women's lives.
- Related: Abnormal Sex-Tendency, Race-Development
- Signs of the Times
- Gilman's Chapter 8 survey of contemporary evidence — women entering paid work, objections to that work being raised and answered, uneven progress across different groups of women — that she reads as proof the sexuo-economic relation was already beginning to change in her own era. The chapter functions as a status report between her diagnosis and her proposed remedies.
- Related: Economic Independence
- Specialization
- Gilman's evolutionary argument that economic progress depends on individuals developing distinct, exchangeable skills rather than each person doing everything for themselves — the pattern she says has driven all of human civilization except within the home. She uses specialization as her model for what domestic work could become if freed from the assumption that only an untrained wife can perform it.
- Related: Domestic Industries, The Home as Undeveloped Industry
T
- The Case for Maternal Sacrifice, Examined
- Gilman's Chapter 9 title and project: testing the standard justification for women's subordination — that it exists for the sake of children — against actual outcomes rather than sentiment. She distinguishes specialization for sex (being a wife) from specialization for motherhood (being a parent), arguing the two have been wrongly bundled together to justify keeping women dependent.
- Related: Maternal Sacrifice, Belief in Motherhood Versus Its Results
- The Coiled Spring
- Gilman's striking image for how women's confined, restrained energy has historically been redirected into fueling male achievement: 'abnormal development of sex, restrained and imprisoned by every law, has acted like a coiled spring upon the only free agent in society — man.' She argues this dynamic has been sentimentally celebrated as 'love' when it is really compressed female force finding its only available outlet through men.
- Related: The Sexuo-Economic Relation, Maternal Sacrifice
- The Family We Know
- Gilman's Chapter 5 examination of the ordinary, unremarkable household as itself the best evidence for her thesis — she argues one need not look to extreme cases of abuse or poverty to see the sexuo-economic pattern at work, since it structures even affectionate, comfortable marriages. She notes pointedly that marriage functions as a means of economic gain secured through love, whatever the partners' sincere feelings.
- Related: The Sexuo-Economic Relation, Economic Effects on Society
- The Four Walls of the Home
- Gilman's shorthand for women's physical and social confinement to the domestic sphere, which she argues has done real damage by limiting women's information, ideas, and judgment simply through lack of exposure to the wider world. The phrase appears in her chapter on confinement and arrested development as the concrete, spatial mechanism behind the more abstract idea of arrested development.
- Related: Arrested Development, Confinement
- The Home as Undeveloped Industry
- The argument at the center of Gilman's eleventh chapter: that domestic work is not naturally 'womanly' but simply an industry that has never been allowed to specialize, professionalize, or modernize the way every other trade has. She contrasts the primitive, one-woman-does-everything household with the efficiency gains possible if domestic labor were organized collectively.
- Related: Domestic Industries, Toward a Wider Social Life
- The Moral and Psychic Gain
- Gilman's closing chapter, summarizing the book's full argument with the line 'not woman, but the condition of woman' as the actual target of her critique. She argues confinement has produced both the vices and the virtues conventionally associated with women, and that equality — reframed as a natural rather than radical outcome of social evolution — would improve moral and psychological life for everyone.
- Related: Arrested Development, Economic Independence
- The Sexuo-Economic Relation
- Gilman's central coined term for the arrangement, unique to humans among all species, in which the female's access to food and resources depends on her relation to a male rather than on her own economic activity. She argues this abnormal fusion of the sexual and economic relations — not biology itself — is the root cause of most of what looks like women's natural weakness or dependence.
- Related: Genus Homo, Sex-Distinction, Economic Independence
- Toward a Wider Social Life
- Gilman's closing argument that isolated family units cut people off from the 'machinery of social intercourse' — common meeting places, collective institutions — that a more advanced, economically independent society needs. She frames this widening of social contact as itself a marker of racial, meaning civilizational, advance.
- Related: The Home as Undeveloped Industry, Domestic Industries
W
- What the Home Teaches the Child
- Gilman's Chapter 12 argument that the conventional home, sentimentally praised as the ideal moral environment, actually teaches sons and daughters diverging and often damaging lessons — freedom and entitlement for boys, confinement and self-suppression for girls. She uses this diverging effect as evidence against the claim that the traditional home is naturally best for children's moral development.
- Related: Belief in Motherhood Versus Its Results, Arrested Development