WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Human Work cover

Human Work

Chapter 24: XII: PRODUCTION Summary
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Sociology

About This Book

A systematic examination of social and economic life that treats familiar facts as outcomes of underlying processes, arguing that widespread suffering, ignorance, and inefficient institutions persist despite material advances. The work analyzes social evolution, concepts and conduct, and exposes false assumptions while mapping the social soul and body. It traces economic processes — labor, specialization, production, distribution, and consumption — and contends that many hardships are socially produced and therefore preventable. The author advocates a scientific social physiology to diagnose social pathologies and recommends reorganization and enlightened policy as remedies.

XII: PRODUCTION
Summary

Work is production and distribution. Joy of production. Transmission again. Pleasure in expression more than impression. Social stimulus. Arrested distribution. Increase in production. Shoes. Collective pride. “Owned” machinery. Effect of false concepts. George Eliot’s “Stradivarius.” Art recognised as world-service. The “Pot-boiler.” “Saving” and “serving” one’s country. Traitor and coward. Line of evolution in a productive industry. Effect of errors. “Duty to employer,” etc. Payment not the right incentive. Reactive effect of production. “Greeking.” Effect of great work on society. Physical heredity, social heredity and transmission. Bicycle. Benefit of making, of using. We “exhaust the soil” of humanity by denying it right use of its product. Want theory. Degraded press. Object of production. False production. Individual is society—feels and represents it. Social consciousness mistaken for self-consciousness. “Self-expression” and social service. “The songs of a people.” Position of the artist. Expression is also transmission. “Poor Jones!” Art a social function. Depravity in highly specialised function. The presumptuous eye. Art for humanity’s sake.