Many both in the past and the present have challenged the treatment of women by society over the past century or so. In Western culture, the placement of women on a lower level than men has been around for as long as can be remembered. Never has the woman been thought of as the "breadwinner" of the family. It took the determination of women in the past just to get women into the workplace. Still today, women earn less money and hold less substantial job titles. But because of these women from the past, society has taken a different view. Women such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman have paved the way for women in economics. Her revolutionary view of women in and out of the household is unprecedented. Though written almost a hundred years ago, the same cruelties and injustices Gilman described and attacked in Women and Economics are still very much alive today. The beliefs she put forth in her book are the basis for the amount of independence women have experienced in the present.
             In Women and Economics, Gilman began with the premise that women are "owned" by men. Women could not choose to work out of the house – they were forced to stay with the children. The man of the house would be at work bringing in the money while the woman would stay at home to care for the children and to do things such as housework and cooking. A woman could not choose otherwise because the man supported her. In this way, the woman was "owned" by the man. Arguing from the point of evolutionary science, Gilman illustrated how humans "are the only animal species in which the female depends upon the male for food, the only animal in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation." Here she examined the "cultures" of other animals. She understood that women are the only species that depends on the male for food. All others partake in food gathering equally. The female is not dependent upon the male unlike ...