Our Androcentric Culture: or The Man-Made World [with Biographical Introduction]

This shows at once that such service is no integral part of motherhood, or even of marriage ; but is sup- posed to be the proper industrial position of women, as such. Why is this so? Why, on the face of it, given a daughter and a son, should a form of service be expected of the one, which would be considered ignominious by the other?

1. Walk in Bethel?
2. A Grand Tour!
3. Psychopomp Halloween Special.

The underlying reason is this. Industry, at its base, is a feminine function. The sur- plus energy of the mother does not manifest itself in noise, or combat, or display, but in productive industry. Because of her mother-power she became the first inventor and laborer; being in truth the mother of all industry as well as all people. In this field of fam- ily life, his effect was as follows: Establishing the proprietary family at an age when the industry was primitive and domestic; and thereafter confining the woman solely to the domestic area, he thereby confined her to primitive industry.

The domestic industries, in the hands of women, constitute a survival of our remotest past. Such work was "woman's work" as was all the work then known; such work is still considered woman's work because they have been prevented from doing any other. The term "domestic industry" does not define a certain kind of labor, but a certain grade of labor. Architecture was a domestic industry once — when every savage mother set up her own tepee.

To be confined to domestic industry is no proper distinction of womanhood; it is an historic distinction, an economic distinction, it sets a date and limit to woman's industrial progress. In this respect the man-made family has resulted in arresting the development of half the world. To the same source we trace the social and educational limitations set about women. The dominant male, holding his women as property, and fiercely jealous of them, con- sidering them always as his, not belonging to themselves, their children, or the world; has hedged them in with restrictions of a thousand sorts; physical, as in the crippled Chinese lady or the imprisoned odalisque; moral, as in the oppressive doctrines of sub- mission taught by all our androcentric re- ligions ; mental, as in the enforced ignorance from which women are now so swiftly emerging.

This abnormal restriction of women has necessarily injured motherhood. The man, free, growing in the world's growth, has mounted with the centuries, filling an ever wider range of world activities. The woman, bound, has not so grown; and the child is born to a progressive fatherhood and a stationary motherhood.

We rob our children of half their social heredity by keeping the mother in an inferior position; however legalized, hal- lowed, or ossified by time, the position of domestic servant is inferior. It is for this reason that child culture is at so low a level, and for the most part ut- terly unknown.

To-day, when the forces of education are steadily working nearer to the cradle, a new sense is wakening of the im- portance of the period of infancy, and its wiser treatment ; yet those who know of such a movement are few, and of them some are content to earn easy praise — and pay — by belittling right progress to gratify the preju- dices of the ignorant.

The whole position is simple and clear; and easily traceable to its root. Given a proprietary family, where the man holds the woman primarily for his satisfaction and service — then necessarily he shuts her up and keeps her for these purposes. Being so kept, she cannot develop humanly, as he has, through social contact, social service, true social life.

We may note in passing, her passionate fondness for the child-game 40 THE MAN-MADE WORLD called "society" she has been allowed to en- tertain herself withal; that poor simiacrum of real social life, in which people decorate themselves and madly crowd together, chat- tering, for what is called "entertainment. The child should receive in the family, full preparation for his relation to the world at large. His whole life must be spent in the world, serving it well or ill ; and youth is the time to learn how.

But the androcentric home cannot teach him. We live to-day in a democracy — the man-made family is a despotism. It may be a weak one; the despot may be dethroned and overmastered by his little harem of one; but in that case she becomes the despot — that is all. The girl-child, peering out, sees this for- bidden field as belonging wholly to men- kind; and her relation to it is to secure one for herself — not only that she may love, but that she may live.

He will feed, clothe and adorn her — she will serve him ; from the sub- jection of the daughter to that of the wife she steps; from one home to the other, and never enters the world at all — man's world. The boy, on the other hand, considers the home as a place of women, an inferior place, and longs to grow up and leave it — for the real world.

He is quite right. The error is that this great social instinct, calling for full social exercise, exchange, service, is con- sidered masculine, whereas it is human, and belongs to boy and girl alike. The child is affected first through the re- tarded development of his mother, then through the arrested conditions of home in- dustry; and further through the wrong ideals which have arisen from these condi- tions. We must not overlook the effect of the proprietary family on the proprietor him- self.

He, too, has been held back somewhat by this reactionary force. In the process of becoming human we must learn to recognize justice, freedom, human rights; we must learn self-control and to think of others; have minds that grow and broaden ration- ally; we must learn the broad mutual inter- service and unbounded joy of social inter- course and service. The pretty despot of the man-made home is hindered in his hu- manness by too much manness. For each man to have one whole woman to cook for and wait upon him is a poor education for democracy.

The boy with a servile mother, the man with a servile wife, cannot reach the sense of equal rights we need to-day. Too constant consideration of the master's tastes makes the master selfish; and the assault upon his heart direct, or through that proverbial side-avenue, the stomach, which the dependent woman needs THE MAN-MADE FAMILY 43 must make when she wants anything, is bad for the man, as well as for her.

We are slowly forming a nobler type of family; the union of two, based on love and recognized by law, maintained because of its happiness and use. We are even now ap- proaching a tenderness and permanence of love, high pure enduring love; combined with the broad deep-rooted friendliness and comradeship of equals; which promises us more happiness in marriage than we have yet known.

It will be good for all the par- ties concerned — man, woman and child; and promote our general social progress ad- mirably. If it needs "a head" it will elect a chair- man pro tern. Friendship does not need "a head. All creatures suffer from con- flict with the elements; from enemies with- out and within — the prowling devourers of the forest, and "the terror that walketh in darkness" and attacks the body from inside, in hidden millions.

Among wild animals generally, there is a certain standard of excellence; if you shoot a bear or a bird it is a fair sample of the species; you do not say, "O what an ugly one! In our long ages of blind infancy we as- sume that sickness was a visitation from the gods; some still believe this, holding it to be a special perogative of divinity to afflict us in this way. We speak of "the ills that flesh is heir to" as if the inheritance was en- tailed and inalienable.

Only of late years, after much study and long struggle with this old belief which made us submit to sickness as a blow from the hand of God, we are be- ginning to learn something of the many causes of our many diseases, and how to remove some of them. It is still true, however, that almost every one of us is to some degree abnormal; the features asymmetrical, the vision defective, the digestion unreliable, the nervous system erratic — we are but a job lot even in what we call "good health"; and are subject to a burden of pain and premature death that would make life hideous if it were not so ridiculously unnecessary.

Look at the faces — the figures — in any crowd you meet; compare the average man or the average woman with the normal type of human beauty as given us in picture and statue; and consider if there is not some general cause for so general a condition of ugliness. Moreover, leaving our defective bodies concealed by garments; what are those gar- ments, as conducive to health and beauty? Is the practical ugliness of our men's attire, and the impractical absurdity of our wo- men's, any contribution to human beauty? Look at our houses — are they beautiful? Even the houses of the rich? We do not even know that we ought to live in a world of overflowing loveliness ; and that our contribution to it should be the loveliest of all.

We are so sodden in the dull ugliness of our interiors, so used to calling a tame weary low-toned color scheme "good taste," that only children dare frankly yearn for Beauty — and they are speedily educated out of it. The Man with the Hoe becomes brother to the ox because of over-much hoe- ing; the housepainter is lead-poisoned be- cause of his painting; books have been writ- ten to show the injurious influence of nearly all our industries upon workers.

These causes are sound as far as they go ; but do not cover the whole ground. The farmer may be muscle-bound and stooping from his labor; but that does not account for his dyspepsia or his rheumatism. Then we allege poverty as covering all. Poverty does cover a good deal. But when we find even a half-fed savage better devel- oped than a well paid cashier; and a poor peasant woman a more vigorous mother than the idle wife of a rich man, poverty is not enough. Then we say ignorance explains it.

But there are most learned professors who are ugly and asthmathic; there are even doctors who can boast no beauty and but moderate health; there are some of the petted children 48 THE MAN-MADE WORLD of the wealthy, upon whom every care is lavished from birth, and who still are ill to look at and worse to marry. All these special causes are admitted, given their due share in lowering our standards, but there is another far more uni- versal in its application and its effects. Let us look back on our little ancestors the beasts, and see what keeps them so true to type.

The type itself set by that balance of con- ditions and forces we call "natural selection. Those who live are, by liv- ing, proven capable of maintaining them- selves. Every creature which has remained on earth, while so many less effective kinds die out, remains as a conqueror. The speed of the deer — the constant use of speed — is what keeps it alive and makes it healthy and beautiful.

The varied activities of the life of a leopard are what have developed the sinuous gracile strength we so admire. But there is another great natural force which works steadily to keep all animals up to the race standard ; that is sexual selection. Throughout nature the male is the variant, as we have already noted. His energy finds vent not only in that profuse output of deco- rative appendages Ward defines as "mascu- line efforescence" but in variations not deco- rative, not useful or desirable at all.

The female, on the other hand, varies much less, remaining nearer the race type; and her function is to select among these varying males the specimens most valuable to the race. In the intense masculine com- petition the victor must necessarily be stronger than his fellows; he is first proven equal to his environment by having lived to grow up, then more than equal to his fellows by overcoming them. This higher grade of selection also develops not only the charac- teristics necessary to make a living; but sec- ondary ones, often of a purely aesthetic na- ture, which make much of what we call beauty.

Here is where, during the period of our human history, we in our newborn conscious- ness and imperfect knowledge, have griev- ously interfered with the laws of nature. The ancient proprietary family, treating the woman as a slave, keeping her a prisoner and subject to the will of her master, cut her off at once from the exercise of those activities which alone develop and maintain the race type. Take the one simple quality of speed. We are a creature built for speed, a free swift graceful animal; and among savages this is still seen — the capacity for running, mile after mile, hour after hour.

Running is as natural a gait for genus homo as for genus cervus. Now suppose among deer, the doe was prohibited from running; the stag con- tinuing free on the mountain; the doe living in caves and pens, unequal to any exercise. The effect on the species would be, in- evitably, to reduce its speed. It can easily be seen what the effect on the race would have been if all men had been veiled and swathed, hidden in harems, kept to the tent or house, and confined to the ac- tivities of a house-servant.

Our stalwart la- borers, our proud soldiers, our athletes, would never have appeared under such cir- cumstances. The confinement to the house alone, cutting women off from sunshine and air, is by itself an injury; and the range of occupation allowed them is not such as to develop a high standard of either health or beauty. Thus we have cut off half the race from the strengthening influence of natural selection, and so lowered our race standards in large degree. This alone, however, would not have had such mischievous effects but for our further blunder in completely reversing nature's or- der of sexual selection.

Assum- ing to be the possessor of women, their owner and master, able at will to give, buy and sell, or do with as he pleases, man became the selector. It seems a simple change; and in those early days, wholly ignorant of natural laws, there was no suspicion that any mischief would result. In the light of modern knowl- edge, however, the case is clear. The woman was deprived of the beneficent action of natural selection, and the man was then, by his own act freed from the stern but ele- vating effect of sexual selection.

Nothing was required of the woman by natural se- lection save such capacity as should please her master ; nothing was required of the man by sexual selection save power to take by force, or buy, a woman. It does not take a very high standard of feminine intelligence, strength, skill, health, or beauty to be a houseservant, or even a housekeeper; witness the average.

Here at the very root of our physiological process, at the beginning of life, we have perverted the order of nature, and are suf- fering the consequences. It has been held by some that man as the selector has developed beauty, more beauty than we had before; and we point to the charms of our women as compared with those of the squaw.

The first answer to this is that the squaw belongs to a decadent race ; that she too is subject to the man, that the comparison to have weight should be made between our women and the women of the matriarchate — an obvious impossibility. We have not on earth women in a state of nor- mal freedom and full development; but we have enough difference in their placing to learn that human strength and beauty grows with woman's freedom and activity.

The second answer is that much of what man calls beauty in woman is not human beauty at all, but gross overdevelopment of certain points which appeal to him as a male. The relatively small size of women, deliberately preferred, steadfastly chosen, and so built into the race, is a blow at real human progress in every particular. In our upward journey we should and do grow larger, leaving far behind us our dwarfish progenitors. Yet the male, in his unnatural position as selector, preferring for reasons both practical and sentimental, to have "his woman" smaller than himself, has deliber- ately striven to lower the standard of size in the race.

We used to read in the novels of the last generation, "He was a magnifi- cent specimen of manhood" — "Her golden head reached scarcely to his shoulder" — "She was a fairy creatine — the tiniest of her sex. As a male he is appealed to by the ultra- feminine, and has given small thought to effects on the race.

He was not designed to do the selecting. Under his fostering care we have bred a race of women who are physically weak enough to be handed about like invalids; or mentally weak enough to pretend they are — and to like it. We have made women who respond so perfectly to the force which made them, that they attach all their idea of beauty to those characteris- tics which attract men; sometimes humanly ugly without even knowing it. For instance, our long restriction to house-limits, the heavy limitations of our clothing, and the heavier ones of traditional decorum, have made women disproportion- ately short-legged.

This is a particularly undignified and injurious characteristic, bred in women and inherited by men, most seen among those races which keep their women most closely. The most convenient proof of the inferior- ity of women in human beauty is shown by those composite statues prepared by Dr. Sargent for the World's Fair of ' These were made from gymnasium measurements of thousands of young collegians of both sexes all over America.

The statue of the girl has a pretty face, small hands and feet, rather nice arms, though weak; but the legs are too thick and short; the chest and shoulders poor; and the trunk is quite piti- ful in its weakness. The figure of the man is much better proportioned.

Thus the effect on human beauty of mas- culine selection. Beyond this positive deteriorative effect on women through man's arbitrary choice comes the negative effect of woman's lack of choice. Bought or stolen or given by her father, she was deprived of the innately feminine right and duty of choosing. Dependent, having to be fed and cared for by some man, the victors take their pick perhaps, but the vanquished take what is left; and the poor women, "marry- ing for a home," take anything. As a con- sequence the inferior male is as free to trans- mit his inferiority as the superior to give better qualities, and does so — beyond com- putation.

In modern days, women are freer, in some countries freer than in others ; here in modern America freest of all; and the result is seen in our improving standards of health and beauty. Still there remains the field of inter-mas- culine competition, does there not? Do not the males still struggle together? Is not that as of old, a source of race advantage? To some degree it is. When life was sim- ple and our activities consisted mainly in fighting and hard work ; the male who could vanquish the others was bigger and stronger.

But inter-masculine competition ceases to be of such advantage when we enter the field of social service. The best social servant, progressive, meeting future needs, is almost always at a disadvantage beside the well-established lower types. We need, for social service, qualities quite different from the simple masculine characteristics — desire, combat, self-expression. By keeping what we call "the outside world" so wholly male, we keep up mascu- line standards at the expense of human ones.

This may be broadly seen in the slow and painful development of industry and sci- ence as compared to the easy dominance of warfare throughout all history until our own times. The effect of all this ultra masculine com- petition upon health and beauty is but too plainly to be seen. Among men the male idea of what is good looking is accentuated beyond reason. That jaw is in evidence if everything else fails. He may be cross-eyed, wide-eared, thick-necked, bandy-legged — what you please; but he must have a more or less prognathous jaw.

Meanwhile any anthropologist will show you that the line of human development is away from that feature of the bulldog and the alligator, and toward the measured dig- nity of the Greek type.

The Man-Made World by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The possession of that kind of jaw may enable male to con- quer male, but does not make him of any more service to society; of any better health or higher beauty. Further, in the external decoration of our bodies, what is the influence here of mascu- line dominance. We have before spoken of the peculiar position of our race in that the woman is the only female creature who carries the burden of sex ornament.

Alone among all fe- male tilings do women decorate and preen themselves and exhibit their borrowed plumage literally! This ignominy is forced upon them by their position of economic depend- ence; and their general helplessness. As all broader life is made to depend, for them, on whom they marry, indeed as even the ne- cessities of life so often depend on their marrying someone, they have been driven into this form of competition, so alien to the true female attitude.

The result is enough to make angels weep — and laugh. Perhaps no step in the evolu- tion of beauty went farther than our human power of making a continuous fabric; soft and mobile, showing any color and texture desired. The beauty of the human body is supreme, and when we add to it the flow of color, the ripple of fluent motion, that comes of a soft, light garment over free limbs — it is a new field of loveliness and delight. Naturally this should have filled the whole world with a new pleasure.

Our garments, first under right natural selection develop- HEALTH AND BEAUTY 61 ing perfect use, under right sex selection de- veloping beauty; and further, as our human aesthetic sense progresses, showing a noble symbolism; would have been an added strength and glory, a ceaseless joy. What is the case? Men, under a too strictly inter-masculine environment, have evolved the mainly useful but beautiless costume common to-day; and women —? Women wear beautiful garments when they happen to be the fashion; and ugly garments when they are the fashion, and show no signs of knowing the difference.

They show no added pride in the beautiful, no hint of mortification in the hideous, and are not even sensitive under criticism, or open to any persuasion or argument. Why should they be? Their condition, physical and mental, is largely abnormal, their whole passionate ab- sorption in dress and decoration is abnormal, and they have never looked, from a frankly human standpoint, at their position and its peculiarities, until the present age.

There follow other influences, similar in origin, even more evil in result. To roughly and briefly classify we may dis- tinguish the diseases due to bad air, to bad food, and that field of cruel mischief we are only now beginning to discuss — the diseases directly due to the erroneous relation be- tween men and women. We are the only race where the female depends on the male for a livelihood. We are the only race that practices prostitution. From the first harmless-looking but ab- normal general relation, follows the well recognized evil of the second, so long called "a social necessity," and from it, in deadly sequence, comes the "wages of sin"; death not only of the guilty, but of the innocent.

It is no light part of our criticism of the Androcentric Culture that a society based on maeculine desires alone, has willingly sac- rificed such an army of women; and has re- paid the sacrifice by the heaviest punish- ments. HEALTH AND BEAUTY 63 That the unfortunate woman should sicken and die was held to be her just pun- ishment; that man too should bear part pen- alty was found unavoidable, though much legislation and medical effort has been spent to shield him; but to the further conse- quences society is but now waking up.

Sheltered by the customs and sanctions of a civilization built and upheld by his own sex, man has brought home to his helpless and innocent family the "wages of sin" — and paid them out most heavily. We are now beginning to learn what a percentage of blindness, of epilepsy, of many horrible forms of illness, idiocy and deformity, of sterility, of babies never born alive, or dying in their cradles; and of the ruined health of wives, their subjection to surgical operation, their wretched lives: When a more human or less masculine standard of living is at last reached, we shall see these matters in their true light.

It is inconceivable that a civilization even half representing women, could so sin against Mother and Child; so poison the current of life at its very springs. No heavier single charge can be brought against a civilization in which women are dependent upon men than this; that, man, the "natural protector," has not only doomed to misery and ruin so large a num- ber of the protected; blamed and punished in them what he did not blame and punish in himself; then blamed their more fortunate sisters for this cruel judgment; and, above all, brought to the innocent and trusting wife and the helpless child, the penalty of his misdeeds.

Much less impressive, but more wide spread are the other two lines in which our health is injured by this too masculine order. Modern therapeutics is now learn- ing how many of our disorders of the throat and lungs may be generally classified as "house-diseases. We become acclimated to bad air, as it were, and do not object, in church, car, theatre, crowded store, to the same atmosphere we are used to in our houses. Against the house habit strives the new knowledge of hygienist and physician, but the habit is older and wider than the knowledge, and we as a people submit our lungs to a degree of foul- ness, which were it offered in food, we should repudiate with horror.

Now women are not naturally cave dwellers any more than men. They have been confined to the house for reasons quite outside the needs of motherhood. Only to-day, within a lifetime, are we at last re- learning what a free outdoor life can do for the girl as well as the boy, a lesson lost since Sparta fell.

The woman should compare in size and vigor with the man as the lioness with the lion, or the migrating mother stork with her mate. A house life is not good for man, woman, or child; her enforced limita- tions react on him and on their little ones. Wise, strong, highly civilized are we, rich powerful, somewhat educated, yet from the slowly departing teeth to the rapidly re- moved appendix we seem helplessly open to disease.

Whatever else we have learned in our long ascent, we have not learned what, where and how to eat. It is most singular. No other animal has such difficulty ex- cept to some degree the ones we feed. To- day we are bringing more knowledge to bear on this subject, we are trying to teach bet- ter food habits, but we do not recognize the constant universal cause of the trouble, which is simply this ; that every man has one whole woman to cook for him.

If he can afford it, he has more than one. The dependent woman has this business of cooking as the one main way in which to show her love, to fulfill her service; and — alas! And that placid dame replies with unexpected fervor, "Feed the brute! It is not healthy to have a loving servant always ministering to one's desires.

The Man-Made World

Less devotion and more knowledge, less affection and a higher grade of skill, are needed in this great business of feeding the world. We cater to the appetite continuously. We know what John likes ; but we do not know in the least what the various chemicals we daily present to him do to his unhappy inside. The psychic effect of "Mother's cooking" is a thing we have not considered. No art, no science, no business, can grow far when kept to a domestic level, when the product of labor is for one person only, and is governed not by knowledge but by desire.

The wife-servant, ministering de- votedly to her lord, has not served his best interests. A relation that is wrong at its base cannot work out right in any line. The health of the world is not ensured by making women the servants of men. To-day the human woman and the human man are alike able to discuss transmitting deformity and disease to their beloved ones.

A new moral sense is called for here, and is slowly appearing among us.

Recent Forum Posts on The Man-Made World

A moral sense that shall rate the mother's responsibilty in selecting the father of her children, and in securing to them a pure inheritance in con- stitution, far higher than the preservation of the hush-and-cover policy of our racial beginnings. Further than that we need a new judg- ment upon the offenders in this case; not HEALTH AND BEAUTY 69 merely as breakers of our present moral law, not merely as offenders against our social canons — an offense so light and fre- quent as to meet small rebuke; but as plain criminals, chargeable with poisoning, may- hem and murder.

If a man gives his wife arsenic, he is held criminally responsible; if he shoots his child, or maims Mm with an axe. Wherein is a man less guilty who knowingly transmits disease to a trusting wife, who causes blind- ness and deformity and idiocy in his chil- dren, whose lightest offense is to bring ster- ility and merciful death? Where one or two are proudly exhibited in evidence, they are either pooh-poohed as not very great, or held to be the trifling exceptions which do but prove the rule. Defenders of women generally make the mistake of over-estimating their perform- ances, instead of accepting, and explaining, the visible facts.

What are the facts as to the relation of men and women to art? And what, in especial, has been the effect upon art of a solely masculine expression? Tattooing, for instance, is an early form of decorative art, still in practice among certain classes, even in advanced people. Most boys, if they are in contact with this early art, admire it, and wish to adorn themselves therewith; some do it, too, to later mortification.

Early personal decoration consisted largely in direct muti- lation of the body, and the hanging upon it, or fastening to it, of decorative objects.

• Paperback Editions.
• EU-Japan Relations, 1970-2012: From Confrontation to Global Partnership (Routledge Contemporary Japan Series)!
• Man-made World.
• .
• Ginny’s Dictionary In Other Words.
• Study Guide - The Lord of the Rings Series (A BookCaps Study Guide)?
• !

This we see among savages still, in its gross and primitive forms monopolized by men, then shared by women, and, in our time, left almost wholly to them. In personal decora- tion, to-day, women are still near the savage. The "artists" developed in this field of art are the tonsorial, the sartorial, and all those specialized adorners of the body commonly known as "beauty doctors.

Women, in this as in so many other lines, consume rather than pro- duce. They carry the major part of per- sonal decoration to-day; but the decorator is the man. In the decoration of objects, woman, as the originator of primitive indus- try, originated also the primitive arts; and in the pottery, basketry, leatherwork, needle- work, weaving, with all beadwork, dyeing, and embroideries of ancient peoples, we see the work of the woman decorator. Much of this is strong and beautiful, but its time is long past. The art which is part of indus- try, natural, simple, spontaneous, making beauty in every object of use, adding pleas- ure to labor and to life, is not Art with a large A, the Art which requires Artists, among whom are so few women of note.

Art as a profession, and the Artist as a professional, came later; and by that time women had left the freedom and power of the matriarchate and become slaves in vary- ing degree. The women who were idle pets in harems, or the women who worked hard as servants, were alike cut off from the joy of making tilings. Men, in the proprietary family, restricting the natural industry of women to personal service, cut off their art with their industry, and by so much impov- erished the world. There is no more conspicuously pathetic proof of the aborted development of woman than this commonplace — their lack of a civ- ilized art sense.

Not only in the childish and savage display upon their bodies, but in the pitiful products they hang upon the walls of the home, is seen the arrest in normal growth. After ages of culture, in which men have developed Architecture, Sculpture, Paint- ing, Music and the Drama, we find women in their primitive environment making flowers of wax, and hair, and worsted, doing mottoes of perforated cardboard, making crazy quilts and mats and "tidies" — as if they lived in a long past age, or belonged to a lower race.

Men, specializing, giving their lives to the continuous pursuit of one line of service, have lifted our standard in aesthetic culture, as they have in other mat- ters; but by refusing the same growth to women, they have not only weakened and reduced the output, but ruined the market as it were, hopelessly and permanently kept down the level of taste. Among the many sides of this great ques- tion, some so terrible, some so pathetic, some so utterly absurd, tliis particular phase of life is especially easy to study and under- stand, and has its own elements of amuse- ment.

Men, holding women at the level of domestic service, going on themselves to lonely heights of achievement, have found their efforts hampered and their attainments rendered barren and unsatisfactory by the amazing indifference of the world at large. As the world at large consists half of women, and wholly of their children, it would seem patent to the meanest under- standing that the women must be allowed to rise in order to lift the world.

But such has not been the method — heretofore.

The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture (Paperback)

There are other sides to the ques- tion. Let us consider once more the essen- tial characteristics of maleness, and see how they have effected art, keeping always in mind the triple distinction between mas- culine, feminine and human. Perhaps we shall best see this difference by considering what the development of art might have been on purely human lines. The human creature, as such, naturally delights in construction, and adds decora- tion to construction as naturally.

The cook, making little regular patterns round the edge of the pie, does so from a purely human instinct, the innate eye-pleasure in regular- ity, symmetry, repetition, and alternation. Had this natural social instinct grown unchecked in us, it would have manifested itself in a certain proportion of specialists — artists of all sorts — and an accompanying development of appreciation on the part of the rest of us.

Had this condition remained, we should find a general level of artistic expression and appreciation far higher than we see now. Take the one field of textile art, for instance, that wide and fluent medium of expression, the making of varied fabrics, the fashioning of garments and the decora- tion of them — all this is human work and human pleasure. It should have led us to a condition where every human being was a pleasure to the eye, appropriately and beautifully clothed.

Our real condition in this field is too patent to need emphasis; the stiff, black ugliness of our men's attire, the irritating variegated folly of our women's, the way in which we spoil the beauty and shame the dignity of childhood by modes of dress. In normal human growth, our houses would be a pleasure to the eye ; our furniture and utensils, all our social products, would blossom into beauty as naturally as they still do in those low stages of social evolution MEN AND ART 77 where our major errors have not yet borne full fruit.

Applied art in all its forms is a human function, common to every one to some degree, either in production or apprecia- tion or both. Of all the thousand ways by which humanity is spe- cialized for inter-service, none is more exqui- site than this; the evolution of the social Eye, or Ear, or Voice, the development of those whose work is wholly for others, and to whom the appreciation of others is as the bread of life. This we should have in a properly developed community; the pleas- ure of applied art in the making and using of everything we have, and then the high joy of the Great Artist, and the noble work thereof, spread far and wide.

What do we find? Applied art at a very low level, small joy either for the maker or the user. Art has become an occult profession requiring a long special education even to enjoy, and evolving a jargon of criticism which becomes more esoteric yearly.

See a Problem?

Let us now see what part in this unde- sirable outcome is due to our Androcentric Culture. As soon as the male of our species assumed the exclusive right to perform all social functions, he necessarily brought to that performance the advantages — and dis- advantages — of maleness, of those dominant characteristics, desire, combat, self-expres- sion. Desire has overweighted art in many visi- ble forms, it is prominent in painting and music, almost monopolizes fiction, and has pitifully degraded dancing.

Combat is not so easily expressed in art, where even competition is on a high plane; but the last element is the main evil, self- expression. This impulse is inherently and ineradicably masculine. In the very nature of the sperm-cell and the germ-cell we find this difference: That projective impulse is seen in the male nature everywhere, the constant urge toward expression, to all boasting and dis- play.

This spirit, like all things masculine, is perfectly right and admirable in its place. It is the duty of the male, as a male, to vary ; bursting forth in a thousand changing modifications — the female, selecting, may so incorporate beneficial changes in the race. It is his duty to thus express himself — an essen- tially masculine duty ; but masculinity is one thing, and art is another. Neither the mas- culine nor the feminine has any place in art — Art is Human. It is not in any faintest degree allied to the personal process of reproduction; but is a social process, a most distinctive social process, quite above the plane of sex.

The true artist transcends his sex, or her sex. If this is not the case, the art suffers. Among early peoples we find it a common form of social expression in tribal dances of all sorts, religious, military, and other. Later it be- comes a more explicit form of celebration, as among the Greeks; in whose exquisite personal culture dancing and music held high place.

But under the progressive efforts of purely masculine dominance we find the broader human elements of dancing left out, and the sex-element more and more empha- sized. As practiced by men alone dancing has become a mere display of physical agility, a form of exhibition common to all males. As practiced by men and women together we have our social dances, so lack- ing in all the varied beauty of posture and expression, so steadily becoming a pleasant form of dalliance.

As practiced by women alone we have one of the clearest proofs of the degrading effect of masculine dominance — the dancing girl. We, more sophisticated in this matter, joke shamefacedly about "the bald- headed row," and occasionally burst forth in shrill scandal over some dinner party where a lady clad in a veil and a bracelet dances on the table. Nowhere else in the whole range of life on earth, is this degradation found — the female capering and prancing before the male.

It is absolutely and essentially his function, not hers. That we, as a race, pre- sent this pitiful spectacle, a natural art wrested to unnatural ends, a noble art degraded to ignoble ends, has one clear cause. Architecture, in its own nature, is least affected by that same cause. The human needs secured by it, are so human, so unes- capably human, that we find less trace of excessive masculinity than in other arts. It meets our social demands, it expresses in lasting form our social feeling, up to the highest; and it has been injured not so much by an excess of masculinity as by a lack of femininity.

The home is built on lines of ancient precedent, mainly as an industrial form ; the kitchen is its work- ing centre rather than the nursery. Each man wishes his home to preserve and seclude his woman, his little harem of one; and in it she is to labor for his comfort or to manifest his ability to maintain her in idleness.

The house is the physical expres- sion of the limitations of women; and as such it fills the world with a small drab ugli- ness. A dwelling house is rarely a beauti- ful object. In order to be such, it should truly express simple and natural relations; or grow in larger beauty as our lives develop. The deadlock for architectural progress, the low level of our general taste, the ever- lasting predominance of the commonplace in buildings, is the natural result of the pro- prietary family and its expression in this form.

Its check, as far as it comes under this line of study, has been indicated in our last chapter; the degradation of the human body, the vicious standards of sex- consciousness enforced under the name of modesty, the covered ugliness which we do not recognize, all this is a deadly injury to free high work in sculpture. With a nobly equal womanhood, stalwart and athletic, with the high standards of beauty and of decorum which we can never have without free womanhood, we should show a different product in this great art.

An interesting note in passing is this: When we seek to express sculpturally our noblest ideas, Truth, Justice, Liberty, we use the woman's body as the highest human type. But in doing this, the artist, true to humanity and not biased by sex, gives us a strong, grand figure, beautiful indeed, but never decorated. Fancy Liberty in ruffles and frills, with rings in her ears — or nose.

Music is injured by a one-side handling, partly in the excess of the one dominant masculine passion, partly by the general 84 THE MAN-MADE WORLD presence of egoism, that tendency to self- expression instead of social expression, which so disfigures our art; and this is true also of poetry. Miles and miles of poetry consist of the ceaseless outcry of the male for the female, which is by no means so overwhelming a feature of human life as he imagines it; and other miles express his other feelings, with that ingenious lack of reticence which is at its base essentially masculine.

Having a pain, the poet must needs pour it forth, that his woe be shared and sympathized with. As more and more women writers flock into the field, there is room for fine historic study of the difference in sex feeling, and the gradual emergence of the human note. Literature, and in especial the art of fiction, is so large a field for this study that it will have a chapter to itself; this one but touching on these various forms, and indi- cating lines of observation. That best known form of art which to the lay mind needs no qualifying descrip- tion — painting — is also a wide field; and cannot be done full justice to within these MEN AND ART 85 limits.

The effect upon it of too much mas- culinity is not so much in choice of subject as in method and spirit. The artist sees beauty of form and color where the ordin- ary observer does not; and paints the old and ugly with as much enthusiasm as the young and beautiful — sometimes. If there is in some an over-emphasis of feminine attractions it is counterbalanced in others by a far broader line of work. But the main evils of a too masculine art lie in the emphasis laid on the self-expres- sion. The artist, passionately conscious of how he feels, strives to make other people aware of these sensations.

This is now so generally accepted by critics, so seriously advanced by painters, that what is called "the art world" accepts it as established. If a man paints the sea, it is not to make you see and feel as a sight of that same ocean would, but to make you see and feel how he, personally, was affected by it; a matter surely of the narrowest importance. The ultra-masculine artist, extremely sen- sitive, necessarily, and full of the natural urge to expression of the sex, uses the 86 THE MAN-MADE WORLD medium of art as ingenuously as the part- ridge-cock uses his wings in drumming on the log, or the bull moose stamps and bellows; not narrowly as a mate call, but as a form of expression of his personal sensa- tions.

The higher the artist the more human he is, the broader his vision, the more he sees for humanity, and expresses for humanity, and the less personal, the less ultra-mas- culine, is his expression. They iterate and reiterate endlessly the discussion of cookery old and new, of the care of chil- dren, of the overwhelming subject of cloth- ing, and of moral instruction. All this is recognized as "feminine" literature, and it must have some appeal, else the women would not read it. What parallel have we in "masculine" literature? They have written it and they have read it.

It is only lately that women, generally speaking, have been taught to read; still more lately that they have been allowed to write. It is but a little while since Harriet Martineau concealed her writing beneath her sewing when visi- tors came in — writing was "masculine" — sewing, "feminine. Their effect on literature has been far wider than that, monopolizing this form of art with special favor.

It was suited above all others to the dominant impulse of self-expression, and being, as we have seen, essentially and continually "the sex;" they have impressed that sex upon this art over- whelmingly; they have given the world a masculized literature. It is hard for us to realize this. Men having been accepted as humanity, women but a side-issue; most literally if we accept the Hebrew legend!

In no department of life is it easier to controvert this old belief ; to show how the male sex as such differs from the human type; and how this maleness has monopo- lized and disfigured a great social function. Human life is a very large affair; and literature is its chief art. We live, humanly, only through our power of communication. Speech gives us this power laterally, as it were, in immediate personal contact. For permanent use speech becomes oral tra- dition — a poor dependence.

Literature gives not only an infinite multiplication to the lateral spread of communion but adds the vertical reach. Through it we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future. In these brief limits we can touch but lightly on some phases of so great a sub- ject, and will rest the case mainly on the effect of an exclusively masculine handling of the two fields of history and fiction.

In poetry and the drama the same influence is easily traced, but in the first two it is so baldly prominent as to defy objection. History is, or should be, the story of our racial life. What have men made it? The story of warfare and conquest. Begin at the very beginning with the carven stones of Egypt, the clay records of Chaldea, what do we find of history?

All this will strike the reader at first as biased and unfair. No — it was not the way women lived. Both of them, as sexes, differ from the human norm, which is social life and all social development. Society was slowly growing in all those black, blind years. The arts, the sciences, the trades and crafts and professions, religion, philosophy, government, law, commerce, agriculture — all the human processes were going on as well as they were able, between wars. Male- ness means war. Not only so; but as a male, he cares only for male interests. Men, being the sole arbiters of what should be done and said and written, have given us not only a social growth scarred and thwarted from the be- ginning by continual destruction; but a his- tory which is one unbroken record of courage and red cruelty, of triumph and black shame.

As to what went on that was of real con- sequence, the great slow steps of the work- ing world, the discoveries and inventions, the real progress of humanity — that was not worth recording, from a masculine point of view. Within this last century, "the woman's century," the century of the great awakening, the rising demand for freedom, political, economic, and domestic, we are beginning to write real history, human his- tory, and not merely masculine history.

Literature is the most powerful and neces- sary of the arts, and fiction is its broadest form. If art "holds the mirror up to nature" this art's mirror is the largest of all, the most used. Since our very life depends on some communication, and our prog- ress is in proportion to our fullness and freedom of communication, since real com- munication requires mutual understanding; so in the growth of the social consciousness, we note from the beginning a passionate interest in other people's lives. The art which gives humanity conscious- ness is the most vital art.

Our greatest dramatists are lauded for their breadth of knowledge of "human nature," their range of emotion and understanding; our greatest poets are those who most deeply and widely experience and reveal the feelings of the human heart; and the power of fiction is that it can reach and express this great field of human life with no limits but those of the author. This stage is with us yet as seen in the constant changes in repetition of popular jokes and stories. Fiction to-day has a much wider range; yet it is still restricted, heavily and most mischievously restricted. What is the preferred subject matter of fiction?

The Story-of- Adventure branch is not so thick as the other by any means, but it is a sturdy bough for all that. Stevenson and Kipling have proved its immense popularity, with the whole brood of detective stories and the tales of successful rascality we call "pic- turesque. They do not touch on human processes, social processes, but on the special field of predatory excitement so long the sole province of men. It is to be noted here that even in the over- whelming rise of industrial interests to-day, these, when used as the basis for a story, are forced into line with one, or both, of these two main branches of fiction; — conflict or love.

Unless the story has one of these "interests" in it, there is no story — so holds the editor; the dictum being, put plainly, "life has no interests except conflict and love! As a matter of fact the major interests of life are in line with its major processes; and these — in our stage of human development — are more varied than our fiction would have us believe. Even on so poor a line of distinction as the "woman's column" offers, if women are to be kept to their four K's, there should be a "men's column" also, and all the "sport- ing news" and fish stories be put in that; they are not world interests, they are male interests.

Now for the main branch — the Love Story. Ninety per cent, of fiction is in this line; this is pre-eminently the major interest of life — given in fiction. What is the love- story, as rendered by this art? It is the story of the pre-marital struggle It is the Adventures of Him in Pursuit of Her — and it stops when he gets her! Story after story, age after age, over and over and over, this ceaseless repetition of the Prelim- inaries.

Here is Human Life. In its large sense, its real sense, it is a matter of inter-relation between individuals and groups, covering all emotions, all processes, all experiences. Out of this vast field of human life fiction arbit- rarily selects one emotion, one process, one experience, as its necessary base.

Here is a Human Being, a life, covering some seventy years, involving the changing growth of many faculties; the ever new marvels of youth, the long working time of middle life, the slow ripening of age. Here is the human soul, in the human body, Living. Out of this field of personal life, with all of its emotions, processes, and experiences, fiction arbitrarily selects one emotion, one process, one experience, mainly of one sex.

The "love" of our stories is man's love of woman. If any dare dispute this, and say it treats equally of woman's love for man, I answer, "Then why do the stories stop at marriage? Not a fair representation of how she does feel. If "love" is to be selected as the most important thing in life to write about, then the mother's love should be the principal subject. This is the main stream, this is the general underlying, world-lifting force. The "life-force," now so glibly chattered about, finds its fullest expression in motherhood; not in the emo- tions of an assistant in the preliminary stages.

Createspace Independent Pub Availability: The Man-Made World Annotated: Our Androcentric Culture Author s: The man-made world; or, Our androcentric culture Author s: Easyread Large Edition Author s: Easy Read Comfort Edition Author s: Easyread Edition Author s: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition Author s: Easyread Super Large 20pt Edition Author s: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition Author s: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Publisher: Please email webmaster fantasticfiction.