The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture — John Shaqi
The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric CultureGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The result is enough to make angels weep--and laugh. Perhaps no step in
the evolution 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 developing
perfect use, under right sex selection developing 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 absorption 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.
In the effect of our wrong relation on the world's health, we have
spoken of the check to vigor and growth due to the housebound state
of women and their burdensome clothes. There follow other influences,
similar in origin, even more evil in result. To roughly and briefly
classify we may distinguish 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 between 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 abnormal 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 masculine desires
alone, has willingly sacrificed such an army of women; and has repaid
the sacrifice by the heaviest punishments.
That the unfortunate woman should sicken and die was held to be her just
punishment; that man too should bear part penalty was found unavoidable,
though much legislation and medical effort has been spent to shield him;
but to the further consequences society is but now waking up.
IV. MEN AND ART.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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