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
It is this purely masculine spirit which has given to our early concepts
of Deity the unadmirable qualities of boundless pride and a thirst for
constant praise and prostrate admiration, characteristics certainly
unbefitting any noble idea of God. Desire, combat and self-expression
all have had their unavoidable influence on masculine religions. What
deified Maternity a purely feminine culture might have put forth we do
not know, having had none such. Women are generally credited with as
much moral sense as men, and as much religious instinct; but so far it
has had small power to modify our prevailing creeds.
As a matter of fact, no special sex attributes should have any weight in
our ideas of right and wrong. Ethics and religion are distinctly human
concerns; they belong to us as social factors, not as physical ones.
As we learn to recognize our humanness, and to leave our sex
characteristics where they belong, we shall at last learn something
about ethics as a simple and practical science, and see that religions
grow as the mind grows to formulate them.
If anyone seeks for a clear, simple, easily grasped proof of our ethics,
it is to be found in a popular proverb. Struggling upward from beast and
savage into humanness, man has seen, reverenced, and striven to attain
various human virtues.
He was willing to check many primitive impulses, to change many
barbarous habits, to manifest newer, nobler powers. Much he would
concede to Humanness, but not his sex--that was beyond the range of
Ethics or Religion. By the state of what he calls "morals," and the laws
he makes to regulate them, by his attitude in courtship and in marriage,
and by the gross anomaly of militarism, in all its senseless waste
of life and wealth and joy, we may perceive this little masculine
exception:
"All's fair in love and war."
VIII. EDUCATION.
The origin of education is maternal. The mother animal is seen to teach
her young what she knows of life, its gains and losses; and, whether
consciously done or not, this is education. In our human life,
education, even in its present state, is the most important process.
Without it we could not maintain ourselves, much less dominate and
improve conditions as we do; and when education is what it should be,
our power will increase far beyond present hopes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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