The Man‐Made World
Women we have sharply delimited. Women were a sex, “the sex,”
according to chivalrous toasts; they were set apart for special services peculiar to femininity. As one English scientist put it, in 1888, “Women are not only not the race—they are not even half the
race, but a subspecies told off for reproduction only.”
This mental attitude toward women is even more clearly expressed by Mr. H. B. Marriot‐Watson in his article on “The American Woman” in the “Nineteenth Century” for June, 1904, where he says:
“Her constitutional restlessness has caused her to abdicate those functions which alone excuse or explain her existence.” This is a peculiarly happy and condensed expression of the relative position of women during our androcentric culture. The man was accepted as
the race type without one dissentient voice; and the woman—a strange, diverse creature, quite disharmonious in the accepted scheme of things—was excused and explained only as a female.
She has needed volumes of such excuse and explanation; also, apparently, volumes of abuse and condemnation. In any library catalogue we may find books upon books about women:
physiological, sentimental, didactic, religious—all manner of books about women, as such. Even to‐day in the works of Marholm—poor
young Weininger, Moebius, and others, we find the same perpetual
discussion of women—as such.
This is a book about men—as such. It differentiates between the human nature and the sex nature. It will not go so far as to allege man‘s masculine traits to be all that excuse, or explain his existence: but it will point out what are masculine traits as distinct from human ones, and what has been the effect on our human life of the unbridled dominance of one sex.
We can see at once, glaringly, what would have been the result of giving all human affairs into female hands. Such an extraordinary and deplorable situation would have “feminized” the world. We should have all become “effeminate.”
See how in our use of language the case is clearly shown. The adjectives and derivatives based on woman‘s distinctions are alien and derogatory when applied to human affairs; “effeminate”—too female, connotes contempt, but has no masculine analogue; whereas
“emasculate”—not enough male, is a term of reproach, and has no 5
The Man‐Made World
feminine analogue. “Virile”—manly, we oppose to “puerile”—
childish, and the very word “virtue” is derived from “vir”—a man.
Even in the naming of other animals we have taken the male as the
race type, and put on a special termination to indicate “his female,”
as in lion, lioness; leopard, leopardess; while all our human scheme of things rests on the same tacit assumption; man being held the human type; woman a sort of accompaniment aud subordinate
assistant, merely essential to the making of people.
She has held always the place of a preposition in relation to man. She has been considered above him or below him, before him, behind him, beside him, a wholly relative existence—“Sydney‘s sister,”
“Pembroke‘s mother”—but never by any chance Sydney or
Pembroke herself.
Acting on this assumption, all human standards have been based on
male characteristics, and when we wish to praise the work of a woman, we say she has “a masculine mind.”
It is no easy matter to deny or reverse a universal assumption. The human mind has had a good many jolts since it began to think, but
after each upheaval it settles down as peacefully as the vine‐growers on Vesuvius, accepting the last lava crust as permanent ground.
What we see immediately around us, what we are born into and grow up with, be it mental furniture or physical, we assume to be the order of nature.
If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it.
Nevertheless, if the matter is one of importance, if the previous idea was a palpable error, of large and evil effect, and if the new one is true and widely important, the effort is worth making.
The task here undertaken is of this sort. It seeks to show that what we have all this time called “human nature” and deprecated, was in
great part only male nature, and good enough in its place; that what we have called “masculine” and admired as such, was in large part