The Man‐Made World
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 field. We have a world wherein men, industrially, live in the twentieth century; and women, industrially, live in the first—and back of it.
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, considering 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 submission taught by all our
androcentric religions; 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. Thus
the man‐made family reacts unfavorably upon the child. We rob our
children of half their social heredity by keeping the mother in an inferior position; however legalized, hallowed, or ossified by time, the position of a domestic servant is inferior.
It is for this reason that child culture is at so low a level, and for the most part utterly unknown. Today, when the forces of education are
steadily working nearer to the cradle, a new sense is wakening of the 14
The Man‐Made World
importance 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 prejudices 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 called “society” she has been allowed to entertain herself withal; that poor simiacrum of real social life, in which people decorate themselves and madly crowd together, chattering, for what is called “entertainment.”) Thus checked in social development, we have but a low grade motherhood to offer our children; and the children, reared in the primitive conditions thus artificially maintained, enter life with a false perspective, not only toward men and women, but toward life as a whole.
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 male is esteemed “the head of the family;” it belongs to him; he maintains it; and the rest of the world is a wide hunting ground and battlefield wherein he competes with other males as of old.
The girl‐child, peering out, sees this forbidden 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 subjection
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 considered masculine, whereas it is human, and belongs to boy and girl alike.