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The Man‐Made World
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 dignity of the Greek type. The possessor of that kind of jaw may enable male to conquer 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 masculine 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. This amazing reversal of the order of nature results at its mildest in a perversion of the natural feminine instincts of love and service, and an appearance of the masculine instincts of self-expression and display. Alone among all female things do women decorate and preen themselves and exhibit their borrowed plumage
(literally!) to attract the favor of the male. This ignominy is forced upon them by their position of economic dependence; and their general helplessness. As all broader life is made to depend, for them, on whom they marry, indeed as even the necessities 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 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—?