The Man‐Made World
human, and should be applied to both sexes: that what we have called “feminine” and condemned, was also largely human and applicable to both. Our androcentric culture is so shown to have been, and still to be, a masculine culture in excess, and therefore undesirable.
In the preliminary work of approaching these facts it will be well to explain how it can be that so wide and serious an error should have been made by practically all men. The reason is simply that they were men. They were males, avid saw women as females—and not
otherwise.
So absolute is this conviction that the man who reads will say, “Of course! How else are we to look at women except as females? They
are females, aren‘t they?” Yes, they are, as men are males unquestionably; but there is possible the frame of mind of the old marquise who was asked by an English friend how she could bear to
have the footman serve her breakfast in bed—to have a man in her bed‐chamber—and replied sincerely, “Call you that thing there a man?”
The world is full of men, but their principal occupation is human work of some sort; and women see in them the human distinction preponderantly. Occasionally some unhappy lady marries her
coachman—long contemplation of broad shoulders having an effect,
apparently; but in general women see the human creature most; the
male creature only when they love.
To the man, the whole world was his world; his because he was male; and the whole world of woman was the home; because she was female. She had her prescribed sphere, strictly limited to her feminine occupations and interests; he had all the rest of life; and not only so, but, having it, insisted on calling it male.
This accounts for the general attitude of men toward the now rapid
humanization of women. From her first faint struggles toward freedom and justice, to her present valiant efforts toward full economic and political equality, each step has been termed
“unfeminine” and resented as an intrusion upon man‘s place and power. Here shows the need of our new classification, of the three distinct fields of life—masculine, feminine and human.