Our Androcentric Culture | Page 5

is
essentially human; we alone have extra-physical tools. We have added
to our teeth the knife, sword, scissors, mowing machine; to our claws

the spade, harrow, plough, drill, dredge. We are a protean creature,
using the larger brain power through a wide variety of changing
weapons. This is one of our main and vital distinctions. Ancient animal
races are traced and known by mere bones and shells, ancient human
races by their buildings, tools and utensils.
That degree of development which gives us the human mind is a clear
distinction of race. The savage who can count a hundred is more human
than the savage who can count ten.
More prominent than either of these is the social nature of humanity.
We are by no means the only group-animal; that ancient type of
industry the ant, and even the well-worn bee, are social creatures. But
insects of their kind are found living alone. Human beings never. Our
human-ness begins with some low form of social relation and increases
as that relation develops.
Human life of any sort is dependent upon what Kropotkin calls "mutual
aid," and human progress keeps step absolutely with that interchange of
specialized services which makes society organic. The nomad, living
on cattle as ants live on theirs, is less human than the farmer, raising
food by intelligently applied labor; and the extension of trade and
commerce, from mere village market-places to the world-exchanges of
to-day, is extension of human-ness as well.
Humanity, thus considered, is not a thing made at once and
unchangeable, but a stage of development; and is still, as Wells
describes it, "in the making." Our human-ness is seen to lie not so much
in what we are individually, as in our relations to one another; and even
that individuality is but the result of our relations to one another. It is in
what we do and how we do it, rather than in what we are. Some,
philosophically inclined, exalt "being" over "doing." To them this
question may be put: "Can you mention any form of life that merely 'is,'
without doing anything?"
Taken separately and physically, we are animals, _genus homo_; taken
socially and psychically, we are, in varying degree, human; and our real
history lies in the development of this human-ness.
Our historic period is not very long. Real written history only goes
back a few thousand years, beginning with the stone records of ancient
Egypt. During this period we have had almost universally what is here
called an Androcentric Culture. The history, such as it was, was made

and written by men.
The mental, the mechanical, the social development, was almost wholly
theirs. We have, so far, lived and suffered and died in a man-made
world. So general, so unbroken, has been this condition, that to mention
it arouses no more remark than the statement of a natural law. We have
taken it for granted, since the dawn of civilization, that "mankind"
meant men-kind, and the world was theirs.
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