The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
page 20 of 169 (11%)
page 20 of 169 (11%)
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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 |
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