The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
page 30 of 169 (17%)
page 30 of 169 (17%)
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housekeeper; witness the average.
It does not take a very high standard of masculine, intelligence, strength, skill, health or beauty to maintain a woman in that capacity--witness average. Here at the very root of our physiological process, at the beginning of life, we have perverted the order of nature, and are suffering the consequences. It has been held by some that man as the selector has developed beauty, more beauty than we had before; and we point to the charms of our women as compared with those of the squaw. The answer to this is that the squaw belongs to a decadent race; that she too is subject to the man, that the comparison to have weight should be made between our women and the women of the matriarchate--an obvious impossibility. We have not on earth women in a state of normal freedom and full development; but we have enough difference in their placing to learn that human strength and beauty grows with woman's freedom and activity. The second answer is that much of what man calls beauty in woman is not human beauty at all, but gross overdevelopment of certain points which appeal to him as a male. The excessive fatness, previously referred to, is a case in point; that being considered beauty in a woman which is in reality an element of weakness, inefficiency and ill-health. The relatively small size of women, deliberately preferred, steadfastly chosen, and so built into the race, is a blow at real human progress in every particular. In our upward journey we should and do grow larger, leaving far behind us our dwarfish progenitors. Yet the male, in his unnatural position as selector, preferring for reasons both practical |
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