Our Androcentric Culture | Page 8

to an
embroidered waistcoat; and in direct struggle for the prize, from the
stag's locked horns to the clashing spears of the tournament.
It is earnestly hoped that no reader will take offence at the necessarily
frequent, reference to these essential features of maleness. In the many
books about women it is, naturally, their femaleness that has been
studied and enlarged upon. And though women, after thousands of
years of such discussion, have become a little restive under the constant
use of the word female: men, as rational beings, should not object to an
analogous study--at least not for some time--a few centuries or so.
How, then, do we find these masculine tendencies, desire, combat and
self-expression, affect the home and family when given too much
power?
First comes the effect in the preliminary work of selection. One of the
most uplifting forces of nature is that of sex selection. The males,
numerous, varied, pouring a flood of energy into wide modifications,
compete for the female, and she selects the victor, this securing to the
race the new improvements.
In forming the proprietary family there is no such competition, no such
selection. The man, by violence or by purchase, does the choosing--he
selects the kind of woman that pleases him. Nature did not intend him
to select; he is not good at it. Neither was the female intended to
compete--she is not good at it.
If there is a race between males for a mate--the swiftest gets her first;
but if one male is chasing a number of females he gets the slowest first.
The one method improves our speed: the other does not. If males
struggle and fight with one another for a mate, the strongest secures her;
if the male struggles and fights with the female--(a peculiar and
unnatural horror, known only among human beings) he most readily
secures the weakest. The one method improves our strength--the other
does not.
When women became the property of men; sold and bartered; "given
away" by their paternal owner to their marital owner; they lost this
prerogative of the female, this primal duty of selection. The males were
no longer improved by their natural competition for the female; and the
females were not improved; because the male did not select for points
of racial superiority, but for such qualities as pleased him.

There is a locality in northern Africa, where young girls are
deliberately fed with a certain oily seed, to make them fat,--that they
may be the more readily married,--as the men like fat wives. Among
certain more savage African tribes the chief's wives are prepared for
him by being kept in small dark huts and fed on "mealies' and molasses;
precisely as a Strasbourg goose is fattened for the gourmand. Now
fatness is not a desirable race characteristic; it does not add to the
woman's happiness or efficiency; or to the child's; it is merely an
accessory pleasant to the master; his attitude being much as the
amorous monad ecstatically puts it, in Sill's quaint poem, "Five Lives,"
"O the little female monad's lips! O the little female monad's eyes! O
the little, little, female, female monad!"
This ultra littleness and ultra femaleness has been demanded and
produced by our Androcentric Culture.
Following this, and part of it, comes the effect on motherhood. This
function was the original and legitimate base of family life; and its
ample sustaining power throughout the long early period of "the
mother-right;" or as we call it, the matriarchate; the father being her
assistant in the great work. The patriarchate, with its proprietary family,
changed this altogether; the woman, as the property of the man was
considered first and foremost as a means of pleasure to him; and while
she was still valued as a mother, it was in a tributary capacity. Her
children were now his; his property, as she was; the whole enginery of
the family was turned from its true use to this new one, hitherto
unknown, the service of the adult male.
To this day we are living under the influence of the proprietary family.
The duty of the wife is held to involve man-service as well as
child-service, and indeed far more; as the duty of the wife to the
husband quite transcends the duty of the mother to the child.
See for instance the English wife staying with her husband in India and
sending the children home to be brought up; because India is bad for
children. See our common law that the man decides the place of
residence; if the wife refuses to go with him to howsoever unfit a place
for her and for the little ones, such refusal on her part constitutes
"desertion" and is ground for divorce.
See again the idea that the wife must