The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture
Glossary
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- "Society" and "Fashion"
- Chapter IX's rebuttal of the popular belief that women invent and control "society" and "fashion." Gilman argues these institutions are structured to serve male license and marriage markets, excluding men for offenses like unpaid gambling debts while tolerating offenses against women.
- Related: The Man-Made Family
- "The Economic Man"
- Gilman's Chapter XIII target within Political Economy: the assumption that a rational actor will do nothing without threat of pain or promise of pleasure, and will always try to outwit and defeat an "antagonist" — a model she argues is masculine rather than universally human, and out of step with cooperative, maternal impulses.
- Related: Industry and Economics
A
- A Human World
- The book's closing chapter and positive vision: institutions reorganized around human needs and human nature broadly shared by both sexes, rather than around masculine standards alone — Gilman's answer to men's fears about what they stand to lose from women's equality.
- Related: Androcentric Culture
- Androcentric Culture
- Gilman's central target: a culture built around masculine standards and interests that gets mistaken for the universal human norm. The book's chapters trace this bias through family, art, religion, law, education, and more.
- Related: Humanness vs. Masculinity, Lester F. Ward
C
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- American writer and social reformer (1860–1935), best known for the story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and works like Women and Economics. The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture (1911) extends her earlier economic critique of gender into a survey of nearly every social institution.
- Related: Androcentric Culture
E
- Ethics and Religion
- Chapter VII's framing of ethics as "the science of social relation" — parallel to physics as the science of material relation — and its critique of the common claim that women's supposed conservatism, rather than androcentric structure, explains organized religion's resistance to progress.
- Related: Androcentric Culture
H
- Health and Beauty
- Chapter III's title and topic: Gilman's argument that standards of feminine health and beauty have been distorted by androcentric culture's reversal of sexual selection, producing ideals suited to male preference rather than to women's own vigor and fitness.
- Related: Reversed Sexual Selection
- Humanness vs. Masculinity
- Chapter I's opening distinction, illustrated with sheep, rams, and ewes: qualities common to a whole species (humanness) get confused with qualities specific to one sex (masculinity), with masculine traits wrongly treated as the human standard.
- Related: Androcentric Culture
I
- Industry and Economics
- Chapter XIII's argument that industry is, at root, a natural and daily human/maternal function of providing for life's needs — one Gilman contends has been obscured by masculine economic theory built around competition, antagonism, and profit rather than provision.
- Related: The Economic Man
L
- Law and Government
- Chapter X's examination of how lawmaking and governance, assumed to be naturally masculine since "the beginning of the patriarchate," are in fact historically contingent arbitrary systems built by one sex to formalize what social instinct once regulated unconsciously.
- Related: Androcentric Culture
- Lester F. Ward's Gynaecocentric Theory
- The sociologist whose Pure Sociology coined the term "Androcentric" and proposed a rival "Gyneacocentric Theory" of life — that the female is the original, primary form of the species and the male a secondary, later development. Gilman credits Ward's chapter as foundational to her own argument and calls it the most important theory since evolution.
- Related: Androcentric Culture
M
- Masculine Literature
- Chapter V's claim that literature has been shaped by masculine preoccupations — conquest, combat, romantic pursuit — to the point that stories centered on other human concerns register as marginal or merely "domestic."
- Related: Men and Art
- Men and Art
- Chapter IV's rebuttal to the claim that women's absence from the ranks of "great artists" proves female inferiority — Gilman argues instead that art, like other fields, has been defined and gatekept by exclusively masculine standards and opportunities.
- Related: Masculine Literature
P
- Politics and Warfare
- Chapter XII's argument that politics, properly the "science of government" for a nation's peace and prosperity, has been androcentrically distorted into a contest of conquest, armament, conscription, and party "spoils" — an extension of predatory warfare into civil life.
- Related: Predatory Warfare
- Predatory Warfare
- Gilman's term for combat and conquest as an organizing model of masculine life, traced through the book from games and sports (Chapter VI) to Chapter XII's account of politics and warfare, where she argues it distorts the legitimate business of governing into conquest, tariffs, and "spoils systems."
- Related: Politics and Warfare, Play Instinct
R
- Reversed Sexual Selection
- Gilman's Chapter III claim that androcentric culture inverted nature's usual order, in which females select mates, by making man "the possessor of women" and therefore the selector — a change she argues degraded both health and beauty across the species.
- Related: Health and Beauty
T
- The Concept of Sin and Punishment
- Chapter XI's critique of masculine-derived religious and legal concepts of Sin and retributive Punishment — including the idea of a vengeful God — as products of androcentric ethics rather than necessary features of social evolution.
- Related: Ethics and Religion
- The Man-Made Family
- Chapter II's argument that the patriarchal family — father as head, mother's identity and property absorbed into his — is a masculine historical construction laid over an older, more natural family form, not a fixed or inevitable arrangement.
- Related: Androcentric Culture
- The Maternal Origin of Education
- Chapter VIII's argument that education began as a maternal function — animal mothers teaching their young to survive — before androcentric culture reorganized formal schooling around masculine goals and hierarchies.
- Related: The Man-Made Family
- The Play Instinct and Masculine Games
- Chapter VI's argument that while the play instinct is common to girls and boys alike, sports and games have been built almost entirely around masculine, competitive, predatory models — football praised for preparing a man for combat-as-life rather than for cooperative human ends.
- Related: Predatory Warfare