Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture, The [CPG Family Archive].
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture [CPG Family Archive]. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911.
8vo, 269pp; + 1 p. publisher’s ad for Olive Schreiner’s Woman And Labor; offsetting to endpapers; half-title page and publisher’s ads; smooth dark green cloth; blind edge rules front panel; front panel gold-stamped with title, publisher’s device and author; spine gold-stamped with title, author and publisher as well as decorative rules at head and foot; binding rubbed with small ding front panel; wear to head and foot of spine; two or three short tears to cloth at head of spine with some fraying. About very good.
First English edition. Inscribed by the author in ink at the front flyleaf, My copy / Charlotte Perkins Gilman / 1911 — . Scharnhorst 1381.
Published simultaneously with the American edition; two pages of publisher’s ads for other works by Gilman and by Olive Schreiner at rear. A collection of Gilman’s critical essays in which she posits a biological basis for equality between the sexes. These 14 articles–subjects covered include “As To Humanness,” “The Man-Made Family,” and “Masculine Literature,” among others—originally appeared in Gilman’s monthly magazine The Forerunner.
In her preface Gilman boldly declares: “When we learn to differentiate between humanity and masculinity we shall give honour where honour is due.” She argues that,
we are so consumed...by concepts of masculine and feminine that we do not know what human nature is. Aside from what relates to our separate roles as mothers and fathers, that is, aside from our part in the reproductive process, most of our nature is human nature, shared by men and women alike...there are some specifically masculine and feminine traits, but these, originally related to our parenting roles, have been greatly exaggerated and distorted, with disastrous results. (To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, by Ann J. Lane, NY: Pantheon, 1990, p. 279)
According to Lane, The Man-Made World in many ways predates late 20th-century feminist theory: “What is masculine is believed, says Gilman, to represent the human, the natural, type, while women have been defined by their difference from this norm, as what Simone de Beauvoir many years later called ‘the Other’” (ibid.).
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