The Man‐Made World
economic man” will never do anything unless he has to; will only do it to escape pain or attain pleasure; and will, inevitably, take all he can get, and do all he can to outwit, overcome, and if necessary destroy his antagonist.
Always the antagonist; to the male mind an antagonist is essential to progress, to all achievement. He has planted that root‐thought in all the human world; from that old hideous idea of Satan, “The Adversary,” down to the competitor in business, or the boy at the head of the class, to be superseded by another.
Therefore, even in science, “the struggle for existence” is the dominant law—to the male mind, with the “survival of the fittest”
and “the elimination of the unfit.”
Therefore in industry and economics we find always and
everywhere the antagonist; the necessity for somebody or something
to be overcome—else why make an effort? If you have not the incentive of reward, or the incentive of combat, why work?
“Competition is the life of trade.”
Thus the Economic Man.
But how about the Economic Woman?
To the androcentric mind she does not exist. Women are females, and that‘s all; their working abilities are limited to personal service.
That it would be possible to develop industry to far greater heights, and to find in social economics a simple and beneficial process for the promotion of human life and prosperity, under any other impulse than these two, Desire and Combat, is hard indeed to recognize—for the “male mind.”
So absolutely interwoven are our existing concepts of maleness and
humanness, so sure are we that men are people and women only females, that the claim of equal weight and dignity in human affairs of the feminine instincts and methods is scouted as absurd. We find existing industry almost wholly in male hands; find it done as men
do it; assume that that is the way it must be done.