Plain are the melancholy facts of what we do see. Following that pitiful conception of labor as a curse, comes the very old and androcentric habit of despising it as belonging to women, and then to slaves.
As a matter of fact industry is in its origin feminine; that is, maternal. It is the overflowing fountain of mother-love and mother-power which first prompts the human race to labor; and for long ages men performed no productive industry at all; being merely hunters and fighters.
It is this lack of natural instinct for labor in the male of our species, together with the ideas and opinions based on that lack, and voiced by him in his many writings, religious and other, which have given to the world its false estimate of this great function, human work. That which is our very life, our greatest joy, our road to all advancement, we have scorned and oppressed; so that "working people," the "working classes," "having to work," etc., are to this day spoken of with contempt. Perhaps drones speak so among themselves of the "working bees!"
Normally, widening out from the mother's careful and generous service in the family, to careful, generous service in the world, we should find labor freely given, with love and pride.
Abnormally, crushed under the burden of androcentric scorn and prejudice, we have labor grudgingly produced under pressure of necessity; labor of slaves under fear of the whip, or of wage-slaves, one step higher, under fear of want. Long ages wherein hunting and fighting were the only manly occupations, have left their heavy impress.
The predacious instinct and the combative instinct weigh down and disfigure our economic development. What Veblen calls "the instinct of workmanship" grows on, slowly and irresistably; but the malign features of our industrial life are distinctively androcentric: the desire to get, of the hunter; interfering with the desire to give, of the mother; the desire to overcome an antagonist--originally masculine, interfering with the desire to serve and benefit--originally feminine.
Let the reader keep in mind that as human beings, men are able to over-live their masculine natures and do noble service to the world; also that as human beings they are today far more highly developed than women, and doing far more for the world. The point here brought out is that as males their unchecked supremacy has resulted in the abnormal predominance of masculine impulses in our human processes; and that this predominance has been largely injurious.
As it happens, the distinctly feminine or maternal impulses are far more nearly in line with human progress than are those of the male; which makes her exclusion from human functions the more mischievous.
Our current teachings in the infant science of Political Economy are naively masculine. They assume as unquestionable that "the 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.
When women suggest that it could be done differently, their proposal is waved aside--they are "only women"--their ideas are "womanish."
Agreed. So are men "only men," their ideas are "mannish"; and of the two the women are more vitally human than the men.
The female is the race-type--the man the variant.
The female, as a race-type, having the female processes besides; best performs the race processes. The male, however, has with great difficulty developed them, always heavily handicapped by his maleness; being in origin essentially a creature of sex, and so dominated almost exclusively by sex impulses.
