The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Sheep as a Rhetorical Device

Gilman’s choice of the sheep is deliberate and layered. She enumerates the animal’s familiar associations—religious imagery, diet, clothing, 'bashfulness and stupidity'—then pivots to the scientific concept of 'sequacity,' the automatic imitation that has kept sheep alive on narrow ledges. The analogy is transparent: humans, too, follow inherited gender norms without independent judgment. Yet Gilman refuses to let the metaphor become heavy-handed. She notes that sheep are 'ewes and rams' but insists that 'all that has been said was said of sheep, genus ovis.' The point is that species-specific traits (ovine, bovine) have nothing to do with sex. By starting with an animal so thoroughly stripped of gender, she clears the ground for her central claim: that what we call 'masculine' or 'feminine' is largely a cultural overlay on a shared human base.

The Masculine Bias in Education and Sport

Gilman takes aim at the late-nineteenth-century cult of athletic 'manliness.' She quotes the objection that women teachers cannot educate boys because 'the education of a boy is carried on largely on the playground.' Her reply is sharp: the games in question—baseball, football—are 'forms of fighting, of course, violent and fierce, modern modifications of the instinct of sex-combat.' She grants that women are not built for physical combat, but questions whether such games have the educational value claimed for them. With deadpan irony, she notes that 'a few young men are killed and many maimed' in football, yet this is dismissed as nothing compared to the 'manliness' developed. The argument is not against sports per se but against a system that prizes male sex traits over human development. Gilman proposes that education should be 'a human process' developing 'human qualities—not sex qualities.'

The Threefold Distinction: Masculine, Feminine, Human

Midway through the excerpts, Gilman crystallizes her analytical framework: a 'threefold distinction' between masculine, feminine, and human. She insists that woman 'cannot emulate man in being masculine—and does not want to,' and that masculine qualities have their place. But the human qualities 'shared by both, owned by neither' are most important. This tripartite schema recurs throughout the book, allowing her to diagnose cultural problems as the hypertrophy of male traits at the expense of human ones. She illustrates with a contrast between two boys: one an artist or scientist, the other a 'big, husky fellow, a good fighter.' The latter is called 'a fine manly fellow,' but Gilman retorts that he is 'distinctly and excessively male, at the expense of his humanness.' The passage reveals her method: taking a commonplace judgment and exposing the unexamined gender assumptions behind it.

Readers should attend to Gilman’s shifting pace: the leisurely, almost whimsical opening with sheep gives way to tighter, more combative paragraphs as she homes in on education and sports. Her voice modulates between ironic understatement and blunt assertion, but the underlying structure remains logical and cumulative. The excerpts do not reveal how she develops the remaining chapters (on law, politics, industry), but the pattern is set: each institution is examined for its androcentric bias, measured against a human standard. Gilman’s tone—cool, precise, occasionally sardonic—is itself an argument for the rational, humane world she envisions.

After reading Gilman's argument, I kept noticing how invisibly masculine assumptions shape everything—even the words we choose. That feeling stayed with me, like a quiet unease. Later, I happened upon Mankind in the Making — Edition Insights, and it seemed to speak to that same lingering thought, asking what we might build instead. It felt less like an answer and more like a gentle permission to wonder.