Androcentric Ethics

5. Androcentric Ethics

Gilman believed that humanity would only advance if women were liberated and if we achieved the transition from the primacy of the individual consciousness to the collective consciousness. Her economic analysis of free labor sought to promote collectivity. “The life and prosperity of each member is absolutely interwoven with that of the others, of the whole, and not to recognize this, and act accordingly, is to manifest an inferior plane of development.”38 Women should have an active role in the development of social consciousness, shaping a social ethics along feminine lines. The masculine world, she claimed, has valued patriotism, as a general concept of ethical behavior, which once again 

emphasizes fighting and death. But she insists that humanity needs new values. Women, she believes, have no “joy of combat,” no “impulse to bang one another about, taking neither pride nor pleasure in violence.”39 Instead, women, as members of the superior sex, are the peacemakers of the race. Women’s nature is “more human” than man’s. Fighting, war, aggression, destruction are the qualities only of the male, not of humans as such. The highest value ought to be caring for others through serving society.

To attain an advanced social ethics, Gilman proposed that we change our sex-based thinking which has attributed to women the virtues of the oppressed: obedience, patience, endurance, contentment, humility, resignation, temperance, prudence, cheerfulness, modesty, gratitude, thrift, and unselfishness, and to men, virtues more social in scope: truth, justice, loyalty, generosity, patriotism, honor. Truth, for instance, is honored in men, by “keeping their word,” central to their manhood, while, she notes, women are allowed to change their minds.40 For Gilman the most important virtue women need to respect in themselves is courage. Women have been socialized not to be courageous. “Women were expected to be meek, modest, and submissive... Women are not ashamed of being cowards. They will own to it without a blush, even, indeed, with a sort of pride.”41 Yet courage is central if women are to be active in maintaining and improving humanity.

Gilman’s ethical theory was utilitarian: right conduct is that which tends toward the greatest development of humanity, wrong conduct promoted injury to human advancement. The degree of rightness or wrongness of an act, was determined by the amount of good or evil it produced for society.