Pets, People, and Pragmatism by McKenna Erin;

Author:McKenna, Erin; [McKenna, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3239795
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Contemplating the unhappiness of such creatures, she wishes that all the unhappy dogs in the cities would die—and they did. The woman with the dog doesn’t even notice her dog is dead until she gets off the streetcar.

As the narrator realizes her power, she further considers the horses. “As I watched the horses at work that afternoon, and thought of all their unknown sufferings from crowded city stables, bad air, and insufficient food, and from the wearing strain of asphalt pavements in wet and icy weather, I decided to have another try on horses” (26). She also takes on the parrots. The parrots began to demand to be let out, and they began to speak their minds. This is exactly what Gilman wants for human women as well—to be let out and to be able to speak their minds.

Gilman argued that, to liberate human women, the androcentric home must change if we hope to produce people capable of becoming democratic citizens. Not only are women and girls hindered in their development, but fathers and sons are perverted by their power. “For each man to have one whole woman to cook for and wait upon him is poor education for democracy. The boy with a servile mother, the man with a servile wife, cannot reach the sense of equal rights we need to-day. Too constant consideration of the master’s tastes make the master selfish…” (Man-made World 42–43). If we want to produce people capable of looking to the needs of others as well as their own, the model of men in competition for personal ownership must give way to the model of women in cooperation for the individual development of all. We need to experiment with a different social arrangement.

In order to develop her gynocentric model, Gilman started with the fact that humans are born of a woman and into relationships of dependence. Gilman sees the mother/child relationship as our most basic relationship and the ground for developing the possibilities of humanity. She argued that with primitive man involved in hunting, death and power became his central concerns. With primitive woman involved in birth and cultivation of children, planting and cultivation of food, growth, and the improvement of others became her central concerns. Gilman believed that as humanity evolved and men became more settled, they saw the care and service women gave to the children, animals, and crops as desirable for themselves (His Religion 207). Not only did they want to have control of her eventual products, they wanted her to serve and care for them. So, the custom of a man possessing a woman began. Equal partnership was replaced by a relationship of domination and subordination. So too with other animal beings.

On Gilman’s view subordination to and dependence on another is a perverse relationship that adversely affects both the one in power and the one who is disempowered (His Religion 213). This applies to women and other animal beings. Gilman extended this argument to critique slavery and capitalism. “In the

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