ARTICLE

MASCULINITY, FEMININITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Rosemary

England

In most cultures, masculine and feminine attitudes and occupations di- vide along pretty well the same lines. Men hunt, herd animals, build houses, make and enforce the laws, advance scientific and technical knowl- edge, build and operate factories and manage commerce generally. Most of these activities could be described as aggressive — going out and doing something to the envionment. Women, on the other hand, are essentially conservative in their activities. They are concerned with crop raising, food preservation and cooking, making the home and clothes, tending the sick man and both rearing and teaching their children. While male activities mould and destroy their environment and each other (I left War out of my list of Masculine activities), women are much more concerned with safe- guarding the future of the species and its environment.

At the moment there is an apparently increasing merger of masculine and feminine behaviour in people of both sexes. I say "apparently" ad- visedly, because if you look closely at all movements from the "blue stockings" of Victorian days, through the suffrage movement to the cur- rent efforts of Women's Lib., they are mainly concerned with becoming equal to Men in their specifically Masculine affairs. When they get there, in the army, the legislature or the Office they will attempt to outdo the men in aggressiveness and destructiveness, becoming perfect copies of the men they have supplanted.

We have all heard a great deal about Spoilation of our Environment, wastage of limited resources and now the possible destruction by our activities of the human race altogether. These are, of course, the 21st cen- tury chickens, hatched out of 19th century eggs, that are coming home to roost, the end result of our inventiveness and aggressiveness against our environment. It is by our purely masculine behaviours that we have

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