THE DISCREET CHARM OF BEING MALE

In the beginning there were men and they created their world, masculine of course, and with them came progress. In the beginning there were women, and they created their world, feminine of course, and by them, progress became possible. In the mid- nineteenth century, the first wave of the feminist movement began and lasted until the First World War. Charlotte Perkins Gillman (1860-1935) proclaimed that the world was androcentric in the title of the book she published in 1911. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) stated that women were the second sex and her book marked a before and an after. They conceived men as the centre, as the first sex and women as “otherness”. Therein, it is the origin of the many Women’s Institutes which have proliferated during the second half of the twentieth century in developed countries. The purpose is political: to deny that they are the second sex, question androcentrism, which are both expressions, made up an