Labor represents the expenditure of energy in securing food, and in
making the food-process constant and sure; and we may well expect to
find that the somatological differences shown to exist between man and
woman will be found reflected in the labors of primitive society.
An examination of the ethnological facts shows that among the
primitive races men are engaged in activities requiring strength,
violence, speed, and the craft and foresight which follow from
the contacts and strains of their more motor life; and the slow,
unspasmodic, routine, stationary occupations are the part of woman.
Animal life is itself motor, elusive, and violent, and both by
disposition and of necessity man's attention and activities are
devoted first of all to the animal process. It is the most stimulating
and dangerous portion of his environment, and affords the most
immediate and concrete reward.
Contrasted with this violent and intermittent activity of man, we
find with equal uniformity that the attention of woman is directed
principally to the vegetable environment. Man's attention to hunting
and fighting, and woman's attention to agriculture and attendant
stationary industries, is so generally a practice of primitive
society that we may well infer the habit is based on a physiological
difference. An explanation of exceptions to the rule, and the
departure from it in the later life of the race, we shall have to seek
in changes in the social habits of the race.
The old observation, that "woman was first a beast of burden, then
a domestic animal, then a slave, then a servant, and last of all a
minor," represents the usual view of the condition of woman taken by
early missionaries and travelers. This view is, as we shall see, out
of focus, but there is no doubt that the labors of early woman were
exacting, incessant, varied, and hard, and that, if a catalogue of
primitive forms of labor were made, woman would be found doing five
things where man did one.
An Australian of the Kurnai tribe once said to Fison: "A man hunts,
spears fish, fights, and sits about;"[166] and this is a very good
general statement of the male activities of primitive society the
world over, if we add one other activity--the manufacture of weapons.
On the other hand, Bonwick's statement of the labors of Tasmanian
women is a typical one:
In addition to the necessary duty of looking after the
children, they had to provide all the food for the household
excepting that derived from the chase of the kangaroo. They
climbed up hills for the opossum, delved in the ground with
their sticks for yams, native bread, and nutritive roots,
groped about the rocks for shellfish, dived beneath the sea
for oysters, and fished for the finny tribe. In addition to
this, they carried, on their frequent tramps, the household
stuff in native baskets of their own manufacture. Their
affectionate partners would even pile upon their burdens
sundry spears and waddies not required for present service,
and would command their help to rear the breakwind, and
to raise the fire. They acted, moreover, as cooks to
the establishment, and were occasionally regaled, at the
termination of a feast, with the leavings of their gorged
masters.[167]
Among the Andamanese, while the men go into the jungle to hunt pigs,
the women fetch drinking water and firewood, catch shellfish, make
fishing nets and baskets, spin thread, and cook the food ready for
the return of the men.[168] In New Caledonia "girls work in the
plantations, boys learn to fight."[169] In Africa the case is similar.
Among the Bushmen (to take only one example from this continent)
the woman "weaves the frail mats and rushes under which her family
finds a little shelter from the wind and from the heat of the sun,"
constructs a fireplace of three round stones, fashions and bakes a
few earthenware pots. When her household labors are done, she gathers
roots, locusts, etc., from the fields. On the march she frequently
carries a child, a mat, an earthen pot, some ostrich eggshells, and
"a few ragged skins bundled on her head or shoulder," while the man
carries only his spear, bow, and quiver.[170] The conditions among the
American Indians were practically the same. Cotton Mather said of
the Indians of Massachusetts: "The men are most abominably slothful,
making their poor squaws or wives to plant, and dress, and barn, and
beat their corn, and build their wigwams for them;"[171] and Jones,
referring to the women of southern tribes, says:
Doomed to perpetual drudgery and to that subordinate position
to which woman is always consigned where civilization and
religion are not, she was little less than a beast of burden,
busy with cooking, the manufacture of pottery, mats, baskets,
moccasins, etc., a tiller of the ground, a nurse for her
own children, and at all times a servant to the commands and
passions of the stronger sex.[172]
Primitive woman was therefore undoubtedly very busy, but I have seen
no reason to believe that she considered her condition unfortunate.
Our great-grandmothers were also very busy, but they were apparently
not discontented. There was no reason why woman should not labor
in primitive society. The forces which withdrew her from labor were
expressions of later social conditions. Speaking largely, these
considerations were the desire of men to preserve the beauty of women,
and their desire to withdraw them from association with other men.
It is the connection in thought and fact between idle and beautiful
women and wealth, indeed, which has frequently led to the keeping of
a superfluous number of such women as a sign of wealth.
The exemption of women from labor, in short, implied an economic
surplus which early society did not possess. The lower classes of
modern society do not possess it either, and there the women are
still "drudges," if we want to use that word about a situation which
is normal, in view of the economic condition of the men and women
concerned. It was necessary that primitive society, in the absence
of elaborate machinery for doing things, in unstable and precarious
food conditions, and without resources accumulated from preceding
generations, should utilize _all_ its forces. The struggle for
existence, in its harshest sense, was but little mitigated, and
no group could have spared at all the industry of women. Even if
primitive life had been as hard as Hobbes would have it, "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short," mere negative, habitual hardness
and miserableness of condition did not get the attention of primitive
society particularly. Their life was hard, as we look at it, not as
they looked at it. They could not compare themselves with the future,
and comparisons with the past were doubtless in their favor. The best
returns from activity will of course follow when each individual
is doing something he is specially well fitted to do, and natural
selection seems to have seen to it that primitive society should so
divide the labor as best to utilize social energy by assigning to men
the tasks requiring violent exertion, and to women those requiring
constant attention.
But was not primitive man very lazy, and did he not do fewer things
than he reasonably could have done? If we mean by lazy an aversion to
certain types of action, primitive man was doubtless lazy; but if we
mean an aversion to all kinds of exertion, he certainly was not lazy.
He was so thoroughly aroused by certain stimulations and so exhausted
by the expenditure of energy in reacting to these stimulations
that periods of recuperation, or "sitting about," were necessary.
Heckenwelder's remarks on the labor of men and women among the Indians
of Pennsylvania are very instructive, although they relate to tribes
which had come under white influences to some extent:
The work of the women is not hard or difficult. They are
both able and willing to do it, and always perform it with
cheerfulness. Mothers teach their daughters those duties which
common sense would otherwise point out to them when grown up.
Within doors their labor is very trifling; there is seldom
more than one pot or kettle to attend to. There is no
scrubbing of the house, and but little to wash, and that not
often. Their principal occupations are to cut and fetch in the
firewood, till the ground, sow and reap the grain, and pound
the corn in mortars for their pottage, and to make bread which
they bake in the ashes. When going on a journey or to hunting
camps with their husbands, if they have no horses, they carry
a pack on their backs which often appears heavier than it
really is; it generally consists of a blanket, a dressed deer
skin for moccasins, a few articles of kitchen furniture, as
a kettle, bowl, or dish, with spoons, and some bread, corn,
salt, etc., for their nourishment. I have never known an
Indian woman complain of the hardship of carrying this burden,
which serves for their own comfort and support as well as of
their husbands. The tilling of the ground at home, getting of
firewood, and pounding of corn in mortars, is frequently
done by female parties, much in the manner of those husking,
quilting, and other _frolics_ (as they are called) in some
parts of the United States.... [When accompanying her husband
on the hunt the woman] takes pains to dry as much meat as she
can, that none may be lost; she carefully puts the tallow
up, assists in drying the skins, gathers as much wild hemp as
possible for the purpose of making strings, carrying bands,
bags, and other necessary articles; collects roots for dyeing;
in short, does everything in her power to leave no care to
her husband but the important one of providing meat for the
family. After all, the fatigue of the women is by no means
to be compared to that of the men. Their hard and difficult
employments are periodical and of short duration, while their
husbands' labors are constant and severe in the extreme.
Were a man to take upon himself a part of his wife's duty,
in addition to his own, he must necessarily sink under the
load, and of course his family must suffer with him. On his
exertions as a hunter their existence depends; in order to
be able to follow that rough employment with success, he must
keep his limbs as supple as he can, he must avoid hard labor
as much as possible, that his joints may not become stiffened,
and that he may preserve the necessary strength and agility
of body to enable him to pursue the chase, and bear the
unavoidable hardships attendant on it; for the fatigues of
hunting wear out the body and constitution far more than
manual labor. Neither creeks nor rivers, whether shallow or
deep, frozen or free from ice, must be an obstacle to the
hunter when in pursuit of a wounded deer, bear, or other
animal, as is often the case. Nor has he then leisure to think
on the state of his body, and to consider whether his blood
is not too much heated to plunge without danger into the cold
stream, since the game he is in pursuit of is running off from
him with full speed. Many dangerous accidents often befall
him both as a hunter and a warrior (for he is both), and
are seldom unattended with painful consequences, such
as rheumatism or consumption of the lungs, for which the
sweat-house, on which they so much depend, and to which they
often resort for relief, especially after a fatiguing hunt
or warlike excursion, is not always a sure preservative or
effectual remedy.[173]
The male and female come together by sexual attraction, and the
chances of life are increased through association which permits each
to do that class of things which by reason of its somatic habit it can
do most effectively. Man's exploits were, however, of a more striking
and sensational character, appealed to the emotions more, and
secured the attention and the admiration of the public more, than the
"drudgery" of the woman. The unusual esteem given by society to the
destructive activities of the male can be very well understood in
connection with a reference to the emotions. The emotions of anger,
fear, and joy, to take only these examples, represent a physiological
change in the organism in the presence of dangerous situations. Anger
is a physiological preparation to resist, to crush a dangerous object;
fear is an organic expression of inadequacy to avert the danger; and
joy, in one of its aspects, is an organic revulsion answering to the
recognition of the fact that the danger is safely passed. The same
type of situation incessantly recurring in the life of the race, and
constantly met by the same organic changes, has resulted in a fixed
relation of certain types of situation to certain types of emotion.
The forms of activity recognized first of all in the consciousness of
the race as virtuous are simply those which successfully avert danger
and secure safety. Courage, intrepidity, endurance, skill, sagacity,
an indomitable spirit, and a willingness to die in fight, are virtues
of the first importance, vitally indispensable to the society in
conflict with man and beast, and they are virtues of which man is by
his organic constitution, by the very fact of his capacity for the
rapid destruction of energy, particularly capable. Man's exploits,
therefore, first of all had social attention.
The occupations of women were not of an emotional type, and, apart
from sexual life, they got their excitements as spectators and
approvers of the motor activities of the men. The Hebrew girls who
went out with harps and timbrels to meet a victorious army, and
sang that Saul had slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands,
represent the relation between mighty deeds and social attention and
approval. Thus the attention which the organism gives to situations of
danger, through violent physiological readjustments fitted to meet the
situation, has a parallel in the attention given by society to social
means of meeting situations dangerous to the common life and welfare.
We have a very plain continuance of the primitive appreciation of the
virtues of violence in the worship of military men nowadays, and it
is significant, also, that the appreciation of the fighting quality
still reaches its most animated expression in women--the sex
constitutionally most in need of social protection. It can hardly
be denied, therefore, that man both enjoyed this exciting kind of
performance more than the labors which women were connected with,
and that the women justified him (if we assume that they passed any
judgment on his conduct at all) in refraining from doing many things
which he could have done perfectly well without constitutional hurt.
The abundance of the labors of primitive woman seems to be accounted
for further by the fact that a stationary life is the condition of
a greater variety of industrial expressions than a life inclined
to motor expressions. It is notorious that a wandering life is not
favorable to the development of industries. Industries, in their very
nature, handle and shape stationary stuffs, for the most part, and
woman developed the constructive or industrial activities as a simple
consequence of her more stationary condition of life. The formation
of habit is largely a matter of attention, and the attention of woman
being limited by her bodily habit and the presence of children
to objects lying closer at hand, her energies found expression in
connection with these objects.
First of all, the house was identified with woman. The home was, in
its simplest terms, the place where the wandering male rejoined the
female. It was a cave, or a hollow tree, or a frail structure. It was
sought or made with reference to safety and comfort, particularly
with reference to the comfort of the young. Recognizing the greater
interest of the woman in the child, it is evident that shelter was
a more important consideration to her than to the man. The house is,
indeed, a very fit accompaniment of the stationary habit of woman,
and usually we find the most primitive tribes recognizing her greater
interest in it. Even when the houses are built by men, they are
generally owned by the women. Man as a solitary animal might, of
course, make himself a shelter, but he had a particular interest in
being about the shelter of woman, and it was under her shelter, after
all, that children were born and that society accumulated numbers.
This resulted in the maternal system and the recognition of woman as
the head of the household, and the owner of the house. So, when the
Indian squaw carries the wigwam on the march, she is carrying her
private property and one of her own particular appurtenances. Contrary
to the phrase which I quoted above, man is rather, in the sense in
which I am now speaking, the domesticated animal. He has been inducted
into the family. The estufas of the Pueblo Indians and the men's
clubhouses in Africa represent the failure of men to assimilate
completely in a society which was essentially female in its genius,
and the club still stands for a difference in interest between the
male and the female.
From the house, or shelter, as a base, woman got such connections with
food as she might. For it is an error to suppose that she was in the
most primitive times entirely dependent on man for food. She appears
to have been quite as active in developing food surroundings in her
way as man was in his. The plant world gave her the best returns for
the effort which she could make. She beat out the seeds of plants,
digged out the roots and tubers which the monkeys and pigs were seen
to grub for most eagerly,[174] strained the poisonous juices from the
cassava and made bread of the residue, and it was under her attention
that a southern grass was developed into what we know as Indian corn.
Looking back on this process, we call it the domestication of plants,
and we are likely to regard it as a more conscious process than it
really was. It was the result of her conversion to her own uses
of the most available portion of her environment. In view of her
physiological habit, the animal environment was, for the most part,
out of the question, and her attention was of necessity directed to
the plant side. While less remunerative in its beginnings than
the animal side of the process, it was, perhaps, at all times less
precarious and uncertain, and we find in consequence that the economic
dependence of man on woman is as evident as her dependence on him.
A dinner of herbs is a humbler resort than a roast of antelope, but
there was less doubt that it would be forthcoming, and primitive man
was often, when in hard luck, dependent on the activities of his wife,
or the females of the group.
The domestication of animals appears similarly to be the following-up
by man of his connections with animal life, when this life began to
be less abundant. It is probable that the practice originated in
the habit of taking the young of animals home as pets, and there is
apparently a point of difference between the attention of the men and
the women given to animals once taken into the household. The men
were interested in these animals as reviving in memory the emotional
situations of hunting life, and also in the clever and inimitable
accuracy of co-ordination and superhuman development of
sense-perceptions, while there was always in the attitude of woman
toward these animals a touch of maternal feeling, such as is still
expended on the "harmless, necessary cat." And, in a small way, woman
also contributed to the domestication of animals by giving them suck,
partly as an economic investment. In Tahiti and New Britain, for
example, the women suckle the pigs, and the old women feed them.[175]
Aside from this, the connections which primitive woman has with animal
life is very slight. Worms and insects, shellfish, and even fish she
may capture, but but after this her relation to animal life is in
caring for the flesh and skins turned over to her by the man.
It was a very general early practice that, when man had killed his
game and brought it home, he was not concerned in the further handling
of it. He did not, indeed, in all cases bring it home, but sent his
wife after it. The Indians killed buffalo only as fast as the squaws
could cut them up and care for the meat, and the men of the Eskimos
would not draw the seal from the water after spearing it. Exhausted
by extraordinary efforts, the man may well have left the dressing of
the animal upon occasion to his wife, and, exhausted or not, he soon
fell into the habit of doing so. It thus turns out that all labors
relating to the preparation of food, and to the utilizations of the
side-products of food stuffs, are apt to be found in the hands of the
women.
Vessels are necessary in cooking, both to carry and hold water, and to
store the surplus of food, both vegetable and animal, and the woman,
feeling the need of these in connection with what she has set about
doing, weaves baskets and makes pottery. Fetching wood, grinding corn,
tanning the hides, and in the main the preparation of clothing, follow
rather necessarily from her relation to the raw products. Spinning and
weaving and dyeing are related closely to the vegetable world to begin
with, and it is to be expected that they would be developed by the
women. But man is very deeply interested in clothing on the ornamental
side, and the farther back we go in society, the more this holds, and
sometimes, particularly in Africa, since the domestication of oxen
there, the men prepare the leather and do the sewing, even for the
women. There is, indeed, nothing in the nature of sewing to make
it a woman's occupation. It involves a relation of the hand to the
eye--similar to that which the man is always practicing and using,
i.e., reaching a given point, perhaps with mechanical aids, through
the mediation of these two organs. It is a motor matter, therefore,
and one of the first industries undertaken by men. There are many
exceptions to the general statement that early manufacture (weapons
excepted) was in the hands of women, but the exceptions may be
regarded as variations due to the fixation of habit through single and
peculiar incidents, or they are the beginning of the later period when
man begins to practice woman's activities.
The primitive division of labor among the sexes was not in any sense
an arrangement dictated by the men, but a habit into which both
men and women fell, to begin with, through their difference of
organization--a socially useful habit whose rightness no one
questioned and whose origin no one thought of looking into. There is,
moreover, a tendency in habits to become more fixed than is inherently
necessary. The man who does any woman's work is held in contempt not
only by men, but by women.
As to the Indian women, they are far from complaining of their
lot. On the contrary, they would despise their husbands could
they stoop to any menial office, and would think it conveyed
an imputation upon their own conduct. It is the worst insult
one virago can cast upon another in a moment of altercation.
"Infamous woman," will she cry, "I have seen your husband
carrying wood into the lodge to make the fire. Where was
his squaw, that he should be obliged to make a woman of
himself!"[176]
That men are similarly prejudiced against women's taking up male
occupations we know from modern industrial history, without looking
to ethnological evidence. Habit was, however, in another regard
favorable to woman, since what she was constantly associated with and
expended her activities upon was looked upon as hers. Through her
identification with the industrial process she became, in fact, a
property-owner. This result did not spring from the maternal system;
but both this and the maternal system were the results of her bodily
habit, and the social habits flowing from this.
When the woman as cultivator was almost the sole creator of
property in land, she held in respect of this also a position
of advantage. In the transactions of North American tribes
with the colonial governments many deeds of assignments bear
female signatures, which doubtless must also be referred to
inheritance through the mother.[177]
Among the Spokanes "all household goods are considered as the wife's
property."[178] The stores of roots and berries laid up by the Salish
women for a time of scarcity "are looked upon as belonging to them
personally, and their husbands will not touch them without having
previously obtained their permission."[179] Among the Menomini a woman
in good circumstances would possess as many as from 1,200 to 1,500
birch-bark vessels, and all of these would be in use during the season
of sugar-making.[180] In the New Mexican pueblo,
what comes from outside the house, as soon as it is inside
is put under the immediate control of the woman. My host at
Cochiti, New Mexico, could not sell an ear of corn or a
string of _chile_ without the consent of his thirteen-year-old
daughter, Ignacia, who kept house for her widowed father.
In Cholula district (and probably all over Mexico) the man
has acquired more power, and the storehouse is no longer
controlled by the wife. But the kitchen remains her domain;
and its aboriginal designation, _tezcalli_ (place, or house,
of her who grinds), is still perfectly justified.[181]
A plurality of wives is required by a good hunter, since in
the labors of the chase women are of great service to their
husbands. An Indian with one wife cannot amass property, as
she is constantly occupied in household labors, and has not
time for preparing skins for trading.[182]
The outcome of this closer attention of the woman to the industrial
life is well seen among the ancient Hebrews:
A virtuous woman ... seeketh wool and flax, and worketh
willingly with her hands. She is like the merchant ships: she
bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet
night, and giveth meat to her household, and their task to her
maidens. She considereth a field and buyeth it; with the fruit
of her hands she planteth a vineyard.... She perceiveth that
her merchandise is profitable: her lamp goeth not out by
night. She layeth her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold
the spindle. She spreadeth out her hand to the poor; yea, she
reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of
the snow for her household; for all her household are clothed
with scarlet. She maketh for herself carpets of tapestry; her
clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the
gates, when linen garments and selleth them; and delivereth
girdles unto the merchant.[183]
There must come a time in the history of every group when wild game
becomes scarce. This time is put off by successive migrations to
wilder regions; but the rapid increase of population makes any
continent inadequate to the supply of food through the chase
indefinitely. Morgan estimates that the state of New York, with its
47,000 square miles, never contained at any one time more than 25,000
Indians.[184] Sooner or later the man must either fall back on
the process represented by the women, taking up and developing her
industries, or he must change his attitude toward animal life. In
fact, he generally does both. He enters into a sort of alliance with
animal life, or with certain of its forms, feeding them, and tending
them, and breeding them; and he applies his katabolic energies to the
pursuits of woman, organizing and advancing them. Whether the animal
or the plant life receives in the end more attention is a matter
turning on environment and other circumstances.
When the destructive male propensities have exhausted or diminished
the food stores on the animal side, and man is forced to fall back on
the constructive female process, we find that he brings greater and
better organizing force to bear on the industries. Male enterprises
have demanded concerted action. In order to surround a buffalo
herd, or to make a successful assault, or even to row a large boat,
organization and leadership are necessary. To attack under leaders,
give signal cries, station sentinels, punish offenders, is, indeed, a
part of the discipline even of animal groups. The organizing capacity
developed by the male in human society in connection with violent
ways of life is transferred to labor. The preparation of land for
agriculture was undertaken by the men on a large scale. The jungle
was cleared, water courses were diverted and highways prepared for the
transportation of the products of labor.
But more than this, perhaps, man brought with him to the industrial
occupations all the skill in fashioning force-appliances acquired
through his intense, constant, and long-continued attention to the
devising and manufacture of weapons. Man is relatively a feeble
animal, but he made various and ingenious cutting, jabbing, and
bruising appliances to compensate. His life was a life of strains,
both giving and taking, and under the stress he had developed
offensive and defensive weapons. There is, however, no radical
difference, simply a difference in object and intensity of stimulus,
between handling and making weapons and handling and making tools.
So, when man was obliged to turn his attention to the agriculture
and industries practiced by primitive woman he brought all his
technological skill and a part of his technological interest to bear
on the new problems. Women had been able to thrust a stick into the
earth and drop the seed and await a meager harvest. When man turned
his attention to this matter, his ingenuity eventually worked out a
remarkable combination of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms:
with the iron plow, drawn by the ox, he upturned the face of the
earth, and produced food stuffs in excess of immediate demands, thus
creating the conditions of culture.
The destructive habits of the male nature were thus converted
under the stress of diminishing nutrition to the habits represented
primarily by the constructive female nature, and the inventive faculty
developed through attention to destructive mechanical aids was now
applied equally to the invention of constructive mechanical aids.