In the villages of the Teme valley, Worcestershire and Herefordshire, "in the old climbing-boy days, chimneys used to be swept on New Year's morning, that one of the right sex should be the first to enter; and the young urchins of the neighbourhood went the round of the houses before daylight singing songs, when one of their number would be admitted into the kitchen 'for good luck all the year.'" In 1875 this custom was still practised; and at some of the farmhouses, if washing-day chanced to fall on the first day of the year, it was either put off, or to make sure, before the women could come, the waggoner's lad was called up early that he might be let out and let in again.{11} The idea of the unluckiness of a woman's being the "first-foot" is extraordinarily widespread; the present writer has met with it in an ordinary London restaurant, where great stress was laid upon a man's opening the place on New Year's morning before the waitresses arrived. A similar belief is found even in far-away China: it is there unlucky on New Year's Day to meet a woman on first going out.{12} Can the belief be connected with such ideas about dangerous influences proceeding from women as have been described by Dr. Frazer in Vol. III. of "The Golden Bough,"{13} or does it rest merely on a view of woman as the inferior sex? The unluckiness of first meeting a woman is, we may note, not confined to, but merely intensified on New Year's Day; in Shropshire{14} and in Germany{15} it belongs to any ordinary day. |325| As to the general attitude towards woman suggested by these superstitions I may quote a striking passage from Miss Jane Harrison's "Themis." "Woman to primitive man is a thing at once weak and magical, to be oppressed, yet feared. She is charged with powers of child-bearing denied to man, powers only half understood, forces of attraction, but also of danger and repulsion, forces that all over the world seem to fill him with dim terror. The attitude of man to woman, and, though perhaps in a less degree, of woman to man, is still to-day essentially magical."{16}