It is not necessary to go outside the white European race to find evidences of the reality of this historical factor of the question before us. It would appear that at the dawn of European civilisation women were taking a leading part in the evolution of human progress. Various survivals which are enshrined in the myths and legends of classic antiquity show us the most ancient deities as goddesses; and, moreover, we encounter the significant fact that at the origin nearly all the arts and industries were presided over by female, not by male, deities. In Greece, as well as in Asia Minor, India, and Egypt, as Paul Lafargue has pointed out, woman seems to have taken divine rank before men; all the first inventions of the more useful arts and crafts, except in metals, are ascribed to goddesses; the Muses presided over poetry and music long before Apollo; Isis was "the lady of bread," and Demeter taught men to sow barley and corn instead of eating each other. Thus even among our own forefathers we may catch a glimpse of a state of things which, as various anthropologists have shown (notably Otis Mason in his _Woman's Share in Primitive Culture_), we may witness in the most widely separated parts of the world. Thus among the Xosa Kaffirs, as well as other A-bantu stocks, Fritsch states that "the man claims for himself war, hunting, occupation with cattle; all household cares, even the building of the house, as well as the cultivation of the ground, are woman's affair; hardly in the most laborious work will a man lend a hand."[2] So that when to-day we see women entering the most various avocations, that is not a dangerous innovation, but perhaps merely a return to ancient and natural conditions. It is not until specialisation becomes necessary and until men are relieved from the constant burden of battle and the chase that the frequent superiority of woman is lost. The modern industrial activities are dangerous, when they are dangerous, not because the work is too hard--for the work of primitive women is harder--but because it is an unnaturally and artificially dreary and monotonous work which stifles the mind, depresses the spirits, and injures the body, so that, it is said, 40 per cent. of married women who have been factory girls are treated for pelvic disorders before they are thirty. It is the conditions of women's work which need changing in order that they may become, like those of primitive women, so various that they develop the mind and fortify the body. This, however, is an evil which will be righted by the development of the mechanical side of industry, for machines tend constantly to become larger, heavier, speedier, more numerous and more automatic, requiring fewer workers to tend them, and these more frequently men.[3]