As to the subjection of women, what exists of it the elders are responsible for. It is they who scare a girl or shame her into being docile. It is they who marry her off against her will, it is they who set her unending tasks or shut her up in idleness. It is they who make her undergo the discomforts or miseries of what we call conventional life or bully her into exile or death. With this control of girls or women the warriors, the "standing army," have little or nothing to do, even less in primitive life than in modern. It is the old people, the old women at times as well as the old men. Again it is the old men who are leaders in the exclusion of the women. In control of the initiation of the youths, they separate them from their mothers or sisters and often decree for the initiates a ceremonial avoidance of all women for a set time. The penalties they threaten--sickness, decrepitude, effeminacy--are too dire to pass unheeded. This "avoidance" has been explained as due to the monopolistic spirit of the elders. With their women they want no interference by the youths. But a far more plausible explanation, I think, takes the avoidance as a concentration rite, so to speak, a symbol, if you like, of the life ahead, the life in which the boys, "made" men, are going to have little to do in public with women. For even after the special avoidance of the initiation period ends, the segregation of the sexes continues. Men keep together and away from women in their club-houses, and in all the places of assembly which are differentiated from the primitive club-house--the church, the council, the workshop, the gymnasium, the university, the play-house. And from all the interests which center in these places men have from time to time excluded women, they have excluded them from magic and religion, from arts and letters, from games, from politics and, let me add, from war.