Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women in politics -- United States
In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the sexes.
The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts
and makes weapons of the chase. The woman fetches and carries, digs and
delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery.
Gradually she changes wild grasses to domesticated plants, and rears the
young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve
their human masters. She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no
way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere,
mainly unthinking.
With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn
his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction
of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his
career as fighter and hunter he has learned to cooperate with his
fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land,
protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe.
He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows.
Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new
tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent
have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or
better arrow-heads.
It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day
between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who
remain in their peasant homes in Europe. The peasant has even greater
need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but
he lacks the driving impulse. It was the same with women and men under
the conditions of savage life. Thus it came about that man's greater
strength and mobility, backed by power of cooperation and invention,
gave him the leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in
the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first
lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the
industrial life.
With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable
women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually
became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the
second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male
and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the
mass of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to
realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are
surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy
labor and wretchedness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account