Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/494

 SEX IN PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY.

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 por- tion of his environment, and affords the most immediate and con- crete reward. And 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 that 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 labors of woman in early society were exacting, inces- sant, Varied, and hard. The remark of Letourneau that woman was first a beast of burden, then a domestic animal, then a slave, then a servant, and last of all a minor, is a fair conclusion from the reports of early missionaries and travelers. And, indeed, there is not doubt that if a catalogue of primitive forms of labor

■ See " On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes," American Journal of Sociology, July, 1897.

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