Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/507

 SEX IN PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY 487

leaders, give signal cries, station sentinels, punish offenders, is, indeed, a part of the discipline even of animal groups. The organizing capacity developed by the male in human society in connection with violent ways of life is transferred to labor. The preparation of land for agriculture was undertaken by the men on a large scale. The jungle was cleared, water courses were diverted, and highways prepared for the transportation of the products of labor. But more than this, perhaps, man brought with him to the industrial occupations all the skill in fashioning force-appliances acquired through his intense, constant, and long-continued attention to the devising and manufacture of weapons. "Unaccommodated man" is a very feeble thing in nature, but he made various and ingenious cutting, jabbing, and bruising appliances. His life was a life of strains, both giving and taking, and under the stress he developed offensive and defensive weapons. But there is no radical difference, simply a difference in object and intensity of stimulus, between handling and making weapons and handling and making tools. So, when man was obliged to turn his attention to the agriculture and industries practiced by primitive woman, he brought all his tech- nological skill and a part of his technological 'interest to bear on the new problems. Women had been able to thrust a stick into the earth and drop the seed and await a meager harvest. When man turned his attention to this matter, his ingenuity eventually worked out a remarkable combination of the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms: with the iron plow, drawn by the ox, he upturned the face of the earth, and produced food stuffs in excess of immediate demands, thus creating the condition of culture. The destructive habits of the katabolic nature were thus converted under the stress of diminishing nutrition to the constructive habits represented primarily by the anabolic nature, and the inventive faculty developed through attention to destructive mechanical aids was now applied equally to the invention of constructive mechanical aids.

Primitive life was rich in emotional incidents and interests, and types of pleasure and pain became fixed in connection with activities vitally good and vitally bad. When society is com- pelled to substitute more and more the routine, dead, mechan-