Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/188

 180 a sex distinction has been obliterated, and she has become externally assimilated to a male youth. Moreover, the object has evidently been intentional. It would be no outrage to the reasoning powers of the Sarmatians to suppose that they believed a woman's chances of bearing male children were vastly enhanced by her wearing a man's dress, and by being conformed in some degree to the male type by forcible compression of the breasts during maidenhood. They would argue thus: a woman wants to bear male children, therefore she ought to be made as much like a man as possible. A conviction of this kind is gained by a process identical with the immature reasoning that underlies what is called sympathetic magic. Here a postulant by a symbolical act expresses the longings of his heart in the mute language of signs, under the vague hope that his wish will be granted either by the spirit or deity in v.hose power it lies to bestow such a desire, or by virtue of an irresistible necessity, the exact nature of which he cannot fathom, but in which he has, nevertheless, the profoundest belief In applying this statement to the reasoning of the Sarmatians there seems to be a hiatus. For how is a spirit or an all-compelling necessity to understand what a girl means by dressing like a man and repressing the growth of the breasts? That every Amazon was expected to marry and bear children, and had herself the wish to do so, was regarded as so natural as to be implicit, and to be understood by anybody. All she had to do, therefore, to be fully comprehended by the powers that grant such desires was to hoist, as it were, a signal to indicate the sex of the child she desired to conceive, and this she did naturally enough by donning male attire and exhibiting her flattened bosom. It may be asked why this was done only in maidenhood, and not during the married state, when it would seem more appropriate? It is obvious repression of the breasts could not be maintained when a woman became a mother, and for all we know she may have continued to wear