Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/110

102 positions and different kinds of loads: cushions for placing the burden on the head; cords or straps for supporting it from the head while it is carried on the shoulder or the back. "Away down in Arizona hay is delivered at the agency by Mojave Indian women, who go out and cut with common house knives the 'grama grass' put it up in immense sheaves, and bring it to the agency on their backs," or rather shoulders, a sheaf of hay sticking from each end of a pole that rests on the shoulders, and knapsack contrivances of different kinds. We generally suppose that the knapsack belongs to soldiers and schoolboys; but "if you will get up early some morning and walk around the busy portions of a German city, you will see upon a box or table a cylindrical basket, holding half a bushel, more or less, with the sticks of the frame projecting an inch or two downward from the bottom, and two broad straps fastened at one end to the rim of the basket and having eyelets or loops at the loose ends. Presently you will see a woman back up to the basket, draw the straps over her shoulders, and pass the ends backward around the projecting frame sticks below. She is now hitched up and may walk off with such load as the basket may contain. Perhaps this is older than the knapsack." Women are carriers, too, in France, and a picture by Gioli, exhibited at Venice in 1887, shows that in Italy, also, that work has not been taken off from her.

"It is not enough, in speaking of savage women, to say that they, as a class, do this or that. It should also be asked how many of these are performed by one woman—in short, by every woman. Recalling what was previously said about the user of an implement having to be the maker of it, one sees to what a diversity of occupations this would naturally lead. . . . It is not enough to say in any case, as we have seen, that she was food-bringer, weaver, skin-dresser, potter, or beast of burden. This view of her is absolutely misleading. It is not sufficient to say that the modern lucrative employments originated with her. We are bound to keep in mind that each woman was all of these. As in the animal world one part of the body performs many functions, in the social world one woman is mistress of many cares. The diversification of duties in well-regulated houses among the civilized nations produces the matron. The savage woman is really the ancestress and prototype of the modern housewife, and not of our factory specialists."

Savage woman next appears on the scene as an artist; and her originality and skill in this line are illustrated in every piece of pottery and every basket; in decorative work of all kinds, and in costumes in a thousand designs of form and color, all of which the maker had to invent, and furthermore to find means and instruments for producing them.