agricultural and domestic labours, which were
yet more consistent with the continual dependence of infant life on
her own, than those of man in war and the chase. There was nothing
artificial in such a division; it threw the heaviest burden of the most
wearying and unexciting forms of social labour on woman, but under it
both sexes laboured in a manner essential to the existence of society,
and each transmitted to the other, through inheritance, the fruit of its
slowly expanding and always exerted powers; and the race progressed.

Individual women might sometimes, and even often, become the warrior
chief of a tribe; the King of Ashantee might train his terrible regiment
of females; and men might now and again plant and weave for their
children: but in the main, and in most societies, the division of
labour was just, natural, beneficial; and it was inevitable that such a
division should take place. Were today a band of civilised men, women,
and infants thrown down absolutely naked and defenceless in some desert,
and cut off hopelessly from all external civilised life, undoubtedly
very much the old division of labour would, at least for a time,
reassert itself; men would look about for stones and sticks with which
to make weapons to repel wild beasts and enemies, and would go a-hunting
meat and fighting savage enemies and tend the beasts when tamed: (The
young captured animals would probably be tamed and reared by the women.)
women would suckle their children, cook the meat men brought, build
shelters, look for roots and if possible cultivate them; there certainly
would be no parasite in the society; the woman who refused to labour for
her offspring, and the man who refused to hunt or defend society, would
not be supported by their fellows, would soon be extinguished by want.
As wild beasts were extinguished and others tamed and the materials for
war improved, fewer men would be needed for hunting and war; then they
would remain at home and aid in building and planting; many women would
retire into the house to perfect domestic toil and handicrafts, and on
a small scale the common ancient evolution of society would probably
practically repeat itself. But for the present, we see no such natural
and spontaneous division of labour based on natural sexual distinctions
in the new fields of intellectual or delicately skilled manual labour,
which are taking the place of the old.

It is possible, though at present there is nothi