still short of this, and how far our sympathy
and morality are still tribal and even familial, is indicated by the
persistence of race-prejudice and of that

lust in man no charm can tame
Of loudly publishing our neighbor's shame.

SEX AND 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 portion of his environment, and affords the most
immediate and concrete reward.

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 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 old observation, that "woman was first a beast of burden, then
a domestic animal, then a slave, then a servant, and last of all a
minor," represents the usual view of the condition of woman taken by
early missionaries and travelers. This view is, as we shall see, out
of focus, but there is no doubt that the labors of early woman were
exacting, incessant, varied, and hard, and that, if a catalogue of
primitive forms of labor were made, woman would be found doing five
things where man did one.

An Australian of the Kurnai tribe once said to Fison: "A man hunts,
spears fish, fights, and sits about;"[166] and this is a very good
general statement of the male activities of primitive society the
w