orld over, if we add one other activity--the manufacture of weapons.
On the other hand, Bonwick's statement of the labors of Tasmanian
women is a typical one:

In addition to the necessary duty of looking after the
children, they had to provide all the food for the household
excepting that derived from the chase of the kangaroo. They
climbed up hills for the opossum, delved in the ground with
their sticks for yams, native bread, and nutritive roots,
groped about the rocks for shellfish, dived beneath the sea
for oysters, and fished for the finny tribe. In addition to
this, they carried, on their frequent tramps, the household
stuff in native baskets of their own manufacture. Their
affectionate partners would even pile upon their burdens
sundry spears and waddies not required for present service,
and would command their help to rear the breakwind, and
to raise the fire. They acted, moreover, as cooks to
the establishment, and were occasionally regaled, at the
termination of a feast, with the leavings of their gorged
masters.[167]

Among the Andamanese, while the men go into the jungle to hunt pigs,
the women fetch drinking water and firewood, catch shellfish, make
fishing nets and baskets, spin thread, and cook the food ready for
the return of the men.[168] In New Caledonia "girls work in the
plantations, boys learn to fight."[169] In Africa the case is similar.
Among the Bushmen (to take only one example from this continent)
the woman "weaves the frail mats and rushes under which her family
finds a little shelter from the wind and from the heat of the sun,"
constructs a fireplace of three round stones, fashions and bakes a
few earthenware pots. When her household labors are done, she gathers
roots, locusts, etc., from the fields. On the march she frequently
carries a child, a mat, an earthen pot, some ostrich eggshells, and
"a few ragged skins bundled on her head or shoulder," while the man
carries only his spear, bow, and quiver.[170] The conditions among the
American Indians were practically the same. Cotton Mather said of
the Indians of Massachusetts: "The men are most abominably slothful,
making their poor squaws or wives to plant, and dress, and barn, and
beat their corn, and build their wigwams for them;"[171] and Jones,
referring to the women of southern tribes, says:

Doomed to perpetual drudgery and to that subordinate position
to whic