of sewing to make
it a woman's occupation. It involves a relation of the hand to the
eye--similar to that which the man is always practicing and using,
i.e., reaching a given point, perhaps with mechanical aids, through
the mediation of these two organs. It is a motor matter, therefore,
and one of the first industries undertaken by men. There are many
exceptions to the general statement that early manufacture (weapons
excepted) was in the hands of women, but the exceptions may be
regarded as variations due to the fixation of habit through single and
peculiar incidents, or they are the beginning of the later period when
man begins to practice woman's activities.

The primitive division of labor among the sexes was not in any sense
an arrangement dictated by the men, but a habit into which both
men and women fell, to begin with, through their difference of
organization--a socially useful habit whose rightness no one
questioned and whose origin no one thought of looking into. There is,
moreover, a tendency in habits to become more fixed than is inherently
necessary. The man who does any woman's work is held in contempt not
only by men, but by women.

As to the Indian women, they are far from complaining of their
lot. On the contrary, they would despise their husbands could
they stoop to any menial office, and would think it conveyed
an imputation upon their own conduct. It is the worst insult
one virago can cast upon another in a moment of altercation.
"Infamous woman," will she cry, "I have seen your husband
carrying wood into the lodge to make the fire. Where was
his squaw, that he should be obliged to make a woman of
himself!"[176]

That men are similarly prejudiced against women's taking up male
occupations we know from modern industrial history, without looking
to ethnological evidence. Habit was, however, in another regard
favorable to woman, since what she was constantly associated with and
expended her activities upon was looked upon as hers. Through her
identification with the industrial process she became, in fact, a
property-owner. This result did not spring from the maternal system;
but both this and the maternal system were the results of her bodily
habit, and the social habits flowing from this.

When the woman as cultivator was almost the sole creator of
property in land, she held in respect of this also a position
of advantage. In the transactions of No