e to bake some
bread they were only persuaded to do so with the utmost
difficulty, and were ever after pointed at as old women.[272]

Amongst the Barea, man and wife seldom share the same bed; the
reason they give is that the breath of the wife weakens the
husband.... The Khyoungthas have a legend of a man who reduced
a king and his men to a condition of feebleness by persuading
them to dress up as women and perform female duties. When
they had thus been rendered effeminate they were attacked and
defeated without a blow.... Contempt for female timidity has
caused a curious custom amongst the Gallas: they amputate the
mammae of the boys soon after birth, believing that no warrior
can possibly be brave who possesses them, and that they should
belong to women only.... Amongst the Lhoosais when a man is
unable to do his work, whether through laziness, cowardice or
bodily incapacity, he is dressed in women's clothes and has to
associate and work with the women. Amongst the Pomo Indians of
California, when a man becomes too infirm for a warrior he is
made a menial and assists the squaws.... When the Delawares
were denationized by the Iroquois and prohibited from going
to war they were according to the Indian notion "made women,"
and were henceforth to confine themselves to the pursuits
appropriate to women.[273]

Women were still further degraded by the development of property and
its control by man, together with the habit of treating her as a piece
of property, whose value was enhanced if its purity was assured and
demonstrable. As a result of this situation, man's chief concern in
women became an interest in securing the finest specimens for his own
use, in guarding them with jealous care from contact with other men,
and in making them, together with the ornaments they wore, signs of
his wealth and social standing. The instances below are extreme ones,
taken from lower social stages than our own, but they differ only in
degree from the chaperonage of modern Europe:

I heard from a teacher about some strange custom connected
with some of the young girls here [New Ireland], so I asked
the chief to take me to the house where they were. The house
was about twenty-five feet in length and stood in a reed and
bamboo enclosure, across the entrance of which a bundle of
dried grass was suspended to show that it was str