The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being universal.  As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345):  “Among ourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost, if not entirely, absent among the peasantry.”  Still less would we expect to find it among the lower races.  Primitive times were warlike times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more useful than daughters.  Sons also were needed for ancestor worship, which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life.  For these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky—­or rather unlucky—­if she was allowed to live at all.

A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt for women—­frequently coupled with maltreatment—­exhibited by the lower races in all parts of the world.  But as the attitude of Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss, II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile.  Everybody ran to and fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored.  If an Indian refuses to quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains (VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a warrior, as she is too far beneath him.  In Tahiti the head of a husband or father was sacred from a woman’s touch.  Offerings to the gods would have been polluted if touched by a woman.  In Siam the wife had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband’s, to remind her of her inferiority.  No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori chief.  Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter.  The Zulus regard their women “with haughty contempt.”  Among Mohammedans a woman has a definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband; unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her.  (Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by elders and priests is the insulting

“Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive thee.”  “On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that she is an unwelcome guest in the family.” (Ramabai Saravasti, 13.)

William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and misery of woman’s lot among the Pa-Urgs: