“when rather new to Kaffirland, happened to look into a hut and there saw a stalwart Kaffir sitting and smoking his pipe, while the women were hard at work in the sun, building huts, carrying timber, and performing all kinds of severe labor.  Struck with a natural indignation at such behavior, he told the smoker to get up and work like a man.  This idea was too much even for the native politeness of the Kaffir, who burst into a laugh at so absurd a notion.  ‘Women work,’ said he, ‘men sit in the house and smoke.’”

MacDonald relates (in Africana, I., 35) that “a woman always kneels when she has occasion to talk to a man.”  Even queens must in some cases go on their knees before their husbands. (Ratzel, I., 254.) Caille gives similar testimony regarding the Waissulo, and Mungo Park (347) describes the return of one of his companions to the capital of Dentila, after an absence of three years: 

“As soon as he had seated himself upon a mat, by the threshold of his door, a young woman (his intended bride) brought a little water in a calabash, and kneeling down before him, desired him to wash his hands; when he had done this, the girl, with a tear of joy sparkling in her eyes, drank the water; this being considered as the greatest proof she could possibly give him of her fidelity and attachment.”

An Eskimo, when building a house, looks on lazily while his women carry stones “almost heavy enough to break their backs.”  The ungallant men not only compel the women to be their drudges, but slyly create a sentiment that it is disgraceful for a man to assist them.  Of the Patagonian Indians Falkner asserts that the women are so rigidly “obliged to perform their duty, that their husbands cannot help them on any occasion, or in the greatest distress, without incurring the highest ignominy,” and this is the general feeling, of which other illustrations will be given in later chapters.  Foolish sentimentalists have tried to excuse the Indians on the ground that they have no time to attend to anything but fighting and hunting.  But they always make the squaws do the hard work, whether there be any war and hunting or not.  A white American girl, accustomed to the gallant attentions of her lover, would not smile on the red Dacota suitor of whom Riggs writes (205): 

“When the family are abed and asleep, he often visits her in her mother’s tent, or he finds her out in the grove in the day time gathering fuel.  She has the load of sticks made up, and when she kneels down to take it on her back, possibly he takes her hand and helps her up and then walks home by her side.  Such was the custom In the olden time.”

Still, there is a germ of gallantry here.  The Dacota at least helps to load his human donkey, while the Kaffir refuses to do even that.