In early times man’s superior physical force, the wider range of his experience, his mechanical inventions in connection with hunting and fighting, and his combination under leadership with his comrades to carry out their common enterprises, resulted in a contempt for the weakness of women and an almost complete separation in interest between himself and the women of the group.  The men frequently formed clubs, and lived apart from the women; and even where this did not happen, the men and women had no mental life in common.  To this contempt for women also was added a superstitious fear of them, growing out of the primitive belief that weakness or any other bad quality is infectious, and may be transferred by physical contact or association.[270]

From Mr. Crawley’s excellent paper on “Sexual Taboo” I transcribe the following illustrations of this attitude: 

In New Caledonia you rarely see men and women talking or sitting together.  The women seem perfectly content with the company of their own sex.  The men who loiter about with spears in most lazy fashion are seldom seen in the society of the opposite sex....  The Ojebwey, Peter Jones, thus writes of his own people:  “I have scarcely ever seen anything like social intercourse between husband and wife, and it is remarkable that the women say little in the presence of the men.”  The Zulus regard their women with a haughty contempt.  If a man were going to the bush to cut firewood with his wives, he and they would take different paths, and neither go nor return in company.  If he were going to visit a neighbor and wished his wife to go also, she would follow at a distance.  In Senegambia the women live by themselves, rarely with their husbands, and their sex is virtually a clique.  In Egypt a man never converses with his wife, and in the tomb they are separated by a wall, though males and females are not usually buried in the same vault.[271]

Amongst the Dacotas custom and superstition ordain that the wife must carefully keep away from all that belongs to her husband’s sphere of action.  The Bechuanas never allow their women to touch their cattle; accordingly the men have to plow themselves....  In Guiana no woman may go near the hut where ourali is made.  In the Marquesas Islands the use of canoes is prohibited to the female sex by tabu:  the breaking of the rule is punished with death.  Conversely, amongst the same people tapa-making belongs exclusively to the women:  when they are making it for their own headdresses it is tabu for the men to touch it.  In Nicaragua all the marketing was done by the women.  A man might not enter the market nor even see the proceedings at the risk of a beating....  In Samoa where the manufacture of cloth is allotted solely to the women, it is a degradation for a man to engage in any detail of the process....  An Eskimo thinks it an indignity to row in an umiak, the large boat used by women.  The different offices