of husband and wife are also clearly distinguished; for example, when he has brought his booty to land it would be a stigma on his character if he so much as drew a seal ashore, and generally it is regarded as scandalous for a man to interfere with what is the work of women.  In British Guiana cooking is the province of the women, as elsewhere; on one occasion when the men were compelled perforce 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 strictly tabu.  Inside the house there were three conical structures about seven or eight feet in height, and about ten or twelve feet in circumference at the bottom, and for about four feet from the ground, at which