In addition to the necessary duty of looking after the children, they had to provide all the food for the household excepting that derived from the chase of the kangaroo.  They climbed up hills for the opossum, delved in the ground with their sticks for yams, native bread, and nutritive roots, groped about the rocks for shellfish, dived beneath the sea for oysters, and fished for the finny tribe.  In addition to this, they carried, on their frequent tramps, the household stuff in native baskets of their own manufacture.  Their affectionate partners would even pile upon their burdens sundry spears and waddies not required for present service, and would command their help to rear the breakwind, and to raise the fire.  They acted, moreover, as cooks to the establishment, and were occasionally regaled, at the termination of a feast, with the leavings of their gorged masters.[167]

Among the Andamanese, while the men go into the jungle to hunt pigs, the women fetch drinking water and firewood, catch shellfish, make fishing nets and baskets, spin thread, and cook the food ready for the return of the men.[168] In New Caledonia “girls work in the plantations, boys learn to fight."[169] In Africa the case is similar.  Among the Bushmen (to take only one example from this continent) the woman “weaves the frail mats and rushes under which her family finds a little shelter from the wind and from the heat of the sun,” constructs a fireplace of three round stones, fashions and bakes a few earthenware pots.  When her household labors are done, she gathers roots, locusts, etc., from the fields.  On the march she frequently carries a child, a mat, an earthen pot, some ostrich eggshells, and “a few ragged skins bundled on her head or shoulder,” while the man carries only his spear, bow, and quiver.[170] The conditions among the American Indians were practically the same.  Cotton Mather said of the Indians of Massachusetts:  “The men are most abominably slothful, making their poor squaws or wives to plant, and dress, and barn, and beat their corn, and build their wigwams for them;"[171] and Jones, referring to the women of southern tribes, says: 

Doomed to perpetual drudgery and to that subordinate position to which woman is always consigned where civilization and religion are not, she was little less than a beast of burden, busy with cooking, the manufacture of pottery, mats, baskets, moccasins, etc., a tiller of the ground, a nurse for her own children, and at all times a servant to the commands and passions of the stronger sex.[172]

Primitive woman was therefore undoubtedly very busy, but I have seen no reason to believe that she considered her condition unfortunate.  Our great-grandmothers were also very busy, but they were apparently not discontented.  There was no reason why woman should not labor in primitive society.  The forces which withdrew her from labor were expressions of later social conditions.  Speaking largely, these considerations were the desire of men to preserve the beauty of women, and their desire to withdraw them from association with other men.  It is the connection in thought and fact between idle and beautiful women and wealth, indeed, which has frequently led to the keeping of a superfluous number of such women as a sign of wealth.