The exemption of women from labor, in short, implied an economic surplus which early society did not possess.  The lower classes of modern society do not possess it either, and there the women are still “drudges,” if we want to use that word about a situation which is normal, in view of the economic condition of the men and women concerned.  It was necessary that primitive society, in the absence of elaborate machinery for doing things, in unstable and precarious food conditions, and without resources accumulated from preceding generations, should utilize all its forces.  The struggle for existence, in its harshest sense, was but little mitigated, and no group could have spared at all the industry of women.  Even if primitive life had been as hard as Hobbes would have it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” mere negative, habitual hardness and miserableness of condition did not get the attention of primitive society particularly.  Their life was hard, as we look at it, not as they looked at it.  They could not compare themselves with the future, and comparisons with the past were doubtless in their favor.  The best returns from activity will of course follow when each individual is doing something he is specially well fitted to do, and natural selection seems to have seen to it that primitive society should so divide the labor as best to utilize social energy by assigning to men the tasks requiring violent exertion, and to women those requiring constant attention.

But was not primitive man very lazy, and did he not do fewer things than he reasonably could have done?  If we mean by lazy an aversion to certain types of action, primitive man was doubtless lazy; but if we mean an aversion to all kinds of exertion, he certainly was not lazy.  He was so thoroughly aroused by certain stimulations and so exhausted by the expenditure of energy in reacting to these stimulations that periods of recuperation, or “sitting about,” were necessary.  Heckenwelder’s remarks on the labor of men and women among the Indians of Pennsylvania are very instructive, although they relate to tribes which had come under white influences to some extent: 

The work of the women is not hard or difficult.  They are both able and willing to do it, and always perform it with cheerfulness.  Mothers teach their daughters those duties which common sense would otherwise point out to them when grown up.  Within doors their labor is very trifling; there is seldom more than one pot or kettle to attend to.  There is no scrubbing of the house, and but little to wash, and that not often.  Their principal occupations are to cut and fetch in the firewood, till the ground, sow and reap the grain, and pound the corn in mortars for their pottage, and to make bread which they bake in the ashes.  When going on a journey or to hunting camps with their husbands, if they have no horses, they carry a pack on their backs which often appears heavier than it really is; it generally consists