Vessels are necessary in cooking, both to carry and hold water, and to store the surplus of food, both vegetable and animal, and the woman, feeling the need of these in connection with what she has set about doing, weaves baskets and makes pottery.  Fetching wood, grinding corn, tanning the hides, and in the main the preparation of clothing, follow rather necessarily from her relation to the raw products.  Spinning and weaving and dyeing are related closely to the vegetable world to begin with, and it is to be expected that they would be developed by the women.  But man is very deeply interested in clothing on the ornamental side, and the farther back we go in society, the more this holds, and sometimes, particularly in Africa, since the domestication of oxen there, the men prepare the leather and do the sewing, even for the women.  There is, indeed, nothing in the nature of sewing to make it a woman’s occupation.  It involves a relation of the hand to the eye—­similar to that which the man is always practicing and using, i.e., reaching a given point, perhaps with mechanical aids, through the mediation of these two organs.  It is a motor matter, therefore, and one of the first industries undertaken by men.  There are many exceptions to the general statement that early manufacture (weapons excepted) was in the hands of women, but the exceptions may be regarded as variations due to the fixation of habit through single and peculiar incidents, or they are the beginning of the later period when man begins to practice woman’s activities.

The primitive division of labor among the sexes was not in any sense an arrangement dictated by the men, but a habit into which both men and women fell, to begin with, through their difference of organization—­a socially useful habit whose rightness no one questioned and whose origin no one thought of looking into.  There is, moreover, a tendency in habits to become more fixed than is inherently necessary.  The man who does any woman’s work is held in contempt not only by men, but by women.

As to the Indian women, they are far from complaining of their lot.  On the contrary, they would despise their husbands could they stoop to any menial office, and would think it conveyed an imputation upon their own conduct.  It is the worst insult one virago can cast upon another in a moment of altercation.  “Infamous woman,” will she cry, “I have seen your husband carrying wood into the lodge to make the fire.  Where was his squaw, that he should be obliged to make a woman of himself!"[176]

That men are similarly prejudiced against women’s taking up male occupations we know from modern industrial history, without looking to ethnological evidence.  Habit was, however, in another regard favorable to woman, since what she was constantly associated with and expended her activities upon was looked upon as hers.  Through her identification with the industrial process she became, in fact, a property-owner.  This result did not spring from the maternal system; but both this and the maternal system were the results of her bodily habit, and the social habits flowing from this.