In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the sexes.  The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts and makes weapons of the chase.  The woman fetches and carries, digs and delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery.  Gradually she changes wild grasses to domesticated plants, and rears the young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve their human masters.  She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere, mainly unthinking.

With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated.  In his career as fighter and hunter he has learned to cooeperate with his fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land, protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe.  He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows.  Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or better arrow-heads.

It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who remain in their peasant homes in Europe.  The peasant has even greater need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but he lacks the driving impulse.  It was the same with women and men under the conditions of savage life.  Thus it came about that man’s greater strength and mobility, backed by power of cooeperation and invention, gave him the leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews.  True, woman was his first lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the industrial life.

With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the second chapter of this volume.  Meantime slaves were multiplying, male and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the mass of them became drudges in house and field.  It is hard for us to realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy labor and wretchedness.