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WOMAN'S SHAKE IN PRIMITIVE

CULTURE

At the Foot of the Ladder — A Pieblo Woman at Home.

(After Wittich.)

"WOMAN'S SHARE

IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE

BY

OTIS TUFTON MASON, A. M., Ph. D.

CURATOR OP THE DEPARTMENT OF ETHNOLOGY IN
THE UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS

" Dux feraina facti."

Aeneid, i, 364.

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1899

Copyright, 1894,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Electrotyped and Printed
at the appleton press, u. s. a.

TO

ALL GOOD WOMEN,

LIVING OR DEAD,

WHO WITH TnEIR BRAINS OR BY THEIR TOIL

HAVE AIDED THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD,

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

The word Anthropology in its broadest meaning in-
cludes several subordinate sciences, such as Somatology
or Physical Anthropology, Ethnology, Ethnography, Pre-
historic Archaeology, and Culture History. In the Anthro-
pological Series, of which this is the first volume, it is
planned to publish books dealing with special topics in
these various fields. The work is undertaken in the hope
that through this series the grandest and newest of all the
sciences, Anthropology — the science of man — may become
better known to intelligent readers who are not special-
ists and who do not desire to become such. At the same
time the series will be one which no special student can
afford to ignore.

For, while the works are intended to be of general
interest, they will in every case be written by authorities,
and scientific accuracy will never be sacrificed to popular-
ity. Leaders in anthropological study in America and
Europe have expressed an interest in the undertaking and
have promised their co-operation. Besides books expressly
written for the series by workers in the Old World and the
New, the plan includes translations of valuable works from
the French and German.

The editor is particularly glad that the series begins
with this book by Professor Mason upon Woman's Share
in Primitive Culture. In many minds it will awaken new
thoughts. Division of labour began with the invention

viii EDITOR'S PREFACE.

of fire- making, and it was a division of labour based upon
sex. The woman staid by the fire to keep it alive while the
man went to the field or the forest for game. The world's
industrialism and militancy began then and there. Man
has been cunning in devising means of killing beast and
his fellowman — he has been the inventor in every mur-
derous art. The woman at the fireside became the burden
bearer, the basket- maker, the weaver, potter, agriculturist,
domesticator of animals — in a word, the inventor of all
the peaceful arts of life. Professor Mason traces the story
for us in these chapters.

Arrangements have already been made for other vol-
umes, which will be issued soon. Still others will be un-
dertaken if the success of the early numbers warrants it.

CONTEXTS

CHAPTER

I. — Introduction .

II. — The Food Bringer
III. — The Weaver .
IV. — The Skin Dresser

V. — The Potter .
VI. — The Beast of Burden .
VII. — The Jack-at-all-trades
VIII. — The Artist .
IX. — The Linguist .

X. — The Founder of Society
XI. — The Patron of Religion
XII. — Conclusion .

PAGE
1

14
41

70
91
114
139
1G1
188
205
241
272

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

FIG. PAGE

At the Foot of the Ladder— A Pueblo Woman at Home.
(After Wittich.) Frontispiece

1. The Primitive Farmer and Burden-bearer, South Africa.

(After Livingstone.) 6

2. Division of Labour under New Conditions — A California

Scene. (After Henshaw.) facing 7

3. Reciprocity— A California Family at Home. (After Hen-

shaw.) facing 11

4. The Primitive Farmer — California Woman assorting Food.

(After Henshaw.) facing 15

5. Bean Granary, Mohave Indians, Southern California. (After

Henshaw.) 17

6. The Primitive Miller — California Indian Woman using

Metate and Muller 22

7. The Pemmican Maker pounding Cherries and Dried Buffalo

Meat — Sioux Indians, Dakota. (After Jungling.) . . 28

8. Tuscan Vintners — Carrying on the Head, the Shoulder, and

the Side 31

9. Moki Fruit Picker's Basket, Arizona. (After Mason.) . 43

10. The Basket-maker — California Woman at Work. (After

Henshaw.) facing 45

11. Twined Weaving by Hupa Woman, Northern California.

(After Mason.) 46

12. Coiled Weaving by Ute Woman, Utah. (After Mason.) . 50

13. Mohave Cradle Frame, showing the Shredded Bark Bed, the

Framework, and the Geometric Patterns in Weaving . 56

14. The Primitive Loom Weaver — Navajo Woman, Arizona.

(After Matthews.) 61

15. Impressions of Twined Weaving on Ancient Pottery. (After

Holmes.) facing 63

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

FIG. PAGE

16. Eskimo " Scraper,*' made to fit the Woman's Hand. (After

Mason.) 73

17. Eskimo Fat Scraper of Reindeer Antler and Rawhide.

(After Mason.) . 74

18. Eskimo Fat Scraper of Walrus Ivory, made to fit the

Fingers. (After Mason.) 75

19. 20, 21, 22. Tools of the Primitive Tanner — Implements of

Bone, Antler, and Iron used by Sioux Women in dress-
ing Hides facing 82

23. Modelled Vase, with Rattles in the Legs. (After Holmes.) . 96

24. Making Coiled Ware in Basket Bowl. (After Gushing.) . 98

25. Basket Bowl as Base Mould for Large Vessel, showing also

the Smoothing Process after Coiling. (After dishing.) . 100

26. The Processes in building up the most Finished Type of

Jar. (After Cushing.) 103

27. Clay Vessel Modelled after a Shell Vessel. (After Holmes.) . 110

28. Vessel of Shell as Model for one in Clay. (After Holmes.) .111

29. California Cradle Frame. (After Mason.) . . . .116

30. Eskimo Mothers. (After Healy.) 117

31. Turkish Beggar in the Streets of Washington. (After

Thomas Lee.) facing 119

32. Indian Men and Women delivering hay to the Govern-

ment facing 121

33. Ute Children carrying Water in Basket Bottles. (After

Powell.) facing 123

34. The Knapsack in Woman's Work. — German PeasantWToman . 124

35. The Danish Fish Woman 132

36. Florentine Wood Gatherers. (After Gioli.) . . facing 133

37. German Bread Woman supporting the Sinews of War . 134

38. German Market Women 135

39. Hod Carriers in Nuremberg 137

40. German Women as Housewives, Gardeners, Domesticators,

Draught Animals, and Merchants. (After Chandlee.) . 140

41. The Primitive Shelter or Home — A Bannak Family, Mon-

tana facing 152

42. The Matron of Isleta, New Mexico. (After Wittich.) . . 159

43. The Origin of the Scroll. (From ancient Pueblo pottery,

after Holmes.) 163

44. Elucidation of Decoration on Tusayan Dipper. (After

Holmes.) facing. 173

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xiii

FIG. PAGE

45. Ancient Tusayan Dipper, Arizona. (After Holmes.) . .173

46. The Pretty Girl— A Mold Beauty. (After Wittich.) . . 180

47. The Ute Standard of Beauty, Utah. (After Wittich.) . . 181

48. The Yuma Fine Lady, Southern California. (After Wit-

tich.) .... .... facing 182

49. Manner of piercing the Ear — Seminole Indian Woman . 184

50. The Mother of the Caryatides — Low Caste Indian Woman . 186

51. The Maiden in Savagery facing 207

52. The Founder of Society, the Primitive Social Unit . . 214

53. The Ganowanian Family, Havasupai, Southern Califor-

nia facing 217

54. The Australian Family facing 219

55. Mexican Indian Family 223

56. Zuni priestess Praying for Rain on the Young Corn which

she planted 243

57. Modena WTater Carrier, Cousin of the Naiads . . . 248

58. Sioux Women cutting themselves for the Dead. (After

Yarrow.) facing 252

59. Atropos drawing out the Thread or Weft of Life . facing 266

60. Kwan-yin, the Chinese Female Buddha .... 282

WOMAN'S SHARE
IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

Of the billion and a half human beings on the earth,
one half, or about seven hundred million, are females.
What this vast multitude are doing in the world's activi-
ties and what share their mothers and grandmothers, to
the remotest generation backward, have had in originating
and developing culture, is a question which concerns the
whole race. The answer to this inquiry will benefit the
living in many ways, especially if it can be shown that the
achievements of women have been in the past worthy of
honour and imitation and have laid the foundation for arts
of which all are now justly proud. Dr. Hermann Ploss,
just before his death in 1891, finished his monumental
work, Das Weib, which leaves little to be desired concern-
ing the natural history of woman. In this work her anat-
omy and physiology, in health and disease, in savagery
and civilization, from the cradle to the grave, are clearly
traced. The girl, the maiden, the wife, the matron, the
widow, pass before us one after another to absorb our at-
tention. In the present work these subjects are ignored
or lightly passed over, and the effort is made to set forth
woman's share in the culture of the world by her works.

(i)

2 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

The woman and her works have reacted one upon the
other, as every one knows. But the point of view adds
new pleasure to the vista.*

Militancy and industrialism — these are the two periods
into which Herbert Spencer divides the life history of civ-
ilization. First came the period of militancy, of savagery
and barbarism, of warring between man and man, be-
tween man and Nature. After that succeeded the period
of industrialism, when peoples settled down to the great
occupations that dignify the most advanced nations.

Without calling in question this classification, the in-
quiry is here made whether these two words, in the early
history of our species at least, did not mark a sexual divi-
sion— whether, instead of an age, we should not rather
say a sex of militancy and a sex of industrialism. Cer-
tainlv there was never an asfe in which there was a more
active armament, larger battle ships, more destructive ex-
plosives and cannon, and vaster establishments for the
creation of engines and implements of death than in our
own. From all these women are excluded, save now and
then a few poor girls may be allowed for a pittance to fill
cartridges ; save that, as in the days of Tacitus, women
carry food and cheers to their husbands on battlefields;
save that the good sisters of the Red Cross bind up the
wrounds and minister to the wants of the unfortunate
victims. In contact with the animal world, and ever
taking lessons from them, men watched the tiger, the
bear, the fox, the falcon — learned their language and imi-
tated them in ceremonial dances.

But women wrere instructed by the spiders, the nest

* Ploss, Das Weib in der Natur- unci VSlkerkunde, Leipsic, Fer-
nan ; also consult Lester F. Ward, Our Better Halves, Forum, N. Y..
1888, vol. vi, pp. 26G-275: Cecilia Seler. Die Fran im Mexico. Ber-
lin, 1893: and 0. T. Mason. Am. Antiquarians. Chicago, 1889, xi,
pp. 1-13 ; Ilavelock Ellis, Man and Woman, London, 1894, Scott.

INTRODUCTION. 3

builders, the storers of food and the workers in clay like
the mud wasp and the termites. It is not meant that
these creatures set up schools to teach dull women how to
work, but that their quick minds were on the alert for
hints coming from these sources.* Even though we dis-
arm our soldiery, we do not seem to be able to dissociate
men from the works that bring violent death. It is in
the apotheosis of industrialism that woman has borne her
part so persistently and well. At the very beginning of
human time she laid down the lines of her duties, and she
has kept to them unremittingly.

How comfortless, however, was the first woman who
stood upon this planet ! How economical her dowry !
Her body was singularly devoid of comfortable hair, her
teeth and jaws were the feeblest, her arm was less pow-
erful than that of any creature of her size, she had no
wings like the birds, she could not see into the night like
the owl, the timid hare was fleeter of foot than she. Her
inventive genius and cunning ringers had not yet devised
the sheltering tent or the comfortable clothing. As yet
she had no tools of peaceful industry nor experience.
Society had- not then formed its body politic around her
as a nucleus. She had poor ways of expressing her
thoughts or her sense of beauty. She had no theory of
the life below and poorer conceptions of the heavenly
world. Nature mocked her. The food and textile plants
withheld their productions from her. The mountain sheep
fled away to their fastnesses with their fleece and milk.
So many secrets were held back from her by Nature, who
knew so much and told so little. As yet her magic touch
had not even begun to cover the earth with waving grain -

* Cf. Payne, History of America, New York, 1892, vol. i, p. 307,
quoting Lucretius (v, 997). On the conduct of the bees in the honey
industry, see Riley, President's Address, Biological Society. Wash-
ington, 1894.
2

4 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

fields or golden cornfields, or luscious fruit. As we in
imagination behold these women primeval, the words of
Lear rise spontaneously in the memory :

Poor naked wretches on the edge of time,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides defend you

From seasons such as these? King Lear, iii, 1.

The road from her to my fair reader in the midst of
many comforts is long indeed. But even this poorly
equipped woman had more brain than was sufficient to
meet the demands of bodily existence, and in this fact
lay the promise of her future achievements. The mater-
nal instinct, the strong back, the deft hand, the aversion
to aggressive employment, the conservative spirit, were
there in flower.

Her shop was ample enough, for it was the vaulted
sky ; but her tools and materials and methods were of the
simplest kind. What we do in hours she accomplished in
years. But if you could from some exalted position take
in the exploitation of the earth and sea, the transfor-
mation of raw material into things of use, the trans-
portation of these products in all directions, the com-
mercial transactions involved in the sale of these com-
modities, you would be astonished to know how many
of these wheels were set agoing by women in prehistoric
times.

Furthermore, as the method of living in each age of
the world survives and is propagated into the succeeding
ages, one would not have to go far from any of our great
cities to find women still, in a small way, practicing these
same arts in competition with the products of machinery.
Her patient face may also be seen in the midst of our fly-
ing wheels, so that in Ezekiel's vision the rims that were
full of eyes remind us of a modern cotton factory. The
spirit of the living creature in the wheels is the genius

INTRODUCTION. 5

of industrialism originated and fostered in the world by
women.

In the year 1888 the United States Commissioner of
Labour published his fourth annual report, devoted to
working women in large cities. There are three hundred
and thirty-six occupations mentioned in the book. In
some of them the women were simply working with men
at men's trades. Other employments, such as rag pick-
ing and a few more, are peculiar to civilization and
are not hinted at in savagery. Again, the differentiation
and specialization of trades found in this list do not exist
low down in culture or even in our own farmhouses.
For instance, a great many of them are merely the needle-
woman making a variety of things. Bu$ it 'is most inter-
esting to run the eye up and down the columns and see
what a large proportion of the working women in our
cities are still following the paths trodden long ago by
dnsky savages of their own sex.*

Now, Jules Simon is not altogether satisfied with what
the nineteenth century has done for the millions of toil-
inor women in cities. Savs he: "And what shall we say
of women?. Formerly isolated in their households, now
herded together in manufactories. . . . From the mo-
ment when steam appeared in the industrial world, the
wheel, the spindle, and the distaff broke in the hand, and
the spinsters and weavers, deprived of their ancient liveli-
hood, fled to the shadow of the tall factory chimney.
The mothers have left the hearth and the cradle, and
the young girls and the little children themselves have
run to offer their feeble arms ; whole villages are si-

* Report of Commissioner of Labour, Washington, 1889, Govern-
ment Printing Office. Also H. Ditmar, United States Consular
Report. 103, March, 1889, p. 431 ; Popular Science Monthly, xxiii,
p. 388 ; North American Review, cxxxvi, p. 478 ; ibid., cxxxv,
p. 433.

6

WOMAN'S SHARK IX PRIMITIVE CULTUKIv

lent, while huge brick buildings swallow up thousands

of living humanity from dawn of day to twilight

shades." *

In many books of travels woman among savage tribes

is pictured to us as an abject creature born under an evil

star, the brutalized slave of
man, to be kicked or killed
at his pleasure. This can
scarcely be true of any ad-
vancing people. Savages
as they are now visited are
not in a normal condition.
It does not need to be
urged, for instance, that a
tribe of Indians on a reser-
vation, the same tribe run-
ning at large but environed
by whites, or, thirdly, in its
unmolested condition be-
fore the discovery, presents
different states of social
health.

It is not reasonable to
suppose that any species or

Fig. 1.— -The Primitive Farmer and variety of animals would
Burden-bearer, South Africa. Kurvive jn wRjcR tRe help-
(After Living stone.) . ._ x

less, maternal half is sub-

jected to outrageous cruelty as a rule. According to the
law of survival of the fittest, a tribe or stock of human
beings in which brutality of this sort has place simply
chooses the downward road and disappears. It is one
way to account for the great industry and patience of

* M. Jules Simon, quoted by Bessie Rayner Parkes, Essays on
Woman's Work, London, 18G5, p. 82. Also U. S. Consular Reports,
p. 103, 1889.

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INTRODUCTION. 7

savage women, that the best have been educated through
their trials, and in the " good old days " of summary exe-
cution the vixenish and the worthless were weeded out by
their disgusted lords and masters.

Ao-ain, crueltv does not breed refinement either of
manners or of taste. Where women adorn themselves
with flowers, and produce with skillful fingers work that
will excite the admiration of the most refined, their home
can hardly be the abode of cruelty. Of one' of the most
primitive peoples E. H. Man says : " It is incorrect to say
that among the Andamanese marriage is nothing more
than taking a female slave, for one of the striking fea-
tures of their social relation is the marked equality and
affection which subsists between husband and wife. Care-
ful observations extended over many years prove that not
only is the husband's authority more or less nominal, but
that it is not at all an uncommon occurrence for Anda-
manese Benedicts to be considerably at the beck and call
of their better halves." *

A charm ins: confession is made bv the same writer
with reference to the moral influence of woman's pres-
ence. He says : " Experience has taught us that one of
the most effective means of inspiring confidence when en-
deavouring to make acquaintance with these savages is to
show that we are accompanied by women, as they at ouce
infer that, whatever may be our intentions, they are at
least not hostile."

From Africa we have the testimony of Livingstone
upon the same subject. He offered one of Nyakoba's men
a hoe to be his guide, which the man agreed to, and
went off to show the hoe to his wife. He soon returned

* The Andamanese Islanders, London, 1883. The foot-notes
abound in contradictions of disparaging remarks about these people
by superficial observers. Also Trotter, Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc, Lon-
don, 1892, p. 701.

8 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

and said his wife would not let him go. After much
chaffing the doctor was told : " Oh, that is the custom in
these parts — the wives are masters." *

We do not stop to inquire into the veracity of Nya-
koba's man. If he was sincere, there was at least one
henpecked husband in the Dark Continent. If he was
lying, he had not forgotten a very ancient subterfuge of
laying the blame on his wife.

Among the Guiana Indians, says Im Thurn, an excel-
lent observer, there is an equal division of labour, though
that of the men is accomplished more fitfully than that
of the women. ]No different distribution ever entered
into the thoughts of Indians, and the women do their
share willingly, without question and without compulsion.
The women in a quiet way have a considerable amount of
influence with the men ; and even if the men were —
though that is contrary- to their nature — inclined to treat
them cruelly, public opinion would prevent this. More-
over, the women, just because they have been accustomed
to hard labour all their lives, are little weaker than the
men. If a contest arose between an average man and an
average woman, it is very doubtful with which the victory
would be.f Even on a hunting trip women were not to be
despised, according to Warburton Pike.

"I now saw what an advantage it is to take women on
a hunting trip of this kind. If we killed anything we
had only to cut up and cache the meat, and the women
and small boys would carry it in. On returning to camp

* Travels in South Africa, New York, 1858, p. G67.

f Im Thurn, Indians of British Guiana, p. 215. Consult also
Dall, American Naturalist, Philadelphia, 1878. vol. xii, p. 5, note,
and Murdoch. Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology,
Washington, 1802. quoting Parry, NordenskjSld, and Simpson. See
also Bancroft, Native Race-, New York, 1874-'76, sub voce, vol. v,
p. 787.

INTRODUCTION. 9

we could throw ourselves down on a pile of caribou skins
and smoke our pipes in comfort, but the women's work
was never finished. The rib bones have all to be picked
out, and the plat cote hung up in the smoke to dry ; the
meat of haunches and shoulders must be cut up into thin
strips for the same purpose, and the bones have to be col-
lected, pounded down, and boiled for the grease, which is
in such demand during the cold weather about to com-
mence. But the greatest labour of all lies in dressing the
skins, cutting off the hair, scraping away every particle of
flesh and fat, and afterward turning them into soft
leather for moccasins, which are themselves no easv task
to make. Many skins, too, have to be made into parch-
ment or carefully cut into babiche for snowshoes, and again
there are hair coats to be made for each member of the
party." *

The work of the men among the Omahas, according
to Dorsey, was regulated essentially by that of the women,
who were to them a sort of calendar. The summer hunt
was undertaken after the women had planted the corn
and the pumpkins and the beans had been gathered.
They returned on the ripening of the sunflower. They
went on the fall hunt when the hair on the game was
thick and warm, out of which the women made the
clothing. The women buried in caches whatever they
wished to leave. Food, etc., was placed in a blanket,
which was gathered at the corners and tied with a thong :
then the bundle was allowed to fall at the bottom of the
cache. Then the women went over the cornfields to see
that all the work had been finished. They prepared pack-
saddles and litters and mended moccasins and other
clothing. The day for the departure having arrived, the

* Warburton Pike, Barren Grounds, etc., London, 1892, Mac-
mil Ian, pp. 75, 1G0.

10 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

women loaded their horses and dogs and took as great
weights on their own backs as they could conveniently
transport*

Another popular error concerning the division of labour
in savagery is the assertion that all woman's work is de-
grading to man and all man's work tabooed to women.

It is not denied that the taboo is m full force among
primitive races. There are occasions in all aboriginal
tribes when it would be fatal and ill-starred for a woman
even to touch or to look upon objects to be used in men's
activities. There are also occupations of women in which
men think themselves degraded to engage. But nothing-
is more common than to see the sexes lending a helping
hand in bearing the burdens of life. Men were the hun-
ters and fishermen, but women went hunting and fishing.
Women have been the spinners and weavers the world
over, but there are occasions when men have to weave.
Indeed, the taboo of which we have been speaking com-
pels them to weave the blanket to be worn by the man in
the next prayer ceremonial for rain or in the tribal dance.
Hence, among the Navajo, and in some of the Pueblos,
men are among the best weavers.

Yet this co-operation in one another's employments,
unless demanded by religion, must always have been a
matter of friendly help and never of compulsion. The
feeling never seems to be absent that it is a reflection
upon the ability and skill of a woman, however weak she
may be, to have her husband bearing her burden. When
the woman engages in the man's occupation it is to help
him out in those matters that are not tabooed.

* Cf. Dorsey, Omaha Sociology. Also Bartram, Travels, etc.
London, 1702, p. 481 ; Rev. Ashur Wright, quoted by Morgan, Anct.
Society, New York. 1877. Holt, p. 455; J. G. Garson, J. Anthrop.
Inst., London, 1886, p. 145; and Boas, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.,
p. 485.

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[NTRODUCTION. 11

Campbell * says of a Corean woman : " To make mat-
ters worse, the head man upon whom I had relied for
assistance in hiring the men I wanted was absent, but his
wife proved a capable substitute, and seemed to fill her
husband's place with unquestioned authority. Between
bullying and coaxing, she rapidly pressed twenty reluctant
men into service. . .". The subjection of women, which
is probably the commonest of accepted theories in the
East, received a fresh blow, in my mind. Women in
these parts of the world, if the truth were known, fill a
higher place and wield greater influence than they are
credited with."

For a correct knowledge of primitive woman's activi-
ties there are five witnesses to take the stand. The first
is Clio, Muse of history. Her memory runs backward
three or four thousand years, and recalls the childhood of
nations now grown old and decayed. Her faithful serv-
ants put on record many things by the way of tribes that
lingered in the pristine culture, and these she hands to us.

The second witness is Language, feminine in gender
among all races. Already has her testimony brought
Aryan peoples into a common brotherhood and showed
the status of the common ancestress before the separation.

The third witness is Archaeology — or Archaiologia, as
Plato wrote it. She wears an apron, and in her hands
she carries a very ancient digging stick, by means of which
she opens the graves of the dead and points to this one as
of a man, to this one as of a woman. The skulls and
bones, the relics of useful implements — pottery, knives,
jewellery — brought forth and held in the light of modern
science, assume their former relations and repeat the story
of their owners many centuries ago.

* Campbell. Journey through North Corea. Proceedings of the
Royal Geographical Society, London, 1892. vol. xiv, p. 145. Also
Lcclerc, Rev. Scient., Paris, 1892, vol. li, p. 72.

12 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

The fourth to take the stand is commonly called Folk-
lore. This witness can recall all the superstitious beliefs
and practices among the poor and ignorant about rocks
and plants and trees ; about goblins and witches and med-
ical charms ; about magic and divination. She is familiar
with old-time customs in seasons of festivity, or in the
ceremonies of birth and coming of age, of marriage and
burial. The games of the young and of grown-up folks,
as well as the peculiarities attaching to any region, are at
her tongue's end. She can talk to children by the hundred,
telling them nursery tales and fables, or gather the adults
around her to listen to more serious myths, or traditions,
or legends. On occasion she can sing a song or ballad, or
lullaby, or repeat riddles and proverbs by the hour. All
these contain precious bits of history necessary to the
comparative study of culture.

The last witness to come forward will be one now liv-
ing, a member of any tribe accessible in every continent,
belonging to a people that have stood still during all the
ages. By visiting enough of these it may be possible to
re-edify the structure of very ancient history. At least,
this witness will inform us as to what her sisters have been
doing in this present century that resembles the primi-
tive woman's work in the past.

By piecing together what they all have to say, the nar-
rative of woman's earliest history will be known. From
this it will be possible to reckon what the present owes to
her and what should be her lines of progress to success in
the future. Clio, Grlossa, Archaiologia, Paradosis, and
Ethnologia are they whose friendly ollices we humbly
crave in perfecting this historic study.

We may close this introductory chapter with the sig-
nificant words of Plutarch : * " Concerning the virtues of

* Plutarch, Concerning the Virtues of Women. Morals, Boston,
1870, Little, Brown & Co., vol. i. pp. 340, 341.

INTRODUCTION. 13

women, 0 Cleanthes, I am not of the same mind with
Thucydides. For he would prove that she is the best
woman concerning whom there is the least discourse made
by people abroad, either to her praise or dispraise; judg-
ing that, as the person, so the very mime of a good woman
ought to be retired and not gad abroad. But to us Gor-
gias seems more accurate, who requires that not only the
face but the fame of a woman should be known to many.
For the Roman law seems exceeding good, which permits
due praises to be given publicly both to men and to women
after death.

" Neither can a man truly any way better learn the re-
semblance and difference between feminine and virile vir-
tue than by comparing together lives with lives, exploits
with exploits, as the product of some great art ; duly con-
sidering whether the magnanimity of Semiramis carries
with it the same character and impression with that of
Sesostris, or the cunning of Tanaquil the same with that
of King Servius, or the discretion of Porcia the same with
that of Brutus, or that of Pelopidas with Timoclea, re-
garding that quality of these virtues wherein lie their
chiefest point and force."

CHAPTER II.

THE FOOD BKINGEK.

To cook the dinner, to name the dishes, and to serve
the repast is indeed a burdensome task in these days ; but
the primitive aristologist was more grievously puzzled,
though she had not so many courses in her dinner nor so
much crocker v to worry about.

The division of labour at present requires the whole
earth to be ransacked that one may entertain his friends.
In early times, on the contrary, a chief might dine his
neighbour chief in grandest fashion, and a little coterie of
women, styled his wives, would make the whole prepara-
tion. In this chapter we are to note the multiplicity of
industries set agoing bv woman in prehistoric times for the
supply of aliment to mankind, in which she brings food
and drink, and even medicine, to the use of her family.

To feed the flock under her immediate care, woman
had to become an inventor, and it is in this activity of
her mind that she is specially interesting here. The hen
scratches for her chicks all day long, because Nature has
fastened her hoes and rakes and cutting apparatus upon
her body. But here stands a creature on the edge of Time
who had to create the implements of such industry. It is
true that all the ages and all experiences and examples of
the zoological world were around her. So had they been
around other creatures. But the power to associate new
ideas constantly and independently were to be for the first
time her peculiar endowment as a bringer of food.

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THE FOOD BRINGER. 15

Upon three kingdoms of Nature she made requisition
to furnish aliment for her species. Each one of these sup-
plied her with food substances, with the means of manipu-
lating them, and with the possibility of serving and stor-
ing them. Her ingenious mind accepted the problem and
solved it.

In each of these kingdoms, when the light of history
rose upon her, the work was nearly done. She had ex-
plored them and selected in each the best for her purposes.

In her exploitation of the vegetable world woman first
appears as taking from the hands of Nature those fruits
and other parts of the plant that are ready for consump-
tion without further preparation. On the next journey
she ventured a step further. With digging stick and car-
rying basket she went to search out roots and such other
parts of plants as might be prepared for consumption by
roasting or perhaps by boiling with hot stones. On her
third journey she gathered seeds of all kinds, but espe-
cially the seeds of grasses, which at her hand were to un-
dergo a multitude of transformations. Wherever tribes
of mankind have gone women have found out by and by
that great staple productions were to be their chief reli-
ance. In Polynesia it is taro and bread fruit. In Africa
it is the palm and tapioca, the millet and yams. In Asia
it is rice, in Europe the cereals, and in America corn and
potatoes, and acorns or pifions in some places. The whole
industrial life of woman is built up around these staples.
From the first journey on foot to procure the raw mate-
rial until the food is served and eaten there is a line of
trades that are continuous and that are born of the envi-
ronment. The occupations necessarily grouped around
any vegetal industry are the gathering of the plant or
parts to be utilized, the transportation of the harvest from
the field to the place of storage, the activities necessary to
change a raw foodstuff into an elaborated product, and,

IQ WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

lastly, the cooking and serving of the meal. It may be
stated with much certitude, though there are noteworthy
exceptions, that all of these processes in savagery were the
function of woman, and in their performance she includes
within herself a multitude of callings, some of which now
belong largely to men.

In the myth of the aged Navajo and his family, told
by Matthews, we read : " Every day while the sons were
gone the old man busied himself cutting down saplings
with his stone ax and building a house, and the daughters
gathered seeds, which constituted the only food of the
family." * The Navajos belong to the Athapascan family
of the northwestern part of Canada, where the women are
very industrious in other matters. They learned the seed
industry after they moved to the southwestern portions of
the Union in a manner now to be explained.

The Panamint woman, of Death Valley, California, of
Shoshonean stock, in harvesting the sand-grass seed [Ory-
zopsis membranacea) carries in one hand a small funnel-
shaped basket and in the other a paddle made of wicker-
work, resembling a tennis racket. With this she beats
the grass panicles over the rim of the basket, causing the
seeds to fall inside. When the basket becomes filled she
takes it on her back, holding it in place with her two
hands brought over her shoulders, or by means of a soft
band of buckskin across her forehead. f This woman's
ancestors taught the daughters of the aged Navajo in the
myth to gather seeds and feed their family.

The thousand and one manipulations at the hands of
women formerly practiced on vegetal substances prepara-
tory to consumption were all anticipatory of methods

* Matthews's Mountain Chant, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p.
389.

f F. V. Coville, American Anthropologist, Washington, 1892, vol.
v, p. 354.

THE FOOD BIMNGER.

11

now in operation on a grander scale. They were the prede-
cessors of harvesters, waggons and freight trains, gran-
aries and elevators, mills and bakeries. The little wicker
basket, holding about a barrel, set up in some northern
California hut to preserve acorns, the larger granaries in

Fig. 5. — Bean Gkanaez, Mohave Indians, Southern California.

(After flenshaw.)

the Mojave country, the pretty structures conspicuous in
the pictures of African villages, are all familiar now on the
farm and in the great grain elevators.

One has only to glance at the many illustrations of
granaries in such a work as Schweinfurth's Artes Africans *
to learn the origin of Mohammedan domes. The author
just named says : " The receptacles for corn in these curi-

* Artes Africanae, Leipsic. 1875, Brockhaus, pi. xx. Also in
other plates. Holub, Fl'ihrer durch das Museum, etc., Prag, 1892,
Otta., p. 27.

IS WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

ous structures, formed of unburnt clay taken from the
mushroom-shaped structures of the termites, are very
artistically connected on the top of the pile by means of a
basketlike scaffolding, and in a most regular manner or-
namented by several mouldings. Equally protected from
moisture and from the teeth of termites and rats, these
storehouses for corn, always situated near to the dwelling
huts, are also through their height more difficult of access
to thieves."

In this role of inventing the granary and protecting
food from vermin the world has to thank woman for the
domestication of the cat. There may be some dispute as to
who has the honour of subduing the dog and the milk- and
fleece-yielding animals. But woman tamed the wild-cat for
the protection of her granaries. Of the time when this
heartless beast laid clown its arms and enlisted in her
service no one knoweth. Already at the dawn of written
history in Egypt the cat was sacred to Sekhet, or Pasht,
dauo-hter of Ra and wife of Ptah. Then as now the
cat and the goddess had among their other qualifications
the faculty of seeing in the dark. Her method of do-
mestication was to secure the young wild-cats and rear
them about her household as playthings for her chil-
dren, and to gratify them in their instincts of prowling
and seizing.

There is abundant proof among the three typical divis-
ions of humanity still living in savagery — the American
Indian, the negroid races, and the Malayo-Polynesians —
that women were the builders and owners of the first
caches, granaries, and storehouses of provisions. A stroll
through any market house will be convincing that they
still keep up the very ancient custom of guarding bread.

When the time came to grind her seeds the woman
discovered two implements, one of which is now exalted
to the service of the apothecary, and may be seen any day

THE FOOD BRINGER. 19

over his door covered with gold leaf ; the other holds its
own as the implement of the miller.

Mortars are common enough in savagery, occurring in
the forms of stone with stone pestles, of wood with wooden
pestles, of wood with stone pestles, but stone mortars with
wooden pestles are rare. For the fabrication of these
woman was entirely competent.

The arctic women grind nothing for food, but, the
moment one passes Mount St. Elias, coming southward,
mortars occur in abundance for pulverizing dried fish.

There is then a stretch of country devoid of this ap-
paratus until the acorn and pirion region of California is
reached, when the mortar and pestle again make their ap-
pearance. In northern California the inventor has pro-
duced a unique device — a stone mortar, very shallow,
around the outer border of which she glues a hopper of
finely woven basketry, her own handiwork. In the absence
of cement, she holds the hopper down so firmly with her
limbs, while she pounds with the pestle held in her hands,
that only the fine meal escapes between the hopper and
the stone, and falls on the mat or skin upon which the
stone sits. Just across in Nevada the Shoshone squaw
selects from the mountain stream a smooth, spheroidal,
water- worn boulder of trap, granite, or lava, of convenient
size to carry from one camp to another. Constant pound-
ing upon the side most convenient gives a start, and fur-
ther use deepens the cavity. Wherever such material was
scarce or hard wood was plentif ul in the land of maize the
wooden mortar was in constant use, either with the wooden
or the stone pestle. The people of the Pacific and the
Indian Ocean had little need for mortars and pestles.
But on the Asiatic continent, for hulling rice and for
bruising food, they were in daily employ.

Africa also south of the Sahara is noted for this
method of grinding wherever the women can procure
3

20 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the necessary materials, and this has been their plan from
time immemorial. In tropical Africa,* and among all
heathen negro tribes, without exception, the work of
grinding grains devolves upon the women. It begins with
bruising the winnowed corn by means of wooden pestles
in a wooden mortar, and subsequently grinding it finer on
a large stone by aid of a smaller one. Sifting and win-
nowing effect the rest.

In the old plantation days in the United States every
farm was equipped with a mortar and pestle of wood for
hominy crushing.

" The Panamint people have learned to cultivate a
little patch by irrigation, but in their primitive condition
they ate the nut of the pine (Piniis monopliylla). In early
autumn the women beat the cones from the trees, gath-
ered them in baskets, and spread them out to dry. As
soon as the cones had cracked, the primitive harvester beat
out the nuts, raked off the cones, and gathered her crop,
which she carried on her back to a dry place among the
rocks, where she made a cache of her spoils, f When she
was ready to serve them she put them into a shallow bas-
ket with some coals, and shook the mass around until the
nuts were roasted. Thus prepared, she and her lord and
her little family either shelled and munched them with-
out further preparation, or she ground them in a wooden
mortar with a stone pestle, to be eaten dry or made into
soup. Every other edible seed this practical botanist
gathered and roasted in the same way, but some of them
were so hard that she had to grind them between two
hard, flat stones, after the manner of the Mexicans." The
method of winnowing here described was practiced every-

* Schweinf urth, Artes Africans, London, 1871, pi. vi.
f Coville, American Anthropologist, Washington, 1892, vol. v,
v, pp. 351-362.

THE FOOD BRINGER. 21

where in North America where seed food was eaten. The
illustration here cited from the Panamint represents a
common scene among tribes of the Shoshonean, Athapas-
can, Yuman, Zuiiian, Tafioan, and Keresan stocks in the
Southwestern States of the Union. Here is a veritable
Tuccia, whose sieve is not only seed proof but absolutely
waterproof. Her problem is to burn up the chaff, roast
the seed, and to gather her harvest on the blanket at her
feet.

Of the California Indian women Mr. J. F. Suvder
says : " I have seen them gathering acorns in huge conical
baskets, confined to the back by a band around the fore-
head, and then have watched them constructing the acorn
cribs in the mountains for winter storage. I have seen
them pounding the acorns in stone mortars which their
own hands had quarried, leaching the meal in a sand filter
to take out the bitter taste, and cooking the mush in
water-tight baskets with hot stoues. Along many of the
streams there are bare flat ledges of rock in which the
squaws have worked numerous holes, eight to ten inches
deep, which they use as acorn mortars, pounding them
with long stone pestles." Here we have in one woman
harvester, builder, carrier, miller, and stone worker.

The second class of implements for grinding seeds
were in the nature of mills — and women grinding at a mill
have passed into a proverb.

If a great stone cylinder be suspended on a shaft re-
volving on a pivot and over a similar stone which is sta-
tionary, that is the form of mill which has been in vogue
latterly up to the invention of the roller process, which is
a return to the more primitive crusher.

The same type of apparatus small enough for women
to turn is the affair of which Biblical and other ancient
writers tell us. But simpler than the pivoted Irish quern
are the metates and mullers of tropical portions of Amer-

22 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

ica. Whoever has seen a woman with tub and washboard
cleansing clothes will have no difficulty in imagining the
tub to be a box of stone, the washboard to be a slab of
hard, porous rock, and the piece of clothing to be a small
slab of the same hard material. By the selfsame free mo-
tion of the woman's body the slab is rubbed up and down

Fig. 6. — The Primitive Miller. California Indian Woman using

Metate and Miller.

and sidewise upon the nether stone, while the kneeling
miller constantly brings a small quantity of the corn be-
tween the surfaces. The amount of fineness depends
upon the time bestowed upon the work. The rectilinear
motion of the muller becomes often curvilinear in the
hand of the grinder. The metate and muller, therefore,
are older than the quern. Just how the latter is related
to the metate or to the mortar is not known. Thomson

THE FOOD BRINGER. 23

gives the following account of the hand mill in the Holy
Land :

" From this on southward through Philistia there are
no mill streams, and we shall not cease to hear the hum of
the hand mill at every village and Arab camp morning
and evening. When at work two women sit at the mill
facing each other ; both have hold of the handle by which
the upper is turned round upon the nether millstone.
The one whose hand is disengaged throws in the grain
through the hole in the upper stone. It is not correct to
say that one pushes it half round and then the other
seizes the handle. Both retain their hold. I can not
recall an instance in which men were grinding at a hand
mill.*

It is again the woman, ransacking the vegetal king-
dom, who learns to know the drinks that Kature yields.

" It is a singular sight to see a Quissama woman, in
Angola, barelegged, climb up the gigantic palm trees, with
a calabash of immense size around her neck. As soon as
the top branch is reached and she succeeds in tapping
the tree with a piece of rough iron, and finds that it gives
vent, the woman then suspends the calabash in order that
the liquid may flow into it. She then descends the tree,
and in the course of about twelve hours again climbs up,
this time to take down the calabash, which is full of palm
beer." f

In the chapter on woman as a beast of burden, and in
what follows concerning her mineral industries, will be
explained more fully the mission of woman as the guar-

* Thomson, The Land and the Book, New York, 1880, vol. i, p.
108. Figure on page 107.

f Price, J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1872, vol. i, p. 190. For the
middle American drink preparations, see Im Thurn, Indians of
British Guiana, London, 1883, p. 259 ; also numerous authors on
Polynesian Kava.

24 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

dian and patron of springs and wells and devices leading
up to our more convenient water supply and hydro-
techny.

There are in many lands plants which in the natural
state are poisonous or extremely acrid or pungent. The
women of these lands have all discovered indejiendently
that boiling or heating drives off the poisonous or disa-
greeable element. The Indians of southern California
gather the leaves and stems of several cruciferous plants,
throw them into hot water, then rinse them out in cold
water five or six times, then dry them and use them as
boiled cabbage. This washing removes the bitter taste
and certain substances which are likely to produce nausea
and diarrhoea,* The removal of poisonous matter from
tapioca by means of hot water is the discovery of savage
women.

The common reed of the Southwest (Phragmites
vulgaris) furnishes a kind of sugar. In early summer,
when the plants have attained nearly their full size, the
women cut them and dry them in the sun, after which
they grind them and separate the finer portion by sifting.
They mould the moist, sticky flour thus obtained into a
thick, gumlike mass, set it over a fire and roast it until it
swells and browns slightly, and in this taffylike state it
is eaten, f

Honey is largely an animal product, and all the primi-
tive folk had to do was to climb for it. But many sweet
fruits were cooked with flour, and meat, and fish to make
savorv dishes

Up to this point our study is with the very lowest
grades of food-getting from vegetables. But long before
the days of discoverers and explorers who wrote about
them, women in America, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific were

* Coville, op. cit., p. 354. f Ibid., p. 355.

THE FOOD-BRINGER. 25

farmers, and had learned to use the digging stick, the hoe,
and even a rude plough. Livingstone figures a double-
handled hoe that was dragged through the ground by
women.* The evolution of primitive agriculture was
first from seeking after vegetables to moving near them,
weeding them out, sowing the seed, cultivating them by
hand, and finally the use of farm animals.

The exploitation of the mineral kingdom by women
in savagery was chiefly in the search and care for water.
Their habitations were erected near to springs or streams,
and from these to the domestic hearth an uninterrupted
caravan has marched since the uses of fire. In the discus-
sion of other employments will appear the multitudinous
inventions for carrying, storing, and using water. The
effect of environment in deciding whether the vessel shall
be of skin, or bark, or wood, or pottery is worthy of at-
tention.

In speaking of the Malays, Wallace says : " Thin, long-
jointed bamboos form the Dyaks' only water vessels, and
a dozen of them stand in the corner of every house. They
are clean, light, and easily carried, and are in many ways
superior to earthen vessels for the same purpose. Water
is also brought to the houses by little aqueducts formed of
large bamboo split in half and supported on cross sticks
of various heights so as to give it a regular fall. " f

The scraping out of a spring deeper and deeper forms
a well, and the lengthening of a conducting pipe converts
it into an aqueduct or a conduit. Both of these indus-
tries had very humble origins at the hands of women.

Whether women invented the suction pump may re-
main in doubt, but the Bakalahari dames, when they wish
to draw water, provide twenty or thirty ostrich eggshells

* Travels, etc., in South Africa, New York, 1858, p. 442.
f Wallace, Malay Archipelago, New York, I860, 90.

26 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

and place them in a net. They tie a bunch of grass to
one end of a short reed for a strainer and insert the appa-
ratus in a hole as deep as the arm will reach, then ram
down the wet sand firmly round it. Applying the mouth
to the free end of the reed, they draw the water upward
by sucking, and discharge it into an ostrich shell, guiding
the stream by means of a straw. The whole stock of
water passes through the woman's mouth as a pump. The
shells are taken home and buried in wet sand for future
use.*

The first article one notices on entering a modern
kitchen is a knife. It may be in Japan, it may be in
Aryan countries. No cook, purveyor, or commissary can
do without a knife. Most of these articles are stamped
" Sheffield," which I take to be a synonym for all peaceful
knife-makers in the world. If in Sheffield men make
swords and bayonets and daggers and spears and battle
axes, that does not appear. They are cutlers, and that
leads to the question, Who were the first cutlers, the real
founders of Sheffield ? When a Roman soldier was armed
with a knife he was called cultellarius, which is not very
good Latin. Cultellulus was a little knife; cultellus, a
small knife ; and culter, a ploughshare, also a vintner's
knife, a butcher knife, a cooking knife, a knife in general.
As woman was the leading character in the first rendition
of all these homely dramas, it matters not which definition
we use as a test — she was the primitive cutler.

The men of those early times made weapons and all
the paraphernalia of their daily use, and so did their fe-
male companions chip off the spall or flake of flinty rock
to make their knives withal. They each carried at their
sides a hard bit of bone, answering in every respect to the

* Livingstone, Travels and Researches in South Africa, New
York, 1858, p. 59.

THE FOOD BR1NGER. 27

butcher's steel, and gave therewith from time to time new
edge to their homely cutlery.

And while we are looking at this rude implement we
may follow the owner through a series of employments in-
volving its use. The husband has slain the deer, the elk,
the moose, the musk ox, the bear, the buffalo, and there
his share of the operation ends. The woman must now
go out to the game equipped to transport the slain victim
home, or she must — on her sledge or on her back — get it
near her door. Her role of pack animal will be noticed
later on. She removes the skin and rolls it up,* and then
divides the carcass for immediate consumption or to be
dried. In these she is a butcher, and the whole earth are
her shambles. This meat she then proceeds to apportion
according to the rules of her tribe and her clan.f

The Eskimo women have a knife precisely like the
mincing choppers in every kitchen, which they use at
present for all sorts of work. But is it not interesting to
find dainty little women almost at the jumping-off place
of the globe holding on to the primeval form of an im-
plement as well as its use whose modern representative
does service both in our kitchens and our saddler shops ?
The saddler and his wife now divide between them an im-
plement which many thousands of years ago would have
been hers alone, and he would have been defiled to touch
it. With it, in that early day, she made harness for dogs
and for herself to wear, besides cutting out clothing and
tents, skinning animals, and mincing food.

This same butcher and cook, in one, invented another
industry in this connection and fabricated another stone
implement. There are seasons on the plains of the great

* For her treatment of the hide see Chapter VII.
t Cf. Dodge. Our Wild Indians, Hartford, 1883, p. 253. Com-
pare Dorsey, Third An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., 293.

28 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

West — on the borders of desert regions everywhere, for
that matter — where the aridity of the atmosphere is suffi-
cient to cure meat and fish without the aid of salt. The
Indian women would in the aboriginal days cut buffalo
and other meat into thin strips, hang it out to dry in the
sun, and then take a stick or flail and beat it until it was
perfectly fine. What a curious thrashing floor was that !

Fig. 7. — The Pemuican Maker pounding Cherries and Dried Buffalo
Meat — Sioux Indians, Dakota. (After Jungling.)

With a stone mall — their own handiwork — made by
pecking a groove in a boulder of the proper shape, fasten-
ing a hickory handle about this groove, and incasing han-
dle and head in wet rawhide until it shrunk and bound
all fast and strong, they crushed the bones of the animals
slain and extracted the marrow.

The pulverized meat was then sewed up in sacks of
buffalo rawhide and the melted marrow and other choice
fat poured over it, exactly as the country housewife to this

THE FOOD BRINGER. 29

very day imbeds sausages in jars of hog's lard to keep them
over for future seasons of scarcity. When this became
solid it was called pemmican, and the cleverly made malls
may be seen in any ethnological museum.

This pemmican was used by the Indians as an article
of barter. In old times it was eaten by United States
troops for rations, and is said to have been extremely nu-
tritious, though malodorous.

This same mall served the good women other pur-
poses. With it they broke the dry wood of the forest for
faggots, drove down the tent pins, and, on occasion, gave
the coup de grace to their enemies.

It is a little difficult to sum up the operations in this
daily act of drudfferv, each of which would demand a
separate manufactory, such as stone cutter, wood worker,
rawhide manufacturer, meat curer, inventor of a mechan-
ism of exchange, all in addition to the fundamental busi-
ness of feeding her clan.

The bone-breaking malls are most widely distributed.
Captain Ray brought from Point Barrow choice specimens
in the jade of that region, made in shape of cylinders,
having handles of reindeer antler lashed on with thongs
of walrus rawhide.

In many parts of the world broken bones have been
found in shell heaps, etc., among the debris of feasts, and
the apparatus for breaking them could also have been
discovered ; but the ancient cook, I fear, has been usually
voted a stupid thing, who would extract marrow as mon-
keys open cocoanuts — namely, with the first rock they
could pick up.

The butcher's cleaver is also a grandchild of the
woman's bone-breaking mall of stone.

The cooking of vegetal substances in savagery under-
went an evolution something like the following: 1, parch-
ing, as we do popcorn and peanuts ; 2, roasting or baking

30 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

in pits with hot stones ; 3, in the form of mush or gruel ;
4, as griddle cakes, often very thin ; 5, as hominy, rice,
potatoes, etc., boiled in a pot, either on the fire or with
hot stones. Bread, except as thick griddle cakes, is un-
known in savagery. The Scotch oatcakes and bannocks
of pea or barley meal, the scones of the East Indies, the
Passover cakes of the Israelites, the dampers of Australia,
the hoe cake in the United States, are all of a kind — flour
mixed with water and heated, which makes the starch
more soluble. An excellent example of parching has
been given in Mr. Coville's account of the Panamint
woman. In addition to his account of roasting in pits
with stones, it will be curious to note this custom in Poly-
nesia. Indeed, this is a matter of such importance that
professional men cooks supersede the women in the prep-
aration of food pits.*

" ' If there be any one discovery owing to chance, it is
that of leaven. The world was indebted to the economy
of some person or other for this happy discovery, who, in
order to save a little dough, mixed it with the new. They
would, no doubt, be surprised to find that this old dough,
so sour and distasteful itself, rendered the new bread so
much lighter, more savoury, and easy of digestion.' f More
probably leaven arose in hot countries, in the preference
shown for the acid flavour of stale porridge (compare the
practice of adding curds to fresh milk in order to turn it
sour for immediate consumption), as in the caffa or por-
ridge ball of Guinea, which is considered insipid while
fresh (Lander)." J

The most primitive of all meat or fish cooking was the
roast or the toast — that is, the bit of meat or the fish was

* Consult Payne, History of America, New York. 1892, vol. i,
p. 334.

f Goguet, Origin of Laws, vol. i, p. 105.
% Payne, loc. cit.

THE FOOD BRINGER.

31

hung on a stick in front of the fire or wrapped in harm-
less leaves and buried in the ashes. There did not seem

cMsy

wT-

Fig. 8. — Tuscan Vintners — Carrying on the Head, the Shoulder, and

the Side.

to be any demand for patent attorneys in that. The pro-
cesses have been invented over and over again, and the fire-
place could scarcely be dignified with the name of hearth.

32 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Out-of-door ovens, pits lined with stones on which
fires had been kindled and coals accumulated, were known
by very primitive tribes, and some of the patterns will be
described ; but our concern is with cooking devices. And
this brings the aristologist to the cooking pot. Frying
pans were of much later origin.

Now the savage cuisiniere had her choice from the
beginning to bring her pot to the fire or to bring her fire
to the pot. In the latter case she found a mortar-shaped
rock, or made a water-tight basket, or hollowed out with
stone tools and fire brands a log of wood, or dug a hole
in the ground and lined it with rawhide or woven stuff.
Into this she put her meat or mush, and also clean hot
stones, which kept the pot a-boiling. In the former case
she had to become a stone worker or a potter in order to
put the cooking vessel on the fire.

In the chapter on the weaver the method of manu-
facturing the basketry cooking pot will be set forth, and
in the chapter on the potter attention will be paid to
the origin of cooking-dishes. Here the boiling trough
and the " olla," or cooking pot of stone, will be de-
scribed.

Whether women actually felled trees with stone axes
it is a little difficult to ascertain. Certain it is that they
helped in the work by the dexterous use of fire. As soon as
the tree was felled, or taking advantage of the wind giant's
sport, they burned and hacked off a convenient length of
the trunk ; then, gathering from the forests a supply of fat
pine knots, they burned out the cavity of the future boiler.
They carefully watched the progress of the fire, and when
it threatened to spread laterally, they checked its course
in that direction by means of strips of green bark or mud
or water. As soon as the ashes and charred wood pre-
vented the further action of the fire, this marvellous Grill-
at-all-trades removed the fire and brushed out the debris

THE FOOD BRINGER. 33

with an improvised broom * of grass. Then, by means of
a scraper of flint which she had made, she dug away the
charcoal until she had exposed a clean surface of wood.
The firing and scraping were repeated until the " dug-
out " assumed the desired form. The trough completed,
it was ready to do the boiling for the family as soon as
the meat could be prepared and the stones heated. This
apprenticeship of fire in woodworking calls for woman's
help in more industries than one not strictly her own.

Every savage knows that stones heated and brought in
contact with water are fractured hopelessly. But there
is an exception to this rule in the class of rocks usually
called soapstone, steatite, potstone. The aboriginal min-
eralogist, after scouring the earth, discovered this fact.
All over Eskimo land both lamps and cooking pots are
made of this material. In one locality, where it seems to
be absent, mud from the tundra is wrought into a rude
pottery for the same purpose. Quarries of soapstone, an-
ciently worked, have been found in eastern North Amer-
ica, and in them not only fragments of broken pots, but
the quartzite tools with which the quarrying and the scrap-
ing out were done. The fragments lately discovered reveal
the fact that the shallow, open, tray-shaped vessel of the
Algonquin resembled that of the Eskimo. But one must
go to southern California, among the graves of the ex-
tinct tribes of the Santa Barbara islands and the mainland
opposite, to get acquainted with a very dainty stone-work-
ing woman. The steatite pots of that region are almost
globular, the mouths are only a few inches in diameter,
and the walls are in many examples less than an inch in
thickness. Many are capable of holding several gallons,

* The early occurrence of the broom is quite significant in this
connection, admitted on all sides to be in our day one of the indus-
trial perquisites of the sex.

34; WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

and numbers of them show long-continued exposure to
fire. The etymologists of our language seem to be in
doubt whether the word " seethe " meant originally to
burn as a sacrifice or to boil. At any rate, long before
Jacob sod pottage for his father there were abundance of
seething pots all over the world, made of wood, or grass,
or stone, or clay, as Nature furnished the material, and
good women invented the art and apparatus for boiling
food.

The elaboration of the dinner pot was a work of the
asres. The traders who first visited the North American
Indians could have offered no better boon to the women
than the brass kettles and the faithful iron pot. At the
same time they placed in the hands of the men the gun,
the pistol, the iron arrowhead. What the latter did has
been written ; the former has scarcelv been mentioned.

These kettles received by the Indian women were the
acme of a long series of inventions beginning with a bit
of soapstone that would not crack in the fire.

The earliest pots had no legs, but were propped up by
loose stones against the base, serving the twofold purpose
of preventing the tipping of the vessel and of lifting it up
to allow the air to circulate thereunder and to create a
draught.

One sunny day a company of savage women were alter-
nately chatting and chipping in a soapstone quarry, when
it occurred to one of them to leave a bit of the stone pro-
jecting here and there for legs. Happy thought ! No
sooner said than done. And after that all soapstone pots
had legs.

Whether it was the stimulating sunshine that bright-
ened the woman's wits, or the purely accidental leaving
of an ugly hump or two that proved to be blessings in dis-
guise, or seeing the birds hopping around on legs, that
suggested the leaving the bits of stone on the pot, no one

THE FOOD BRINGER. 35

knows. It was much safer and easier than propping up
a round -bottomed pot, and so it went into use.

There are, indeed, among ethnologists opposing schools
of interpreting this simple act, some minimizing the poor
woman's share therein, others giving her all the praise and
Nature none.

Before dismissing the patient creature who all this
time has been practicing for our instruction a multiplicity
of arts it may not be amiss to ask her what is done with
the fish and flesh that is not immediately to be cooked.
To this she would reply, " This portion will be smoked,
another will be sun-dried and ground and packed in mar-
row, as explained in describing the pemmican mall." If
she were asked why she did not cure it with salt, she would
say no savage woman ever thought of that. Salted food
is a product of civilization.*

These same people dried clams, oysters, fish, and meat.

Mrs. Allison, in her account of the Simalkameen In-
dians, of Canada, produces a bill of fare provided by the
women so diversified and elaborate that I beg leave to
copy it : " Formerly their food consisted of venison, fresh
and dried game of all kinds, beaver tails and bears' paws
being esteemed as dainties. The seeds of the sunflower
pounded furnished a sort of flour that was made into cakes.
The root of the sputtum was dug in the spring, and
eaten either boiled with the bark of the service berry or
dried. The cactus was roasted and eaten with meat. The
stitome (a sort of wild potato), growing abundantly in wet
land, was gathered in its season. Various edible fungi
in the earth or in the woods were much used. The long
black lichens on which the deer fed were gathered and
soaked a long time in the river ; a pit was then dug and

*Lord. Mackenzie, Poole, Vancouver, Dunn, Mofras, Pemberton,
Parker, quoted in Bancroft, Native Races, vol. i.
4

36 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

lined first with a layer of hot stones; over these a layer of
green branches was placed ; the wet lichens were then
put in the pit and covered with another layer of green
branches, and more stones and weeds ; the whole was then
earthed over. When the pit was opened some days later
the lichen was found to have run into a substance resem-
bling India rubber in taste and tenacity. This was cut
into cakes, but it is not much wonder that the delicacy
has been given up. The berry of the milshettleman (or
nic-a-nac) was called ike, and when dried and pounded
was used as sweetening. The nic-a-nac, or kinnikinic, is an
evergreen creeping plant with a brilliant red berry. The
leaves are still dried and smoked when tobacco is scarce.
The wild onions are still dug and cooked in pits in the
manner of cooking lichens. There are numerous edible
roots ; the bulb of the tiger lily and a yellow snowdrop are
much used, also a kind of celery. Lebine is made from
the soap berry, which is beaten with the hand in water till
it forms a stiff froth resembling soapsuds. There is a tea,
said to possess many virtues, which the Hudson's Bay
Company tried to introduce into England under the name
of Labrador tea. The service berry was a staple with the
Simalkameens. When the berries were ripe mats were laid
under the bushes, and the berries beaten off them on to
the mats and dried in the sun. A portion was then re-
served for home consumption ; the rest were put in sacks
made of rushes strung together by threads of wild hemp,
and traded with either the Hope or Okanagan Indians for
dried salmon or water-tight baskets, in the manufacture of
which the Hope Indians excelled.'1 *

The Nutka women of Vancouver Island had fourstvles
of serving food, says Bancroft :

* Mrs. S. S. Allison, J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1892, vol. xxi,
p. 308.

THE FOOD BRINGER, 37

1. Boiled — the mode par excellence applicable to every
kind of food, and effected by hot stones in wooden vessels,
carved out of the giant cedar wood with great skill.

2. Steamed — of rarer use — by pouring water over the
food laid on a bed of hot stones, and covered over tightly
with mats.

3. Roasted — rarely practiced, except with smaller fish,
and clams.

4. Raw, as in the case of fish spawn, and, indeed,
any other kind of food when conveniences were not at
hand.*

Among the ancient Mexicans the preparation of food
was most elaborate. Maize, when in the milk, was eaten
boiled ; when dry it was parched or roasted ; but the com-
monest form of serving dry corn was in the form of tor-
tillas, the standard bread, then as now, in all Latin Amer-
ica. The women boiled the corn in limewater. When
the hulls would come off freely the mass was crushed on a
metate with a muller or roller, and was then kneaded by
the hands of the women into thin, round cakes, and baked
on earthen or stone griddles. Sometimes they were
flavoured with plants or flowers. There were many kinds
of this tortilla bread, varying with the kinds of corn, the
degree of fineness of the flour, and the recipe for prepara-
tion. Atoll i was a kind of thick gruel. The mashed corn
was mixed with water and boiled down, variously sweet-
ened and seasoned, and eaten both hot and cold. Beans
(frijoles) were eaten green or dry or ground into flour.

Chili or pepper was likewise treated. A sauce was
also made from it, f6rming their only spice. Fish, flesh,

* Bancroft, Native Races, New York, 1874-76, vol. i, p. 187. See
references under " Women," vol. v, p. 787. Upon Indian bills of
fare also consult Morgan. N. A. Rev., 1869 and 1870, on the Food
Preparations of the Columbia Region : and Matthews, Navajo Moun-
tain Chant, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 430.

38 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

and fowl, salted and fresh, were stewed, boiled, and roasted
in every conceivable proportion, the product taking a dif-
erent name with every change of ingredients.*

Next to chili, says Bancroft, salt or iztatl was the con-
diment most used by the ancient Mexicans, and most of
the supply came from the valley of Mexico. The best
was made by boiling the water from the salt lake in large
pots, and was preserved in white cakes or balls. It was
oftener, however, led by trenches into shallow pools and
evaporated by the sun. The work would seem to have
been done by women, since Sahagun speaks of the women
and girls employed in this industry as dancing at the
feast in honour of the goddess of salt in the month of
Tecuilhuitontli.f

The Indian women of Guiana are excellent purveyors.
They have but one way of cooking meat or fish, and that
is by boiling it down into a sort of thick soup, with
peppers and cassareep, or the juice of strained cassava
boiled down to a sirup. The cassareep reduces all meat to
one common flavour — its own — and has antiseptic qual-
ities which keep meat boiled in it good for a long time.
The result is the far-famed pepper pot, which all settlers
in the West Indies have learned to make and to like.

The staple vegetable food is afforded by the roots of
cassava (Manihot utilissima), which are made into bread.

No scene is more characteristic of Indian life than
that of women preparing cassava. One woman, squatting
on her hams and armed with a big knife, peels off the
skin of the root and washes it. Another woman, grasp-
ing one of the roots with both hands, scrapes it up and
down an oblong board or grater studded with small frag-

* The whole subject of Nahua cuisine is well worked out in Ban-
croft, Native Races, New York, 1874-76, vol. ii, pp. 354-357, with
references to many ancient authorities.

f Bancroft, Native Races, New York, 1874-76, vol. ii. p. 353.

THE FOOD BRING ER. 39

merits of stone like a nutmeg grater. One end of the
grater stands in a trough, the other rests on the woman's
knees. It is violent exercise. As the woman scrapes, her
body swings down and up again from the hips. The
rhythmic " swish ' caused by the scraping is the chief
sound in the house, for the labour is too heavy to per-
mit talking. The grated cassava is placed into a long
sieve or matapie so woven that a weight on the bottom
will compress and open the sides, and we have press and
strainer in one. The cassava, saturated with its poison-
ous juices, is forced into this matapie and suspended from
one of the beams of the house. Through a loop in the
bottom of the matapie a heavy pole is passed, one end of
which rests on the ground. A woman now sits on the
pole, and her weight stretches the strainer and forces the
poisonous juice, which is caught in a vessel below. This
is afterward boiled, and becomes cassareep. The cassava
is taken from the matapie, broken, sifted, and baked into
griddle cakes, which are dried in the sun. The cooking
is done after the following fashion : A large flat slab of
stone is placed over a fire, and on this griddle a thin layer
of meal is spread. A woman, fan in hand, sits by the fire
watching. With her fan she smoothes the upper surface
of the cake and makes its edges round. In a few min-
utes one side is done, and when the cake is turned it is
done in two minutes more. They are next thrown on the
roof to dry, and I have often vainly tried to imitate the skill
with which an Indian woman "quoits" up one of these
large and thin cakes on to the roof, often high above her
head. When thoroughly dried the bread is hard and crisp.
Of the starchy matter remaining in the wickerwork
matapie, called emov, the Carib women make a cake which
is half gelatinous and has a pleasant subacid flavour.*

* Im Thurn, Indians of British Guiana, London, 1883, pp. 259-265.

40 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

This rather extended account of pepper pot and cas-
sava is introduced to show how diversified may be the in-
dustries of a savage woman. By reading again the
description, the Oarib woman will be seen in the role of
potter, butcher, cook, beast of burden, fire maker and
tender, miller, stonecutter (stone-griddle maker), most
delicate and ingenious weaver, engineer (devising a me-
chanical press and sieve in one woven bag and using a
lever of the third kind), baker, and preserver of food.
Add to this her function of brewer, and you have no mean
collection of primitive industries performed by one little
body, all of which underlie occupations which in our day
involve the outlay of millions of dollars and the co-oper-
ation of thousands of men.

CHAPTER III.

THE WEAVER.

There is no work of woman's fingers that furnishes a
better opportunity for the study of techno-geography, or
the relationship existing between an industry and the
region where it may have been developed, than the textile
art. Suppose a certain kind of raw material to abound
in any area or country : you may be sure that savage
women searched it out and developed it in their crude
way. Furthermore, the peculiar qualities and idiosyncra-
sies of each substance suggest and demand a certain treat-
ment. Women of the lowest grades of culture have not
been slow in discovering this ; so that between them and
the natural product there has been a kind of understand-
ing or co-operation leading to local styles. If these
women were moved far away, they carried oftentimes these
processes with them and plied the old trade upon such
strange materials as they discovered in the new home.
The negro women, transported formerly as slaves from
Africa to tropical America, found palm trees growing in
the Western Hemisphere. They continued to make here
the type of coiled basketry they had made in Africa. It
is not surprising, therefore, to come upon this art in two
hemispheres. In some cases where Indian men have mar-
ried negro women the mothers have taught the daughters
their own arts, and these have come, after a few genera-
tions, to consider the arts as indigenous.

It is customary to divide woman's textile industry in

(41)

42 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

savagery into basket work and weaving. The former art
employs more rigid materials, has some stitches of its own,
and the products of its operations are vessels made com-
plete in the working.

Weaving, par excellence, is the production of a flat
textile. It employs usually softer material, its meshes or
stitches are plainer, and its products are mats, bags, sails,
garments, and the like. The distinction between bas-
ketry and weaving, at first, is not well defined, and it will
be profitable to consider them together under forms or
types of meshes or stitches.

Subsidiary to these chief divisions of the textile art as
practiced by women in savagery are spinning, netting,
looping, braiding, sewing, and embroidery. Bark-cloth
beating, described further on, though Nature does the
weaving in this case, is practiced by females in the tropics
all round the world.

Each and all of these require tools which the work-
women must fashion for themselves. And, though the
earth had the raw materials in abundance, it did not yield
them without a search which would do honour to the
manufacturers of our day.

Basketry in its coarsest form is the making of crates,
winding brush in and out to keep the wind or the sun
from the wretched habitation, wattling rods and twigs
into fish weirs and game drives. There are no savages
on earth so rude that they have no form of basketry. The
birds and beasts are basket-makers, and some fishes con-
struct for themselves little retreats where they may hide.
Long before the fire maker, the potter, or even the cook,
came the mothers of the Fates, spinning threads, drawing
them out, and cutting them off. Coarse basketry or mat-
ting is found charred in very ancient sepulchres. With
few exceptions, women, the wide world over, are the
basket-makers, netters, and weavers. The tools of the bas-

THE WEAVER.

43

ket-maker are of the simplest character — those necessary
to the harvesting of the material and those used in mann-
facture As baskets are made of wood in one place, of
bark in another, and of grass, bast, skins, roots, and so
forth, according to locality, the tools for harvesting and
preparing the material must vary from tribe to tribe. But
the one tool that is never absent is the bone awl or stiletto,

Fig. 9. — Moki Fruit Picker's Basket, Arizona. (After Mason.)

which is useful with every type of manufacture, and is
ever present in the graves of primitive women.

In civilization we are somewhat puzzled in our con-
ception of the word " basket," thinking it always to be
something like the homely objects displayed about our

44 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

market houses, manufactured by a weaving of pliable
splints over a rigid warp. Here and there, even in this
coarse modern ware, a diaper effect is secured by the
method of crossing the weft and warp, and a fanciful curl
will be seen around the borders now and then ; but the
general plan of weaving is the same. Most of these ex-
amples were made by men.

On the contrary, aboriginal woman's basketry excites
the admiration of all lovers of fine work. It is difficult to
say which receives the most praise — the forms, the colour-
ing, the patterns, or the delicacy of manipulation.

Primarily, her basketry divides itself into two sorts or
types — the woven and the sewed, the former built up on a
warp, the latter produced by the continuous stitching of
a coil. Of these two main classes there are many sub-
classes, which have been necessitated bv the nature of the
material which the fabricator has at her hands and by
the uses to which the products have to be put.

Woven basketry occurs in the form of plain weaving,
wickerwork, and twined weaving. A diaper effect is pos-
sible in each. Plain or chequer wreaving is effected when
warp and weft are made of fillets having the same thick-
ness and flexibility. The effect is that of the commonest
bagging or cotton cloth. The bottoms of our common
splint hampers are chiefly made thus.

Now, when the pristine artist desired to vary this
chequer type, she had several possible methods from
which to choose.

Among the Algonquin tribes of North America the
women had learned that birch and other woods grow in
layers. They also discovered that by beating a log or stick
of this wood at the proper time of the year the annual
rings or layers could be made to peel off. This gave them
thick shavings of tough wood, of uniform thickness, which
they could cut into ribbons and weave into chequer-

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THE WEAVER. 45

work basketry. The bottom of a Polynesian basket and
of an Algonquian basket look precisely alike, though of
quite diverse material. In the tribes along the Pacific
coast of Washington and British Columbia women treat
the tough cedar bark in the same way, and, following the
Algonquian method, a great many civilized basket-makers
manufacture coarse market hampers in the checker
pattern.

One step upward from this plain work was secured
when the weaver bethought herself to let each strip over-
lap two or more instead of one warp strip. This would
secure on the surface, still flat, a diaper or diagonal effect,
the same as in fine linen weaving. Examine a fish wallet
from the Clallams, of the State of Washington, or, much
finer, the black and brown ware from Guiana, and it will
be seen that the tasteful effect was secured by the simple
counting of one, two, three, over and under, from begin-
ning to end.

Further ornamentation of chequer basketry is effected,
either in plain or diaper varieties, by dyeing the strips of
different colours and working them with proper alterna-
tion, producing geometric designs of great beaut}7.

Finally, these ingenious savages had not failed to dis-
cover that the thin strips need not be all of the same
width. This was a very happy thought, enabling the
weavers to achieve such effects as we should get by manu-
facturing cloth from ribbons of varying widths and col-
ours. The Samoan Islanders were very happy in this
style, using only black and white strips of palm leaf.

Imagine, now, that the savage woman in her wander-
ing has come to the country of twigs, of osiers, of rattan,
of reeds, and has got somewhat out of the track of palm-
leaf, or cedar-bark, or hard- wood splints. Her effort to
produce plain, flat chequer weaving would not succeed.
Just as likely as not women learned their first lesson on

40 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

twigs and wattling ; in that case, by reducing the size of
her material, she arrived at the door of the modern basket-
maker. Her ware became wickerwork by an understand-
ing between her and her material. The philosophy of the
texture is that the warp splints or sticks remain practi-

W//f/mm£mm

wf/fff/ WlwBB,

WMmSSm

yhic"

Fig. 11. — Twined Weaving by Hupa Woman, Nobthebn California.

(After Mason.)

cally rigid, and the weft pieces bend out and in, over and
under the warp pieces, in alternate rows. This gives to
the surface of all such work a ridged or wavy appearance.
Still keeping within the notion of weaving, we now
come to a type of basketry which must have been in use
before womankind separated over the earth at all. I have

THE WEAVER. 47

elsewhere called it the " twined pattern," because the weft
is a genuine two-ply twine. It can be easily learned, and
its possibilities are endless. In one country it will be
made of the root of the spruce, in the next of bark, in the
next of twigs, and before we shall have gone the round we
shall find twisted threads of the finest material wrought
therein.

The warp of this kind of ware is rigid, and is designed
to be entirely concealed. The woof is double. That is,
the basket-maker takes two weft strands around at a time
and gives them a half twist or half twine between each
pair of warp strands, pushing her twine down close upon
the preceding as she goes on. This last step is not neces-
sary, however, as many open-work pieces are to be seen.

If the reader will think a moment, or drive a few pins
in a row along a soft board, and with a coloured and a
white cord make a row or two of twined weaving back-
ward and forward, what I am about to explain will be
better understood.

In the first place, the twines can be driven so close
together as to make the vessel water-tight. Many of the
pots in which the aborigines boiled their food by means
of heated stones are made after this fashion.

Again, if the root or grass be homogeneous in size
throughout, the effect will be uniform and extremely pleas-
ing. Furthermore, by using two colours ia the twine each
row will be spotted and the spots of adjacent rows up and
down may match or alternate so as to give rise to an end-
less variety of geometric effects. Once this style was mas-
tered by any tribe, its capabilities were illimitable. Many
thousands of specimens of pottery are found in the East-
ern United States marked on the surface with this very
twined weaving, showing that women before the advent
of the whites were familiar with it.

So primitive is the twined style of basketry that speci-

48 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

mens from East Africa resemble almost undistinguishably
others from Alaska. The wattling is so simple as to sug-
gest itself again and again to various peoples. Yet this
very twined or wattled style is capable of the most deli-
cate finish on the surface. In the first place, both ele-
mentary strands of each twine or either one may be ]3lain
or dyed. And the combination may be changed at each
round or at any time. This fact alone gives to the basket
woman the greatest possible scope of decoration. But, as
at each half turn or twine she has a double stitch, half in-
side and half outside her basket, it is possible to embroider
any figure she likes entirely on the outside without going
more than half through the texture. The figure will be
on the outside and not appear on the inside at all. Fur-
thermore, there is nothing to prevent her twining her
strands across two or more warp twigs, which, indeed, she
does, producing a diaper effect all over the surface. The
most beautiful specimens of this twined ware embroidered
on the outside are wrought by the women of southeastern
Alaska ; but the Shoshone and Apache women weave a
coarser variety and dip it into hot pitch to make inde-
structible water bottles. These far excel goatskins, or
pottery, or metal canteens for durability and lightness.

The African women practice the twined stitch chiefly
on flexible sacks. In the mound and surface pottery left
by the ancient Americans, frequent marks of this twined
or string weaving are deeply imbedded, leaving the con-
viction that nets or baskets were used by the ancient
potters.

The second class of basketry is the coiled or sewed
variety. The most simple as well as the most beautiful
types come from Siam and the other lands of the bamboo.
The basket-maker provides herself -with a number of small
rods and a quantity of split bamboo of uniform thickness.
The rods are coiled like a wratch spring, and united firmly

THE WEAVER. 49

by wrapping a splint of bamboo around two rods con-
tinuously from the centre of the bottom of the basket on
to the last stitch on the border. As the work goes on
the splint passes between two stitches of the preceding
round and over the fundamental rod.

Ware quite as beautiful as that of the far East may be
seen in the spruce country of North America, where the
fine roots furnish a tough and uniform fiber when split.

Now, suppose that the woman in sewing her coil in-
troduced a thin splint or some tough grass between her
rods in going around ; that would furnish a kind of pack-
ing or caulkiug, which would render the work water-tight.
And that is the case with the Indians of British Columbia
and Washington in making the baskets in which they
boil their food by means of hot stones.

Going farther south, the fundamental rod becomes a
bunch of coarse grass or the split stems of palm or other
tropical plant. The sewing in such cases is done with
stripped yucca or finely split and dressed splints of osier
or rhus, or stems of grass, so nicely and homogeneously
dressed as to enable the maker to produce a basket with
hundreds of thousands of stitches over the surface which
do not show the slightest variation in size.

Great variety is secured in this ware by the material,
by the use of coloured stitches, and by the introduction of
birds' feathers, beads, and other decorative objects into
the texture.

In the arctic regions spruce root is the material with
which the coil is sewed. In California it is split osier
and rhus. In the Moki Pueblos it is extremely finely
divided yucca fibre, while the stems serve for the bodv of
the coil. The tropical regions of both hemispheres
abound with palms of many varieties whose leaves when
split supply the very best material for the coiled ware.

In Tierra del Fuego, as wTell as in Japan, the basket-

50 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

maker produces an attractive variety in the coiled stitch
by passing once around the standing part of the sewing
splint, then between the coil rods, down, through, back,
and over, to repeat the process for each stitch. Of all the
varieties there are many subtypes too intricate to mention
here. We have all the generic forms.

Fig. 12. — Coiled Weaving by Ute Woman, Utah. (After Mason.)

Mr. F. V. Coville says that the Panamint Indian women,
of Death Valley, California, make their baskets of the year-
old shoots of tough willow (Salix lasiandra), the year-old
shoots of aromatic sumac {Rhus trilobata), the long black
horns on the pods of the unicorn plant (Martynia probos-

THE WEAVER. ;,i

cidea), and the long red roots of the tree yucca ( Yucca brevi-
folia). The first two named give the light wood colours,
the third the black colour, and the fourth the red. The
women prepare the willow and the sumac in the same way.
The bark is removed from the fresh shoots by biting it
loose at the end and tearing it off. The woody portion is
scraped to remove bud protuberances and allowed to dry.
As these Indians make coiled basketry, the rods just de-
scribed form the basis of the work. The splints for sew-
ing are prepared as follows : A squaw selects a fresh shoot,
breaks off the too slender upper portion, and bites one
end so that it starts to split into three nearly equal parts.
Holding one of these parts in her teeth and one in either
hand, she pulls them apart, guiding the splits with her
hand so dexterously that the whole shoot is divided into
three nearly even portions. Taking one of these, by a
similar process she splits oft: the pith and the adjacent less
flexible tissue from the inner face and the bark from the
outer, leaving a pliant, strong, flat strip of young willow
or sumac wood. This serves as a fillet in sewing or whip-
ping the coils of the basket together, or in twined basketry
two of them become the weft or filling. The coiled bas-
ketry is most carefully made. In the olden times a stout,
horny cactus spine from the devil's pincushion (Ecliino-
cactus 2)olycep/udus), set in a head of hard pitch, furnished
the needle. When grass stems are carried around inside
the coil with the shoot of willow or rlius they form a
water-tight packing for the pot baskets. Patterns in red
and black are wrought in by means of fillets from the mar-
tynia or fern root.*

In Matthews's Mountain Chant it is asserted that the
avajo, before they learned to weave blankets, made mats
of grass to lie on and to hang in the doorway and fine

* Coville, Am. Anthropologist, vol. v, p. 558.
o

r

52 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

cedar mats to cover themselves with. The soles of the
moccasins were made of hay and the uppers of yucca
fibre.* I have elsewhere alluded to the delightful con-
fusion of time and. i^lace in this myth. When we recall
that the ancestors of the Navajo journeyed to Arizona from
Alaska by way of the Pacific coast we are not surprised to
find mats of grass and shredded cedar bark and yucca fibre
in the same sentence.

A careful study of all woman's work in basketry, as
well as in weaving and embroidery, reveals the fact that
both in the woven and in the sewed or coil ware each
stitch takes up the very same area of surface. When
women invented basketry, therefore, they made art possi-
ble. Along with this fact, that each stitch on the same
basket made of uniform material occupies the same num-
ber of square millimetres, goes another fact — that most
savage women can count ten at least. The production of
geometric figures on the surface of a basket or a blanket,
therefore, is a matter of counting. If the enumeration is
correct each time the figures will be uniform.

Now, many of the figures on savage basketry contain
intricate series of numbers, to remember which cost much
mental effort and use of numerals. This constant, everv
day and hour use of numerals developed a facility in them,
and, coupled with form in ornament, made geometry pos-
sible. The Polynesian and Melanesian club carver trans-
ferred this stvle of decoration to his woodwork, but the
ever-present geometrician of savagery is the woman basket-
maker. She knew lines, triangles, squares, polygons of all
sorts, meanders and a set of cycloidal curves.

In the chapter on pottery it will be shown how the
plasticity of the material rounds off the corners of this
rectilinear, and makes the beginning of curvilinear geom-

* Matthews, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 388.

THE WEAVER. 53

etry. Many savage basket-makers, on the other hand, in
trying to represent birds and clouds and the human form
on their geometric material, conventionalized them, and
then abridged these conventionalities, until they produced
forms that might be the envy of Cairene rug weavers.

These ancient forms are nowadays copied by pattern
drawers for all sorts of work, and the needlewoman and
lace-maker of our day follow the lead of their primitive
sisters without being aware of it.

Akin to basket and mat making art is hand weaving,
or the making of fabrics with the hands, without any
frame or machinery whatever. The Mexican and Panama
hats are thus produced, and travellers in Africa tell of
negro women who sit on the ground with a bundle of split
palm leaf by their side and work most delicate matting
and other articles with the fingers alone.

The New Zealand and other Polynesian women manu-
facture mat robes with long pile after the same fashion.*

The fillets from which all of these kinds of hand weaving
are done are not twisted, but are either straws or leaves,
or bast split finely and evenly. The woman commences in
one corner of the piece, and works diagonally toward the
opposite corner or end. Instead of carrying each fillet
its whole length through a series of warp threads, as in
loom weaving, she makes a loop in each fillet as she pro-
gresses two or three inches from a starting point, runs this
short loop in and out through a dozen or more strands of
the series of warp fillets at right angles, and then draws the
long end of her fillet through. In the same manner she
treats this whole set of fillets, and then takes up the warp
set, crossing these in the same manner through the weft.
By doubling her strands and making short excursions she

* See Ellis. Polynesian Researches, vol. i, p. 186. Compare Tur-
ner, Samoa, London, 1884, p. 120.

54 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

*

keeps all her work along parallel, and avoids tangling.
She believes in the tailor's method of short threads for
quick work. To weave a mat with long pile, it is only
necessary not to use up a few inches of each end of her
fillets, but to let them remain as fringe and pile. Some
of the New Zealand mats woven after this fashion are
three feet wide and nine feet long.

Another kind of textile, if we might use the term in
this connection, is the result of beating out the bast or in-
ner bark of certain trees. In Mexico, all over Central
America, in the South American states certainly as far
south as the tropic of Capricorn, throughout equatorial
Africa, in Oceanica, both among the brown and the black
peoples thereof, culminating in Hawaii, is to be seen a lace-
like fabric with fibres intertwining like paper or felt, or
in coarser fashion. Some pieces thus made are of im-
mense size. There is one in the National Museum in
Washington forty feet loner and over ten feet wide. In
the Australasian area the stuff is never cut into garments,
but is made up into long bolts, as we make calico, and
stamped with patterns, some of which are exceedingly at-
tractive. In America men as well as women manufac-
ture the cloth. Indeed, it is said that the India-rubber
gatherers, when an old tunic becomes too much soiled and
infested, have a knack of beating a clean shirt out of a
single cylinder of bark. All of the costume of the Andean
tribes, decorated with shells, teeth, seeds, and feathers, has
the bark cloth for foundation.

In Hawaii the manufacture of bark cloth was the work
of women exclusively, and the female chief took pride in
the sheets of paper-like cloth she had formed by her own
skill and toil. A log of hard wood, smooth on top, a
variety of hand clubs, and calabashes, to hold water or
mucilaginous fluids, were all the instruments necessary in
the manufacture of Jcapa or tapa ("the beaten"). The

THE WEAVER. 55

sound of the beater upon the log was quite musical, and
the women are said to have signalled to one another thus
from settlement to settlement.*

The bast of the cotton wood, the willow, the linden,
the cedar, will not make tapa or bark cloth, but the good
woman of the forest many centuries ago discovered that it
will fray or fringe or shred under proper treatment, and
so she applied her ingenious mind to this operation. In-
troductorily to this art, as into all other arts, fingers pre-
ceded tools. So she set to work fraying long pieces into
fringes, out of which she made petticoats or divided skirts.

But farther north, from Columbia River to the Frazer
mouth, to heckle the fibrous cedar bark, she drove two
short stakes into the ground, fastened a cross piece to their
tops, and then, with a dull chopping or breaking knife of
bone, separated the filaments until they resembled silk.

The Indian hemp (Apocynum cannaMnwm), common
over the United States and Canada, was treated as mod-
ern spinners treat flax to remove the tough fibre, and in
South America cotton was gathered and picked from the
seed by hand. These simple processes were repeated in
Africa and in Polynesia, in Mexico and Central America, in
each case upon pita fibre or palm leaf or cocoa bark, as
the region suggested.

Among these rude inventors of thread-making the
woman who worked in sinew is not to be forgotten. She
removed the tough tendon from the back or leg of the
deer and other mammals, dried it in the sun, and then
scraped and shredded it as long as fibres would separate.
Owing to the toughness of the material and the long
" staple," this process of separation could be carried to any
degree of tenuity. Some of the thread of the Eskimo

* Brigham, Bishop Mus. Catalogue, Honolulu, 1892, p. 23. Ellis,
Polynes. Res., vol. iv, pp. 109, 179, 184.

56

WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

women is quite fine enough for our smallest sewing
needles.

Twining, twisting, spinning, yarn-making, antecedent
to netting, looping, braiding, or weaving, were begun in

Fig. 13. — Mohave Cradle Frame, showing the Shredded Bake Bed,
the Framework, and the Geometric Patterns ln Weaving.

savagery by rolling a small bundle of fibres or a narrow
strip of bast between the palm of the hand and the thigh,
after the fashion in which the cobbler untwists his thread
to break it.

Among some tribes a twisting device consists of two

THE WEAVER. 57

pieces of wood, bone, or ivory, as the case may be, one
revolving on the other, as in a watchman's rattle. The
fibres are attached to the revolving part, and made to
twist by its revolutions. The Eskimo and the Zuni
women both use this process, especially in heavy work.

The same fly-wheel arrangement used by the Eskimo
women in making sinew thread is applicable to the twist-
ing of twine from two or more spindles; indeed, the ap-
paratus is better adapted to the production of stout cord
and lines, the motion being slower, while the momentum
is greater. The tool, therefore, is more suggestive of the
ropewalk and the devices connected therewith than of
the spindle. I have found the apparatus in use among
the Eskimo for making rawhide lines, and among the
Pueblo peoples for twisting stout twine and rope. Afri-
can women have a still simpler process of manufacturing
excellent twine, which is also to be seen among Sicilian
women. The whole process of twisting the filaments and
the twine is carried on by one person, who takes four
rushes or a double set of bast or other filaments between
the thumb and forefinger of the left hand, twirls one set
four or five times quickly about the forefinger of the
right hand, passes them under to be held between the
fingers and palm of the left hand, and deftly seizes the
other set at the same time to give them a twirl. This
process is repeated with the strands alternately, the fin-
ished twine being drawn along simultaneously. The
Alaskan Indian women also know this process of making
twine just as our boys twist whip crackers, twisting and
twining with both hands at the same time. The fin-
ished part is fastened to some object or held by another
person.*

But the world-wide method of twisting yarn from the

* See Kalm, Travels, London, 1771, vol. ii, p. 131.

58 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

most primitive times and among very uncultured peoples
has been with the spindle. The distaff at first was absent.
The workwoman *held a bunch of prepared fibres in her
left hand and spun with her right.

The rudest spindles were merely straight sticks, with
no hook at the upper end, but the fiy wheel or spindle
whorl is as old as the hills. To imitate the originator of
the spinning jenny, take a bunch of flax or wool in the
left hand, and with the right draw out the fibres a foot or
two in a homogeneous thickness, and fasten the ends se-
curely to the top of the spindle shaft. At first it is better
to sit on the ground and let the lower end rest in a little
cavity of a rock or in a bowl. Twirl the spindle and
twist the yarn as much as you desire, then wind the part
twisted on the spindle shaft, draw out another bunch of
fibre, and give another twirl. The process, in effect, is
precisely the same as that followed by our grandmothers,
only the spinning wheel reduced greatly the time of the
operation. In Roman and Grecian and Egyptian sculp-
tures and paintings the spinner is standing and twirls
the spindle in the air, but the shaft in such cases must
have a hook at the top. The spindle is used by the spin-
ning and weaving Indians of North America throughout
the entire operation of twining. It reduces the wool to
yarn, and then serves as a spool for it. It subsequently
twists the yarn for two- or three-ply twine. It is an in-
teresting sight to watch an Indian woman's dexterity as
she twirls the spindle on her bare thigh and drops the end
into a vase or bowl while the varn is wound. It has
scarcely ceased its rapid revolution before her right hand
is ready to pick it up, carry it to the top of the thigh
again, and give it another impulse. The motion is prac-
tically continuous.*

* Bancroft, Native Races, New York, 1874, vol. i, p. 698.

THE WEAVER. 59

Thomson noticed a very primitive type of spinning at
Bakah, in Palestine. " Some of the women were spinning
thick strands of goat's hair, with which coarse sacks, bags,
carpets, and tent covers are woven. They use no spindle,
but merely fasten the strands to a stone, wThich they twirl
round until the yarn is sufficiently twisted, when it is
wound upon the stone and the process repeated over and
over." * They can weave without any loom. The threads
of the warp are stretched upon the ground and made
fast at either end to a stout stick. The threads of the
woof are passed through with the hand, and pressed back
by a rude wooden comb.f

To save their plaiding coats sorae had
Upo' the haunch a bonnet braid,
Or an auld wecht or kairding skin
To rub and gar the spindle rin
Down to the ground wi' twirlin' speed,
And twine upo' the floor the thread.
Old Scotch ballad. Chambers's Encyclopedia, 1892, s. v. "Spin-

ning."

In the art of braiding sennit from cocoa fibre the Poly-
nesians excelled, and men as well as women engaged in
making it, because it was of use to men quite as much in
their arts as it was to women, taking the place of nails
and screws in housebuilding and boat-making.

But savage women in other parts of the wTorld could
braid or plait also. In America they were most skillful
in giving a plaited effect to borders of baskets and wallets
in the use of a single strand by the continuous loop. The
modern straw hat is a survival from savagery. Indeed,
the braids of them are still made either bv savages or by
white women who live in a very primitive state.

Weaving is the climax of the textile industry. The

* Thomson, The Land and the Book, New York, 1880, vol. i, p. 80.
f Ibid., p. 195.

60 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

very simplest form of loom, out of which might have
grown the most intricate of modern patents, is to be seen
in use among the savage women of British Guiana in
making their queyus or embroidered aprons. The frame
consists of two rods, one flexible and bent in a semicircle,
the other straight and having its ends tied to the ends of
the former. In form it resembles the letter D. The warp
threads pass from one stick to the other, widening apart
slightly on the bent one, and giving to the finished apron
the form of a right trapezoid.

The ancestral form of the heddle or heald in a hand
loom was, in the earliest looms, a rod laid across the warp
and attached to the hinder or under series of warp theads
by a continuous thread, which passed around the heald
rod and around these hinder warp threads all the way
across the warp. The weaver crossed her warp for the
shuttle by simply pulling this heald rod forward, passing
the shuttle through, and then letting go for the next
passage of the weft, the warp readjusting itself by its own
tension. Her shuttle was nothing more than a slender
stick upon which a quantity of yarn was wound, and this
was guided between the two sets of warp threads slowly
by the fingers as in darning. This thread was pressed
into place by means of a baton made in shape of a sword
blade. Sailors use a similar but clumsier device in mak-
ing sword mats. The warp threads were crossed by pull-
ing or releasing the heald and the tedious shuttle was
worked across and back, occupying a minute with each
excursion.

In later times any number of these heald rods could be
employed to give a diaper effect, but in the beginning this
was produced by counting warp threads and carrying the
right number in the mind, a surprising phenomenon to
one who has patiently watched a Zufii belt weaver. While
the modern processes are of immense advantage in rapid-

THE WEAVER.

61

ity, the savage weaver could interrupt her darning process
at any point and introduce fresh colour, working in each
independently, just as tapestry is built up.*

Among all the types of modern savagery — American,
negroid, and Malayo-Polynesian— intricate processes of
weaving were in vogue be-
fore they were approached t^^iv>^r ... Tw

by the white race.

In American and Eu-
ropean factories cotton
and wool are sorted, card-
ed, and spun by machin-
ery tended by women.
The goods are then made
into bales, shipped, sold
by wholesale, and deliv-
ered to retailers by men.
They pass out of the
hands and sight of wo-
men until thev reach the
retailer or the manufac-
turer of garments, where
they are again in the hands of their original owners, to
be made up, as any one will testify who has looked into
a retailer's shop or a tailoring establishment.

In the last operation of using up these goods the abo-
rigines of America, Africa, Polynesia, and Australia have
a share. The looms of Europe and of the United States
have to cater to the demands of the savage women of these
areas. This is especially true in Africa, where the traders'
goods must be au fait or the women will not have them.

In comparison with this complex and world-embracing
activity of modern weaving and commerce, how simple

Fig 14. — The Primitive Loom Weaver
— Navajo Woman, Arizona. (After
Matthews.)

* Minutely described by Matthews. Third Annual Report of the
Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1881-'82.

T>2 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the process in savagery ! The women there go to the
fields or to the animals for the fibre, or hair, or wool.
They transport the material on their backs, in carrying
frames and apparatus that they themselves have made,
and prepare it, as we shall see further on, to be woven or
sewed or embroidered. They make up the bag, or mat,
or garment, or sail of a whole piece, and wear it out in
use — the same woman in each case following the material
from the cradle to the grave.

In lower savagery, indeed, this same woman has to be
adept in many other crafts beside, but in upper savagery
the skilled *weaver is pensioned or allowed to do that work
only. When she arrived thus far on her upward journey,
she was prepared to hand the art over to the male sex
and to machinery, in whose workings she will still bear a
part.* The finer kinds of cloth in Mexico were made of
cotton, of rabbit hair, of the two mixed, or of cotton
mixed with feathers. The rabbit-hair fabrics were pro-
nounced equal in finish and texture to silk, and cotton
cloths were also fine and white. The cloth in the manu-
facture of which feathers were employed often served for
carpets, tapestry, and bed coverings. Maguey fibre and
that of coarse palm leaf — icxotl and izhuatl — were woven
into coarse cloths, the maguey cloth being known as ne-
quen. This nequen and the coarser kinds of cotton were
the materials with which the poorer classes clothed them-
selves. All the work of spinning and weaving was per-
formed by women. f

At the Chicago Exposition were immense collections
from the cliff dwellings, containing, among many other
relics of woman's handiwork, feather cloaks used as

* Adair, History of the North American Indians, London, 1775.
Dilly, p. 423.

f Bancroft, Native Races, New York, 1874-76, vol. ii, p. 484.

Fig. 15.— Impressions of Twined Weaving on Ancient Pottery. (After Holmes.)

THE WEAVER. 0

Q

shrouds or wrapping of mummies. These cloaks were
made in "twined weaving" of cords wrapped with the
downy feathers of the turkey or rabbit skin. The skin
of the rabbits and of the birds after the quill feathers
had been plucked was cut in strips and wound around
the warp and the weft cords, as in the rabbit-skin robes
of the Pueblo peoples. In some examples the soft quill
feathers had been split and wrapped around the cords.

The process of weaving is thus described by Wafer :
" The Women make a Roller of Wood, about three Foot
long, turning easily about between two Posts. About this
they place Strings of Cotton of three or four yards long,
at most, but oftener less, according to the use the Cloth
is to be put to, whether for a Hammock, or to tie about
their Waists, or for Gowns, or for Blankets to cover them
in their hammocks, as they lie in their Houses, which are
all the uses they have for cloth. And they never weave a
piece of Cotton with a design to cut it, but of a size that
shall just serve for the particular use. The threads thus
coming from the Roller are the Warp ; and for the woof,
they twist Cotton yarn about a small piece of Macaw wood
notched at each end. And taking up every other Thread
of the Warp with the Fingers of one Hand, they put the
Woof through with the other hand and receive it out on the
other side ; and to make the Threads of the Woof lie close
in the Cloth they strike them at every turn with a long
and thin piece of Macaw wood like a Ruler, which lies
across between the Threads of the Warp for that pur-
pose." *

Another example of a textile art involving a multi-
plicity of occupations is to be found in the Carib tribes of
South America. They have got far enough along to have

* Laet, Nov. Orb., p. 348, quoted by Bancroft, Native Races, 1874,
vol. i, p. 760.

G-t WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

plantations of a primitive sort. So the women plant the
cotton seed and cultivate the crop. They pick the cotton,
remove the seeds, and card it intte long, loose bands.
Winding one of these about her right wrist, the spinner
then fastens one end of the band to a spindle, which she
twirls with her left hand, drawing out the band evenly
meanwhile with both hands and taking up the thread on
the shaft of her spindle. When she has completed a
number of these she by the same process combines two
threads or three into a twine, and now she is ready to be-
come a weaver. Four pieces of wood are set up, for all
the world after the manner of an old-fashioned quilting
frame, around which she winds in a continuous coil
enough string to form the warp of her hammock and ad-
just the distances to a nicet}^. Across this warp she
weaves bands of three-ply plaits at equal distances so as
to hold the warp firmly in place and give air through the
texture. The men apply the ropes or " scale lines." *

Nothing in handicraft has ever exceeded in beauty
featherwork. The feather plumes and canopies of the
Incas, the shields and mosaic work of the Mexicans and
Central Americans, the war bonnets and other regalia of
eagles' feathers among the Northern tribes, have not failed
to evoke unbounded admiration from the conquerors.

In India travellers admire the fans and screens made
from the plumage of pheasants and peacocks. The old
Assyrian kings were attended by servants holding im-
mense umbrellas of feathers. In Xew Guinea it is the
bird of paradise and the cassowary that provide the gaudy
material for head ornaments, while the Australians went to
the emu and the lyre bird for supplies.

Throughout Polynesia, as elsewhere, feather currency
was in vogue, but the Hawaiians, after all, seem to have

*Cf. Im Thurn, Indians of British Guiana, London, 1883, p. 285.

THE WEAVER. 65

excelled in the art of weaving with feathers. Helmets,
cloaks, standards, and necklaces were most elaborately
wrought on network of the olona fibre (Touchardia lati-
folia). The arrangement of the feathers is said to have
been the work of noble women.*

Colours in textiles are produced first by the happy mix-
ture of natural materials of different tints. Often the
two sides of a leaf will give distinct colours, as in the case
of the yuccas (out of which the Moki women of Arizona
make the pretty and substantial meal trays), or the palm
leaves abounding in the tropics. The California women
get a black effect with martynia pods, a deep brown with
the stem of the maidenhair fern, and a bright red in the
use of the roots of a yucca. These added to the wrood
colour of different plants produce a pleasing variety. The
women of our Pacific coast have found out that burying
spruce root and other woody fibres in certain springs or
muds produces a chocolate colour, and natural dyeing may
be found elsewhere. But our primitive folk also know
how to make dyes from mineral and vegetal substances
and how to fix colours by means of mordants. Until the
discovery of the coal-tar dyes — a plague upon them ! — the
most commonly used colours were those borrowed from
the hands of savage women.

The Navajo woman since the introduction of sheep
into Arizona by the Spaniards has died wool in a good
variety of colours, partly with her native dyes and partly
with new materials. Ingenuity of no trifling order is
shown in this combination. The wool itself occurs in
three natural colours — white, rusty black, and grey. The
native dyes are black, yellow, and reddish. Black is pro-
duced by boiling the leaves and stems of Rhus aromatica
(sumac) and mixing the decoction with baked yellow ochre

* Consult Brigham, Cat. Bishop Mas., Honolulu, 1892, p. 10.

66 WOMAN'S SHARE IX PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

and piiion gum (Piniis edulis). Though the Navajo
woman is not skilled in modern chemical terms, the tannic
acid of the sumac combines for her with the sesquioxide
of iron in the roasted ochre to form a rich blue-black ink
whose colour is deepened by the carbon of the gum.

For yellow, the flowering tops of Bigelovia graveolens
are boiled and the decoction mixed with almogen or na-
tive alum, and this gives her for use a lemon tint. Or, for
" old gold " she grinds on her metate of stone a root of
which our science is ignorant, and for a mordant mixes
therewith the native alum.

Her reddish dye is extracted from the bark of the
Alnus incana and the root of Cercocarpus panifolius,
the mordant being fine ashes of the juniper. On buck-
skin this produces a brilliant tan colour, but a paler
shade in wool.

Dr. Matthews thinks they formerly had a blue dye of
their own, which they abandoned for indigo. The native
blue with native yellow would have given them green ; at
any rate, they now mix indigo with their native yellow.

The brilliant red threads in their best modern blankets
were procured by unravelling baycta, a bright scarlet cloth
with a long nap, much finer than the stroucling which is
so dear to the heart of the Indian women of the North."

In Hawaii, roots, leaves, and bark of various plants
yielded dye stuffs, the chief colours being yellow, red, green,
various shades of browns, and the greys, produced by an
admixture of charcoal. It was customary to prepare a
kapa intensely imbued with colour, and keep this for use
as solid pigment to be beaten into white kapa. For pro-
ducing figures, pigments were ground in oil in a stone
mortar and applied (1) by cords dipped in the liquid and

* Matthews, Navajo Weavers, Third An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.,
Wash., 1884. p. 370.

THE WEAVER. 67

snapped as a quilter's starch line ; (2) by pens of bam-
boo ; (3) by brushes ; (4) by natural objects used as dies ;
(5) by stamps cut on bamboo strips. In some islands
elaborate stamps were made several feet square.*

The subsidiary textile arts are of great importance in
savagery, and they are of great antiquity, remains having
been found in very old deposits. Sewing and embroidery
will be noted further on in the study of the skin-working
art, but in this place it is important to observe the net.
The " reef knot " and the " weaver's knot " were both
known to savage women, but there are simpler forms con-
ducting up to these. Imagine a row of trees leading to a
pitfall. If a stout vine were carried along this row, being
wrapped once around each tree in passing, it would form
an excellent " wing " to the trap. Three or more would
furnish a good fence, and the whole suggests a very simple
form of net. The Mojave Indian women living about the
mouth of the Colorado Eiver construct a carrying basket
in this very way. A number of upright strings connect
the hoop at the top with the bottom of the basket. The
meshes are formed by wrapping a stout string around and
around the four upright frame sticks, taking a single turn
about each upright thread in passing.

Now and then the archaeologist finds an impression on
pottery showing the same type of weaving. It is not
widely diffused, and must have been limited in its ap-
plication on account of the slipping of the warp on the
weft.

A more widely dispersed style of net is the running
loop, or simplest form of crochet. It is a continuous
spiral hooked into itself from round to round, and is an
exceedingly varied and pretty stitch in the hands of abo-
riginal women in both continents. The Pima Indian

* Brigham, Cat. Bishop Mus., Honolulu, 1892, p. 23.

QS WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

women of California construct their burden baskets of
such network, and, by omitting stitches regularly or tak-
ing turns about the coiled part, give to the surface the
appearance of lace work.*

But in the true net the cord is knotted at the inter-
sections of the meshes, which are kept at a uniform size
by what is called in museums a spacer. The natives of
New Guinea, and, indeed, aborigines in other lands, were
perfectly familiar with our square knot or reef knot, and
the Ute Indians in the great interior basin of the United
States employed the weaver's knot in making their carry-
ing nets from the fibre of the native hemp. The very
same type reappears in the netting of the ancient cliff
dwellers, who had many resemblances in art with the Ute
or Shoshonean tribes.

In Samoa it is the work of the women to make nets
chiefly from the bark of the hibiscus. After the rough
outer surface has been scraped off with a shell on a
board, the remaining fibres are twisted with the palm of
the hand across the bare thigh. As the good lady's cord
lengthens, she fills her netting needle and works it into
her net.f

We may pause long enough to note that the Samoans
are also among the most skillful makers of tapa or bark
cloth from the same material. The example of one of the
Samoan women twisting, without the aid of a spindle,
strips of this same bark into cord is as near to the inven-
tion of spinning as we may hope to come.

We have followed the savage woman through the
manipulations of the textile art, and shown that up to
the introduction of machinery it was her own. There

* Both styles figured in the Rep. U. S. X. Museum, 1887, pp.
264, 265, Figs. 7-9.

f Turner, Samoa, London, 1884, p. 167.

THE WEAVER. 69

are certain decorations of textile consisting of overlaying,
omitting, variation of stitch and colour, which will be more
properly described in a chapter on her share in the origin
of aesthetic products and processes. This art remains yet
peculiarly the property of those who originated it, a fact
that should not be overlooked by those who seek the
good of women.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SKIN DRESSER.

Pause for one moment to consider all the modern in-
dustries included within the one word " leather." It in-
volves everything done to the hides of animals from the
moment they are taken off by the butcher until the prod-
ucts are ready to be used up by the consumer. The
hides of cattle, sheep, goats, horses, dogs, and other do-
mestic animals, the skins of all wild beasts that are of any
use, are gathered up in a sort of bloody harvest by butchers,
hunters, and trappers and sent to the tanners or to the
manipulators answering to their trade, most of whom are
men. Here commences a diversity of treatment ending
in the preparation of the hide with the hair remaining by
the farrier, in the production of soft leather by a process
called tawing, or in the manufacture of true leather by
the use of tannin in some form, these also being now
man's work. The products of these establishments are
prepared for consumption by harness-makers, shoemakers,
glove-makers, clothiers, satchel-makers, embossers, book-
binders, carriage-makers, armourers, machinists, musical-
instrument makers, taxidermists, and twice as many more
to be passed on by the great Briareus of commerce to those
Avho will wear out these products by using them.

It would be interesting to inquire in how many of these
activities especially devoted to the manufacture and use of
skin products modern women take part, how many women
work on hides, and how many of these trades and indus-

(70)

THE SKIN DRESSER. 71

tries are kept going in order to satisfy their needs and
wants. This inquiry would be the climax of a study of
which we are tracing only the first steps.

Strictly speaking, savage women were not tanners ; they
were the mothers of tanners, and they practiced a variety
of arts on the skins of animals. In a former chapter, for
the sake of orienting the woman as purveyor, a slain deer
was laid before her door to see what she would do with it.
But, in reality, there is scarcely a family of mammals in
existence whose hides women have not reduced to some
good use. On the American continent alone women skin
dressers knew how to cure and manufacture hides of cats,
wolves, foxes, all the numerous skunk family, bears, coons,
seals, walrus, buffalo, musk ox, goat, sheep, antelope,
moose, deer, elk, all kinds of whales, squirrels of thirty
species, beaver, gopher, muskrat, porcupine, hares, opos-
sum, crocodile, tortoise, birds innumerable, and fishes and
reptiles.

If aught in the heavens above, or on the earth beneath,
or in the waters wore a skin, savage women were found on
examination to have had a name for it, and to have suc-
ceeded in turning it into its primitive use for human cloth-
ing, and to have invented new uses undreamed of bv its
original owner. The operations through which they put
the skins were tempered to the skins themselves and to
the object in view. As anv taxidermist, or farmer's bov,
for that matter, knows, there are hosts of birds and fish
and small mammals whose hides need only to be drawn
off and dried wrong side out in the sun to be completely
cured. The furrier has his way of keeping out the de-
structive insects, and the taxidermist knows the virtues
of arsenical soap ; but away on the boundaries of time or
civilization the harmonies of Nature had not been so much
disturbed, hence there was not such trouble with insect
pests. Furthermore, the garment or what not was in

72 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

daily use until it was worn out, so there was poor chance
for moths or dermestes.

The hides and hair of these thin-skinned creatures
were used chiefly in decoration and in weaving after being
cut into narrow strips and wound around a stout twine.
The Eskimo women made a most comfortable inner blouse
or parka from the skins of birds sewed together, the
feathers being worn next the person. We are told by
those who have seen the operation that the only tanning
or tawing through which the bird skins passed was a
thorough chewing on the wrong side by the women and
girls. These skins were sewed together by means of
sinew thread by whipping the edges, after the manner of
the carpet sewer, and when the seam was stretched and
the garment was straightened out, no one could say where
one skin left off and another began.

In the very same manner the hides of squirrels and the
smaller mammals — indeed, of foxes and other fur-bearing
animals — were cured and cut and sewed into garments of
great beauty.

This might be called the drying process, and is doubt-
less the earliest of all, surviving on to our day — an art
that has been familiar to man in all his history. The next
process to this in simplicity, and thoroughly familiar to
aborigines everywhere on continental areas, is the curing
of the hides of larger mammals with the hair on for the
purpose of making pliant robes or fur clothing. A refer-
ence in any good dictionary to the words " skin," " der-
mis," " epidermis," etc., will show just what the savage
woman had in mind in this operation though she did not
comprehend anatomy.

Her problem was to remove the dermis from the seal
skin, or from the hide of the moose, elk, musk ox, bear,
buffalo, and the like, and leave the hair adhering to the
epidermis, with only a thin portion of the true skin. Fur-

THE SKIN DRESSER.

170

therm ore, if she were a woman of taste and pride and did
not wish her good man to be laughed at, or, more properly
speaking, if she wished not to get herself laughed at over
his shoulders, this great surface, frequently more than
thirty square feet in extent, had to be uniform in thickness
throughout and she should not cut through the epidermis
once. The whole must be as pliable, too, as a woollen
blanket. The problem was to reduce a hide of varying

Fig. 16. — Eskimo "Scraper," made to fit the Woman's Hand.

(After Mason.)

thickness and twice too thick everywhere to a robe of
uniform thickness throughout without once cutting
through the outer part of the skin. Her tools for this
work varied with locality. The Eskimo women scrape off
the fat with a special tool made of walrus ivory or horn
and plane down the dermis with a stone scraper. But the
Indian women cut off the bits of meat and fat and re-
move the dermis with a hoe or adze.

In the good old days of savagery the Eskimo woman
made her fat scraper of walrus ivory or antler ; her skin
scraper was of flinty stone set in a handle of ivory, wood, or
horn, whichever material was easiest to procure. But later
on, it may be, the whalers helped her out with steel tools.

The Indian woman had three tools — to wit, the stone

74

WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

knife for cutting away the flesh, the hoe-shaped scraper
for splitting the skin, and the grainer, a hoe or chisel-like
tool with serrated edge to roughen up the inner side
of the robe and give it flexibility. Besides these, both
Eskimo and Indians had hands and feet and teeth for
pulling and pounding and breaking the grain.* They had

Fig. 17. — Eskimo Fat Scraper of Reindeer Antler and Rawhide.

(After Mason.)

also a wonderful supply of pride in their work and love
of applause, which kept them up to the mark of doing the
very best that could be done with their resources.

The universal plan, with local and tribal variations,
upon the great hides for robes and clothing was to stretch
them either on a stout frame or on a smooth, level place,
and let them dry. They could at the same time be
treated with the brains of the animal to render them more
easilv worked. As soon as the hide was well dried the

* Consult Porsey, Om:iha Sociology, Third An. Rep. Bur. Eth-
nol., Wash., 1884, pp. 310,011.

THE SKIN DRESSER.

75

process of hoeing or scraping commenced, a most exhaust-
ing operation, as all who have witnessed the task agree.
In the days of plentiful buffalo Sioux women were no
idlers in keeping the market stocked with robes.* Another
industrial material in savage life, indispensable to both

Fig. 18. — Eskimo Fat Scraper of "Walrus Ivory, made to fit the

Fingers. (After Mason.)

men and women, was rawhide. This was procured with
the aborigines precisely as it is with us — namely, by simply
drying the skin and then cutting off the hair with a knife
or adze. The lines used for ten thousand purposes in the
cold north land, where nails and screws break like glass
and where no textile plants are to be gathered, were made

* For an excellent picture of a supple Eskimo woman without
the suggestion of a backache or weakness of the spine, see Murdoch,
Ninth An. Rep. Bur. EthnoL, Wash., Fig. 5.

7G WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

of rawhide, and varied in thickness from that of a fine
thread to half an inch. The Eskimo man covers his beau-
tiful skin boat with the rawhides of seals, deprived of the
hair, stretched, and oiled by women.

The most difficult method of treating hides is that
which comes nearest to shamoying, the process formerly
applied to the preparation of the skins of the Alpine cham-
ois as well as to other deerskins. Buckskin and the
chamois skin of commerce are our nearest representatives.
The Eskimo do not treat hides in this way ; the region is
too cold ; but the Indians adjoining them and all their
kindred southward to the tropics were masters of the art,
the work being chiefly done by women. Dr. R. W. Shu-
feldt, U. S. Army, at the request of the writer, observed
carefully the whole operation of preparing a hide in this
way, though the performer was a man. Others have
carefully recorded the same in other tribes, as done by
women, so that this savage art is tolerably well under-
stood.*

The first thing to do is to remove the hair, a process
performed in old-fashioned tanneries either by means of
quicklime or by sweating the skins — that is, heating them,
until putrefactive fermentation has gone on far enough to
loosen the hair but not to injure the texture. The savage
woman also comprehends the latter process. The writer
has heard Lieutenant Emmons say that the Chilkat
women of Alaska procure the hair of the Rocky Mountain
goat for the sacred blankets by rolling up the hide until
it sweats and the pores are open. A woman then sits on
the ground, lays the skin on her lap, and with her hands
scrapes off the hair in great flakes without the use of an
unhairina: tool of any kind.

To soak the skin thoroughly in a mixture of brains

* Mason, Aboriginal Skin Dressing, Rep. U. S. X. M. 1888-89.

THE SKIN DRESSER. 77

and water, to pull and haul it and twist it while drying,
exhausted every energy of the body.*

These stone scrapers, universal in present savagery,
were once the favorite implement with our grandmothers
many times removed. The Aryan peoples, both in Asia
and in Europe, once clothed themselves in the same fashion
as the American aborigines of to-day. If you were to
visit their camp sites you would pick up among the imple-
ments of flint, scrapers in abundance, j In the pile dwell-
ings of Switzerland and Italy fragments of leather have
been found, and the Britons Avere clad in skins in the days
of Julius Caesar.

One of the most interesting testimonials to the peculiar
adaptiveness of women to further the progress of civiliza-
tion is furnished by this very apparatus, so often referred to
by all voyagers in connection with the art of skin dressing.
Imagine an Eskimo, or an Indian, or an African woman
on her knees engaged in perhaps the most filthy work to
be seen anywhere — namely, anticipating the unhairing de-
partment of a modern tannery. Her implement consists
of a blade of stone set in a handle of antler or of wood, or
the leg bone of a large mammal scraped to an edge. The
better culture comes along and says, " My good woman, let
me see that tool," and quietly slips out the poor blade of
stone and substitutes one of steel. As her work is renewed
she feels that a blessing has fallen from the skies upon
her. She is not degraded by being made to take up occu-
pations against which the prejudices of centuries revolt.
A better implement does better work of the same sort,
and so her mind and heart and habits are strengthened.

* Mason, Aboriginal Skin Dressing, Rep. U. S. Xat. Museum.
1888-'89. pp. 553-589, pi. lxi-xeiii. All the processes are described
and figured.

f Cf.' Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, Lond., 1892, Scott,
p. 171.

78 WOMAN'S SHAKE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

The deer and buffalo disappear. But when the cattle
come and take the place of the wild creatures, the woman
continues upon her knees, with the modified scraper trium-
phant, converting the hides of black cattle into white robes,
upon which her husband paints himself pursuing his ene-
mies and the ghosts of elk and buffalo, none of which will
ever return.

The scraper is the oldest implement of any craft in
the world. The Indian women of Montana still receive
their trade from their mothers, and they, in turn, were
taught by theirs, in unbroken succession, since the birth
of the human species.

Crantz, in his History of Greenland (page 167), de-
scribes faithfully the Eskimo woman's processes of hide
dressing :

" For their kapitck, or hairy seal-skin clothes, they
scrape the seal skin thin, lay it twenty-four hours in the
korbik or urine tub, to extract the fat or oil, and then dis-
tend it for drying with pegs on a green place. After-
ward, when they work the skin, it is sprinkled with
urine, rubbed with pumice stone, and suppled by rubbing
between the hands.

" (2) The sole leather is soaked two or three days in a
urine tub ; then they pull off the loosened hair with a
knife or with- their teeth, lay it three days in fresh water,
and so stretch it for drying.

" (3) In the same manner they prepare the ercsak
leather that they use for the legs of boots and the over-
leather, of shoes, only that it is scraped very thin to make
it pliable. Of this leather they also make the sea coats
which the men draw over their other clothes to keep out
the wet when they go to sea. It is true it grows as soft
and wet as a dishcloth bv the salt water and rain, but it
keeps the wet from the trader-garments.

" (4) In the same manner they dress the erogah, of

THE SKIN DRESSER. 79

which they make their smooth black pelts to wear on
shore, only in working it they rub it between their hands;
therefore it is not so stiff as the foregoing, but loses the
property of holding out water and is not fit for boots and
sea coats.

" (5) The boat skins are selected out of the stoutest
seal hides, from which the fat is not quite taken off. They
roll them up and sit on them and let them lie in the sun
covered with grass several weeks till the hair will come
off. Then they lay them in the salt water for some days,
to soften them again. They draw the borders of the
skins tight with their teeth, sew them together, and
smear the seams and stitches with old seal blubber instead
of pitch, that the water may not penetrate. But they
must take care not to impair the grain, for if they do the
corrodinsr sea water will easilv eat through the leather.

" (6) The remnants of this and the other sorts they
shave thin, lay them upon the snow or hang them in the
air to bleach them white, and if they intend to dye it red
chew the leather with some bark of the roots of pine,
which they gather up out of the sea, working it in with
their teeth.

" (7) They soften the skin of the fowls about the head,
and then draw it off whole over the body."

The processes of tanning, Hall says, are first to scrape
the skin by an instrument called sek-koon (by the Fro-
bisher Bay Innuit, teg-se-koon).

This instrument is about six inches lonsr, including
the handle, and is made of a peculiar kind of whet or oil
stone, or else of musk-ox or reindeer bone or of sheet iron.
The second step is to dry the skins thoroughly ; the third,
to scrape again with the sek-koon, taking off every bit of
the flesh ; the fourth, to wet the flesh side and wrap it up
for thirty minutes, and then again scrape with the sek-
koon, which last operation is followed by chewing the

80 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

skin all over, and again scraping and cross scraping with
the instrument. These laborious processes Hall describes
as resulting " in the breaking of the skin, making the stiff
hide .soft, finished like the chamois skin." The whole
work is often completed within an hour.*

" In Cumberland Sound," says Kumlien, " when a seal
skin is about to be prepared for drying, the blubber is first
removed somewhat roughly, the skin then laid on aboard,
and with the woman's knife the membrane underneath
the blubber is separated from the skin. The knife must
be very sharp to do this successfully. The operators al-
ways push the knife from them. It takes considerable
experience to do the job well. "When all the blubber is
removed, which will take three or four hours of faithful
work, the skin is taken outside, and by means of the feet
is rolled and rubbed around in the snow for some time,
and by this process they succeed in removing every trace
of grease from the hair. When thoroughly washed the
skin is put upon the stretchers, if it be winter, to dry ;
these stretchers are merely four poles, which are lashed
together at the corners, like a quilt frame, the proper dis-
tance apart to suit the size of the skin. The skin is se-
cured in place by seal-skin thongs passed through little
slits along its edges and made fast to the poles.

" When the skin is properly stretched upon the frame
it is put above the lamps inside the snow hut to dry. As
the sun gets higher and begins to have some effect, the
skins are stretched flesh side up, on the southern slopes of
snow banks, and are secured by means of wooden or bone
pegs about a foot in length."

Among the Central Eskimo, says Dr. Franz Boas, the
latest authority, the skin of the seal (Phoca fcetida) is

* Narrative of the Second Expedition made by C. F. Hall, pp.

l/I, t/-v.

Figs. 19, 20, 21, 22. — Tools of the Primitive Tanner— Implements of
Bone, Antler, and Iron used by Sioux Women in dressing Hides.

THE SKIN DRESSER. 81

dressed in different ways according to the purpose for
which it is intended. In skinning the animal a longitu-
dinal cut is made across the bellv with a common butcher's
knife or one of ancient pattern. The skin, with the blub-
ber, is cut from the flesh with the same knife. The flip-
pers are cut oh* at the points, and thus the whole skin is
drawn oif in a single piece. The woman's knife, ulo, is
used to clean and prepare the skins, in which operation
the women spread the skin over a piece of whalebone
{asimautang), a small board or flat stone, and sit down
before it, resting on their knees, the feet bent under the
thighs. They hold the skin by the nearest edge, and
pushing the ulo forward, remove the blubber and deposit
it in a small tub, which stands near the board. As they
proceed to the opposite end of the skin the finished part
is rolled up and held in the left hand.

If the skin is to be used with the hair on it, the tough
membrane (piami) which covers the inner side is removed
in the same way as the blubber, and after it has been
carefully patched and the holes have been cut all round
the edge, it is stretched over a gravelly place or on snow
by means of long pegs (paulio?i), which hold it a few
inches above the ground, thus allowing the air to circulate
underneath it. The skin itself is washed and rubbed witli
gravel, snow, or ice, and every hole made by the bullet or
by the spear or in preparing it is sewed up. It very seldom
happens that the women in preparing it damage the skin
or even the thin mami. It is particularly difficult to
split the skin near a hole. First, they finish the work all
around it, and then carefully sever the membrane at its
edge. The skin is dried in the same way as the membrane.
In the early part of spring, though it may still be very
cold, a few choice young seal skins are dried on snow walls
which face the south. In order thoroughly to dry a seal
skin, one fine warm spring day is needed. If the Eskimo

82 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

are greatly in need of skins they dry them in winter over
the lamps. A frame is made of four poles, lashed to-
gether, according to the size of the skin. A thong passes
through the slits along its edge and around the frame,
keeping the skin well stretched. Thus it is placed over
the lamps or near the roof of the hut. However, it is
disagreeable work to dry the skins inside the huts, and as
they are much inferior to those which are dried on the
ground, the Eskimo avoid it if they can. When so pre-
pared, the seal skins are only fit for covering tents, making
bags, etc. ; they are too hard to be used for clothing, for
which purpose the skin of yearlings is almost exclusively
employed.*

But the Indian woman's hardest work, Dodge tells us,
was at the time of the fall hunt. If the buffalo were
moving, success depended upon the rapidity with which
she performed her work on a batch of dead buffalo.
These animals spoiled very rapidly, and the me7i did not,
therefore, wish to kill in any one day more than the
squaws could skin and cut up. No sooner were the buf-
falo dead than the squaws were at work, and the skin
was removed with marvellous celeritv. The meat cut from
the bones was tied up in the skin and packed to camp.
The entrails formed the principal food during the hunt.
Marrow bones and hump ribs roasted on the coals served
for most delicious suppers after the day's work. All these
were prepared by the women and brought to camp. The
skins were spread, flesh side upward, on the ground, slits

* Consult the author's work Aboriginal Skin Dressing, Rep.
U. S. Nat. Museum. 1888-'89, 553-589. Also Franz Boas on the
Central Eskimo in Sixth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.. Washington, 1888.
Murdoch, The Point Barrow Eskimo, Ninth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.,
294-302, Figs. 289-302. The last-named author is especially clear
on the manufacture of clothing from skins, pp. 109-138, and dr?ws
attention to the strength and pliability of the Eskimo woman's body.

THE SKIN DRESSER. 83

cut in the edges, and each stretched and fastened down
by pegs driven through the slits. There were four pro-
cesses in the treatment of the skins. The thickest hides
were selected for shields, meat cases [parfieches], etc. The
hair was taken off by soaking the skins in water in which
was mixed wood ashes or some natural alkali. The skin was
cut into the required form while green. When it became
dry it retained its shape, and was almost as hard as iron.

Making a robe was a much more difficult process.
When the stretched skin had become dry and hard from
the action of the sun, the woman went to work upon it
with a small instrument shaped like a carpenter's adze,
having a handle of elk horn or wood, to which the blade
was tied with rawhide. With this she chipped at the
hard skin, cutting oft a thin shaving at each blow, so as
to remove the superfluous inner skin and leave a per-
fectly smooth inner surface. To render the skin soft and
pliable, every little while the woman smeared the surface
with fat and brains of buffalo, thoroughly rubbed in with
a smooth stone.

Hides for making lodges had the hair taken off, were
reduced in thickness, and were made pliable. Deer, ante-
lope, and other thin skins were beautifully prepared by a
tawing process.*

"• The Patagonian women, besides discharging all the
household duties and fetching wood and water, dress the
furs and manufacture the mantles of the young guanaco,
fox, skunk, and ostrich skins, using, instead of needles and
thread, sharp bodkins and sinew from the back of the
adult guanaco. Some of the women also weave garters
and fillets for the head, and occasionally work in silver.
They also manufacture, pitch, and strike the toldos or tents,
as well as load the poles and hides upon the horses. These

* Dodge, The Plains of the Great West, New York, 1887, p. 357.

84 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

tents consist of rows of forked sticks driven into the
ground with ridgepoles overlaid with a covering made
from forty to fifty guanaco skins sewed together and
smeared with grease and ochre." *

The dried skin, the fur robe, the tawed skin, are now
ready to be turned over to half a dozen other industries all
belonging to women. The tent-maker, the shoemaker, the
tailor, the hatter, the upholsterer, the trunk-maker, all need
the skin dresser's wares. To deliver the prepared skins to
so many crafts in our day would involve much labour and
traffic and transportation. But in the undifferentiated
period of savagery much of this getting about and han-
dling is saved, for one little group of women will take the
whole contract. They will prepare the hides of moose,
deer, or buffalo, cut them into proper shape, sew them to-
gether with sinew thread, go to the swamp and cut down
the poles, set them, stretch the new cover over them, and
erect the house with their unaided hands. Having fin-
ished this, th*ey will make the door, the cowl, the interior
hangings in good proportion, and the ropes of rawhide to
hold all firm.

In the Omaha tribal circle, says Dorsey, "though they
did not measure the distances, each woman knew where to
pitch her tent. Thus, a Kansa woman who saw a Wejifi-
chte tent set up, knew that her tent must be pitched at a
certain distance from that part of the circle, and at or near
the opposite end of the road or diameter of the circle.
When two tents were pitched too far apart one woman said
to the other, 'Pitch the tent a little closer'; or, if they
were too close, she said, 'Pitch the tent farther away.'
In the former case there was danger from attack; in the
latter the women had not enough room to work." f

* Musters. J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1872, vol. i, p. 197.
f Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, Third An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., pp.
219, 220.

THE SKIN DRESSER. 85

As soon as the tents were erected each woman put up
her drying frame, of which there were two or three for
each tent. These were used for curing fresh meat, and
each Avas made by sticking into the ground two forked
sticks that were about four feet high, six or eight feet
apart, and placing poles across them. The pieces of meat
were hung across the transverse poles.*

These frames are universal in the domiciles of savages.
Wherever skin garments are worn the frame serves as a
convenient place for drying clothing that has been satu-
rated with rain.

The tailoring of savage women, especially that of the
North American women, is most interesting. While the
weavers in the South were making blankets and serapes
in the whole piece, never cutting their goods, the tailors
north of the Mexican border were excellent cutters. For
scissors they used the woman's knife, called ulo by the
Eskimos, a blade of chert or other rock, crescent shaped
on the outer edge, and a most excellent device for cutting
skin without marring the hair. Scissors would be worse
than useless in this connection, for thev would shear the
hair as well as the hide and make an ugly seam. In the
fitting of garments these primitive tailors anticipated the
long list of terms, such as puckering, gathering, inserting
gores, and the like. For tucks in their more beautiful
dresses they inserted band after band of the skins of dif-
ferent animals, bits from different parts of the same hide,
and strips of bare hide ornamented by quillwork. Tufts
of feathers or long hair, pendants of shell, hoof, teeth?
or bone — in short, all objects of comely shape and pretty
colour and proper size — were gathered into the costumes
of men and children as well as into their own.

With soles of rawhide and uppers of skin beautifully

* Dorsey, Third An. Rep. Bur. EthnoL, pp. 285, 28G.

86 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

embroidered or adorned they shod the good man uTid
their children, and perhaps themselves. But the proverb
often held in their case, that the shoemaker has no time
to care for her own sole, and she went barefooted. In
the history of journeyings this shoeing of human feet
is to be studied by the side of the shoeing of horses or
putting tires on wheels. The woman who invented san-
dals or moccasins should have a statue bv the side of that
of Watt. Savage women carry a part of their tool chests
in their mouths. The Eskimo woman is a bootmaker,
but has no clamps for stretching leather, so she puckers
the upper and sole all around the edge where they come
together, and uses her teeth for the purpose. In every
other part of the world savage women utilize their teeth
to clamp and cut and hold on.

Murdoch has worked out with the greatest care the
variety and cut of the Eskimo suits for men and for
women in winter and summer. The man's dress at
Point Barrow consists of the hooded frock, without open-
ing except at the neck and wrists. This reaches just over
the hips, rarely about to mid-thigh, where it is cut off
square, and is usually confined by a girdle at the waist.
Under this garment is worn a similar one, usually of
lighter skin, and sometimes without a hood. The thighs
are clad in one or two pairs of tight-fitting knee breeches,
confined round the hips by a girdle and usually secured
by a drawstring below the knee, which ties over the tops
of the boots. On the legs and feet are worn, first, a pair
of long deerskin stockings with the hair inside; then,
slippers of tanned seal skin, in the bottom of which is
spread a layer of whalebone shavings; and outside a pair
of close-fitting boots, usually reaching above the knee.
The boots are of reindeer skin with white seal-skin soles
for winter and dry weather, but in summer waterproof
boots of black seal skin with soles of white whale skin are

THE SKIN DRESSER. 87

worn. Overshoes are sometimes worn over the winter
boots. When travelling on snowshoes or in soft dry snow
the boots are replaced by stockings of the same shape as the
under ones, but made of very thick winter deerskins with
the flesh side out. Over the usual dress is worn in very cold
weather a circular mantle of deerskin, and in rainv weather

7 */

both sexes wear a hooded rain frock of seal intestine.

The dress of the women consists of two frocks, which
differ from those of the men in being continued from the
waist in two rather full rounded skirts at the front and
back, reaching to or below the knee. A woman's frock is
always distinguished by a sort of rounded bulge or pocket
at the nape of the neck, which is intended to receive the
infant when carried in the jacket. On her lower limbs a
woman wears a pair of tight-fitting deerskin pantaloons
with the hair next the skin, and outside of these a similar
pair made of the skins of deer legs with the hair out, and
having soles of seal skin. Those who are well to do own
several complete suits of clothes.

Mr. Murdoch, after enumerating the articles in the
wardrobe of an Eskimo, describes minutely the manner
in which each garment is cut out and the pieces fitted
together, with the double purpose always to make it
fit the wrearer and to adorn the prominent parts, such
as the bosom, shoulders, wrists, and borders, with pretty
coloured fur and long, delicate fringes of hair alternating
with inserted bands of varied material. It must not be
forgotten that the creation of these wardrobes is the work
of the women, that it takes a deal of j3atience and skill and
artistic education to make a comely suit of clothing for an
Eskimo gentleman, and Mr. Murdoch informs us that
some of them are quite exacting in this particular.*

* Murdoch, The Point Barrow Eskimo, Ninth An. Rep. Bur.
Ethnol., Washington, 1892, pp. 109-138, Figs. 51-8G.

88 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Hearne relates of the Indian women west of Hudson's
Bay : " We had no sooner joined the women, on our return
from the expedition, than there seemed to be a universal
spirit of emulation among them, vying who should first
make a suit of ornaments for their husbands, which con-
sisted of bracelets for the wrists and a band for the forehead,
composed of porcupine quills and moose hair, curiously
wrought on leather."* The Indian women visited by
Hearne belong to the great Athabascan stock, and all
their work on costumes is beautifully done. The buck-
skin is as soft as silk, the clothes are neatly fitted, and
the ornaments are put on with much taste.

The modiste, the hatter, the milliner, were practically
one, but more than half the time all members of the tribes
went bare-headed. The war bonnets and such toggery
for the great ceremonies were made by men, though it
must be admitted that they borrowed much of the material
from the good housewife. There is a beautiful war bon-
net of eagle feathers in the United States National Mu-
seum, all the sewing on which was done with a sewing
machine. It was the regalia of a celebrated chief whose
daughter had been educated at Carlisle School.

The reticule, the tobacco bag, the travelling case, the
bandbox, the packing trunk, all exist among savages, and
in North America were made by women, chiefly from the
hides of animals. For the first two, skins of pretty little
rodents and "such small deer'' sufficed. For the "fire
bag," as it is called, to hold the pipe and tobacco, the yel-
low buckskin was the thing, covered at the bottom with
embroidery and finished out with a long fringe of the body
material. The bandboxes and trunks were of rawhide, as
stiff as a board and painted in green and red stripes.

As an offset to the tasteful needlework of the Eskimo

* Hearne, Journey, etc.. London, 1795, Strahan, p. 205.

THE SKIN DRESSER. 80

tailors it is entertaining to read of the German women in
Tacitus's day. " These make choice of particular skins,
which they variegate with spots and with strips of the
furs of marine animals, the produce of the exterior ocean
[northern ocean] and of seas unknown to us. The dress
of the women does not differ from that of the men."* Com-
pare with the spotting of fur clothing the modern practice
of decorating ermine with black lamb's wool and the uni-
versal practice of adding to costly fur capes and cloaks
borders of otter and other skins of various colours.

Following the course pursued in other chapters of this
book, we ought to inquire what has become of all the hard
labor and varied skill of primitive women involved in the
skin-working industry. It is true that in the " Great Lone
Land " much of it is going on still. But the buffalo and
caribou and elk and deer are practically gone. Further-
more, the ancestors of most Europeans were once clad in
skins. Houses of wood and brick and stone cover the very
spots where stood the tents of hide, but women do not
build them. The beds and packing boxes and furniture
that used to be of skins are now made of wood and iron,
but men are the fabricators of the hard parts, while wom-
en manufacture the soft parts. Clothing is fashioned
out of wool and cotton and linen. For the most part
women do the weaving and cutting and sewing. In
the conservation of their energy the force that disap-
pears with the feral animals reappears in the manipula-
tion of the silkworm and the fleece and hair of domesti-
cated creatures. But leather has taken the place of the
prepared skins. It enters into industries without num-
ber. No kind of skin is despised. Glove-makers and shoe-
makers are still largely women. At present, men have
ceased to wear furs, but by the inevitable law of survival

* Tacitus, Germania, chap. 17; also Pliny, xix, i.

90 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

and conservatism women use up nearly all the harvest of
wild skins that are obtained. At this moment, while the
author is penning these lines, the two foremost nations of
the world have invoked the good offices of arbitration
rather than go to war over the fur-bearing seals, whose
hides are needed to clothe the backs of fine ladies. The
skins of all the beautiful birds in the world are being
mercilessly hunted for the plumage to deck the heads of
women. The sea otter, the beaver, and the other pro-
ducers of elegant furs have been nearly extinguished on
their behalf.

CHAPTER V.

THE POTTER.

"Women were the first ceramic artisans and developed
all the technique, the forms, and the uses of pottery. The
inventions concerned in this industrial progress are far-
reaching in their own extent, in the influence which they
have had in the refinement and development of women,
and in the rewards of happiness which they brought to
the races and tribes favoured by their presence. As has
been previously shown, pottery or earlier substitutes there-
for had no place in the kitchen until the mush-making or
meat-seething stasre of cookerv had arrived.

It is a piece of good fortune that this industry may
still be seen in America in its pristine simplicity in two
areas widely separated and serving entirely different pur-
poses.

The first is among the Eskimo, who use the pottery
for the stove or fireplace and not for the cooking ves-
sel to set on the stove. These hyperboreans have neither
coal nor wood to burn, so they generally fashion their
combination stove-lamps of soapstone. These lamps are
shallow dishes or pans, straight on one border and curved
on the other, in outline like a " turnover " pie.

In Greenland, Labrador, all about Hudson's Bay, along
the Arctic and Alaskan coast, wherever the material can
be found, these lamps are hung up or set up in the under-
ground home. Over the lamp is suspended a small cook-
ing pot of the same material and a frame for drying cloth-

92 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

ing. Considerable warmth is imparted to the chamber by
this apparatus, and the blaze affords light enough for the
needs of the inmates. Now, in the Bristol Bay region of
Alaska the soapstone seems to have failed the maker of
lamps and cooking pots, for in that area these utensils
are formed out of clay, mixed, it is said, with dog's hair
and blood. The soapstone lamp is copied in the softer
material, but the form is changed owing to the de-
mands of technical economy. The Bristol Bay woman's
lamps are made, therefore, in form of bowls or saucers,
though she never saw one of these. Murdoch also figures
rude fragments of pottery from the vicinity of Point
Barrow.*

With her lamp-stove of clay and wick of moss or other
vegetable fibre abundant in that region, and with the fat
or blubber scraped from the inner side of the seal skin in
the process of curing and dressing it, this primeval vestal
still keeps her vigils. In all essential particulars the Es-
kimo woman's lamps at Bristol Bay are similar to the ones
tended long ago in the Prytaneum at Athens and in the
temple of Vesta at Borne, and many hundreds of ex-
tremely rude examples are now in use all about the lands
bordering on the Mediterranean.

For the other ceramic artist, still holding and using the
earliest letters patent, we must go to the arid regions of
New Mexico and Arizona. She could also be found in
South America, in Africa, and in New Guinea, but not in
Polynesia. In the Southwestern States of our Union
women have, from time immemorial, practiced the art of
the potter with the greatest success. There is no reason
to believe that their present methods and tools and prod-
ucts are different at all from what they were a thousand
years ago. See what a multiplicity of occupations is in-

* Ninth An. Rep. Bar. Ethnol., Fig. 22.

THE POTTER. 93

volved in the production of one of those fragile vases with
whieh we love to adorn our houses !

The women go forth to the mesa where the proper
layers of clay are exposed, and quarry out the raw mate-
rial. To do this, one would say they ought to he good
mineralogists aud skillful engineers. They also gather
from the sediment of the streams most excellent clay for
their paste. " After the passage of a storm and the rapid
disappearance of the transient flood, the pools of the ar-
royos would retain a sediment of clay two or three inches
thick, having a consistence perfectly suited to the hands
of the potter." *

This is one of those interesting occurrences in which
Nature, asserting her true motherhood over our race,
prepares beforehand the materials of industries and an-
nounces what they are to be. In a certain sense, therefore,
the fine pottery of the Pueblos may be said to have been
created by the floods in the canons.

If the potter is not fortunate enough to find this ex-
cellent paste, she gathers and carries home on her back
the clay quarried from the mesa. In this act the quarry
woman assumes the role of pack woman. In the absence
of the grinding apparatus of the wwld-renowned pot-
teries and of the sieves and bolting cloths, she washes the
clay, lets the gravel and worthless material sink or float,
decants the liquid, and allows the fine aluminous earth
to settle. Though the term " specific gravity " was not
known to her, she seems to have seized upon this principle
in order to gather out the elements desired.

This fine paste will not make pottery; it will crack
badly in drying and baking. But our ceramic worker is
equal to the occasion, and long ago had discovered, as
every archaeologist knows, that sand or some other tern-

* Holmes, Fourth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 267.

91 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

pering material must be added. The oldest fragments
yet discovered reveal in their texture grains of sand,
put there by Nature or by the potter, bits of pulverized
shells, or the remains of old pots ground fine and worked
over into new vessels. The exact way in which these
little foreign bodies prevent cracking in the clay does
not seem to be known. That the mere haphazard com-
bination of unlike materials will suffice is disproved by
the crumbling of such ware on exposure. Indeed, there
is more professional knowledge involved than the un-
initiated realize. Recently the Smithsonian Institution
employed some Pamunkey Indian women to prepare a col-
lection of their ware for the Chicago Exposition. They
failed in half the pieces because they calcined the shells
in burning the pottery. As soon as the pieces were ex-
posed to moisture they slaked like quicklime.

In the process of washing and mixing her clay both
the ancient Pueblo woman and her modern representative
assorted it for different kinds of ware — coarser material
for her ruder ware, and finer material for more artistic
productions. In this she was cultivating the delicacy of
feeling, the keen sense of colour, and exercising her judg-
ment. The potter was being developed in the exercise of
her craft. This process can not be too frequently alluded
to in the growth of any industry.

In making up her clay into ware she followed three
processes, but all without the faintest semblance of the
potter's wheel or other machinery. The age of machinery
had not arrived in the Colorado basin, but she had a
substitute for the symmetrical operation of machinery in
her true eve and her steady hand. There are those who
hold that the sense of beauty is more gratified in contem-
plating such hand work than the monotonous products of
machinery.

The simplest process pursued by these potters in the

THE POTTER. 95

Colorado basin was that of children playing with mud, or
Eskimo women in forming up their lamps, or the cook
in making a pie, not neglecting even the pinching of
the edges in a precisely similar manner. This free-hand
work leads more directly to sculpture than to the ceramic
art. It were better, perhaps, to regard it as the ancestral
type out of which the. others were differentiated. The
Pueblo women of our day not only occasionally model
whole pieces at a time, but they constantly finish out and
decorate ware made after other methods by this free-hand
operation. The Pueblo woman is severely plain in her
tastes, but her kinsfolk, who dwelt in the Mississippi val-
ley and in tropical America long ago, were more venture-
some, and modelled rude little figures of men and beasts
and conventional designs and luted them to their vessels
with fresh clay.

If we had been able to look into the workshops of the
ancient Mexicans, or of the Central Americans, or of the
most skillful tribes of South America, we should be sur-
prised at the barbaric extravagance in modelled extraneous
ornament. It comes to pass in our day that men do this
modelling in pottery most cleverly, especially in Mexico;
but I shall not say that it was so from the beginning.
The modern ware is made for sale and not for use, and
evervbodv knows that the demands of commerce first
drove men to doing woman's work. I have found an
interesting allusion to this barter in pottery in New
Guinea.*

The second process of the potter is that of moulding
the soft clay around or within some object to give it
shape. This process may be employed in the one next to

* Thomson, British New Guinea, London, 1892, Philip, p. 76;
two figures on p. 77, one olla-shaped, the other a shallow bowl, both
with hachured ornament about the rims.

96 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTCRE.

be described, but it was also practiced by itself. Abundant
evidence exists that the primitive potter shaped masses of
prepared clay on the outside and on the inside of gourds,
baskets, nets, and other shapely objects. This is shown
not only by the forms of the vessels themselves, but by
the markings left on their surfaces by the texture of the

Fig. 23.— Modelled Vase, with Rattles in the Legs. (After Holmes.)

mould. There is no doubt that this style of ware is wom-
an's work. The cuneiform inscriptions left by the an-
cient kings of Mesopotamia are not so legible. In the
last chapter the various stitches employed by savage wom-
en in hand plaiting and weaving were carefully described.
They are the same that reappear on the surfaces of pot-
sherds made hundreds of years ago, whether in Swiss lake

THE POTTER. 97

dwellings, in Africa, or in the United States. The two
arts, lovely and beautiful in their lives, in their death
they were not divided.

As a far greater number of ancient fragments in the
United States bear textile markings than are found with
impressions of purely natural objects, such as gourds, it is
fair to infer that basketry was invented or made here be-
fore pottery. Again, as every basketry stitch or pattern
known to savages is found impressed on pottery frag-
ments, the textile art was considerably advanced before it
was applied to ceramics. And, finally, as the impressions
found on fragments in each region conform to the pe-
culiar patterns of basketry practiced by modern savages
when first visited by the whites, we have an argument for
the continuitv of the same arts in the same areas, even
though the peoples practicing them may have changed.

The elements abraded the surfaces of the fragments,
but at the same time filled the twisted furrows with earth.

No more effectually has the dust of ages sealed up and
preserved the Egyptian tombs. The archaeologist with a
soft brush removes the foreign matter and takes the im-
pression of the furrows with some plastic material. The
very style of the spinner, the weaver, the netmaker, is re-
vealed, and in some cases the material. Plain weaving,
diaper weaving, twined weaving, coiled weaving, then as
now, and with scarcelv a change.*

The third style of procedure in ancient pottery-mak-
ing is the most interesting of all, it is so ingenious and
so widespread. In certain areas the archaeologist finds
small shards, indicating that the vessels were molded in
basketry. Now we are to study the making of pottery
like basketry.

* See Holmes, Third An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., pp. 393-425. Pro-
fusely illustrated.

98

WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Prompted, it may be, by the very act of making a
coiled basket, the ancient potter rolled out a fillet or slen-
der cylinder of prepared paste about the thickness, say, of
a chalk crayon. Every one who reads these lines has more
than once seen children playing with putty, rolling it out
into fillets and then coiling it. The cook also makes lit-
tle cakes after the same process, and the tidy housewife
supplies herself thus with mats for her tables.

The ancient potter also coiled her fillet of soft clay
around and around in an orderly manner, pinching as she
went. As hinted at in the description of the second pro-
cess, this work is done occasionally on the outside of a
basket, bowl, or another vase. But the work is more fre-

Fig. 24. — Making Coiled Ware in Basket Bowl. (After Gushing.)

quently built up by the hands, guided chiefly by the eye,
until the vessel is finished. Luckily for the student, many
vessels are left in the corrugated condition produced by
the pinching and coiling.* These examples not only show
the process here referred to, but they evidence a marvellous

* For the great variety in the imbrication and pinching of the
coils consult Holmes, Fourth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., pp. 273-297,

Figs. 219-250.

THE POTTER. 99

variety of finger-nail and finger-tip work. There would be
no greater mistake than to suppose that all these pinched
surfaces are alike. In most cases, however, with this kind of
ware as well as with the modelled and the moulded, every
trace of the finger marks is carefully obliterated, either
with soft tools of hide or gourd very much like those used
by the stone-ware-maker or with bits of gourd while the
pot is soft. After the surface is dry it is rubbed down
and thoroughly polished with very smooth stones. It is
difficult then to detect the fact that the vessel was built
up by coiling, and yet most of the pottery north of Mexico,
ancient and modern, was so constructed.

The Zuni woman often stands while forming a piece
of pottery and leans over her work. She centres it under
her eye. In turning it around in the base upon which
she builds it up she includes all the elements of the pot-
ter's wheel. But there is no better example of the differ-
ence between hand work and machine work. The latter
would make the vessel to be round if the potter were to
shut his eyes; in the former, it is the knack of the eye
that gives. rotundity to the vase.

The ingenious Pueblo woman and her Papuan sister
workwoman know how to combine the three processes
just explained upon the same vessel. The bottom of the
vessel may start with a coiled fillet of clay laid on the
bottom of a symmetrical basket, or even of a gourd or of a
mould made for the purpose. Or this same starting
point may be moulded over an object for some distance
before the coiling begins. In all these cases, the sym-
metry of form once secured, there is no difficulty in per-
petuating it.

But even these poorly taught children of Nature dis-
played considerable originality by using an old bowl in
which to set up a new one, and the constant revolution of
the whole as on a pivot enabled the artisan to correct her
8

100 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

mistakes of symmetry.* The wheat stacker, unloading his
sheaves upon different sides of his structure, and the dress-
maker rely upon the judgment of the eye in the same
manner, looking at the work constantly from every point
of view.

Fig. 25. — Basket Bowl as Base Mould fop. Large Vessel, showing also
the Smoothing Process after Coiling. (After Gushing.)

Nothing has yet been said concerning the evolution of
form in this Pueblo ware. Not to proceed by guesswork,
as some have done, it is necessary to take as our guide
Mr. dishing, who spent several years of his life among
these people for the sole purpose of study. The Havasupai
Indian women of Shoshonean stock, dwelling in Cataract
Canon, Arizona, still adhere to the good old ways of life

* This natural primitive potter's wheel is also observed among
the New Caledonians by J. J. Atkinson, J. Anthrop. Inst., xxiii,
p. 90.

THE POTTER. 101

in all their simplicity. Among their employments is the
gathering of seeds and crickets and roasting them with
bits of meat in a Hat tray of basketry by means of hot
stones or live coals. Several specimens of these in the
United States National Museum have been seriously
charied in this operation. And the happening of this
misfortune doubtless led the Havasupai to lining the
inside of this roasting tray with a thin wash of clay
mingled with sand, which in time was turned by the hot
stones into a veritable flat plate, to be used in its turn as
a rude primitive brasier. Mr. Gushing tells us that the
Zuni Indians actually call the earthenware pot in which
they parch food by a compound name which, interpreted,
means a roasting tray of twigs.

The deepening of the flat dish becomes in pottery a
bowl, just as the deepening of a basket tray becomes a
basket bowl. But these poor Havasupai have two other
devices worthy of notice in this connection. They make
basket pots for boiling food by means of hot stones,
and basket bottles with narrow mouths for carrying
water.

It is easy enough to imagine how dishes become bowls
and bowls pots, but the conversion of the latter into
carafes or bottles, large and small, is worthy of a little
further study. So long as a vessel is wider at the top
than at the middle it can be lifted from any mould, but
the narrowing process requires skill. Again, the women
of savagery are exceedingly proud of their work. In the
saints' calendar above all others stands the names of skill-
ful women. There is a generous rivalry that keeps the
best at their best. Now, in pottery, tenuity, smallness,
and length of neck and flatness of the shoulder are the
points that count.

In effecting these the necks would become so small
that the hand of the operator could no longer be thrust

102 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

inside to sustain the shoulder and finish the upper parts.
Says Mr. dishing : " The effect of the pressure exerted in
smoothing them on the outside, therefore, naturally caused
the upper parts to sink down, generating the spheroidal
shape of the jar. Without any instruction from me be-
yond a statement of my wishes, a Zuni woman sprinkled
the inside of a basket bowl with sand, managing the clay
upward by spiral building, making the shoulders high.
When she had finished the rim, she easily caused the
shoulders to sink with a wet scraper of gourd until she
had exactly reproduced the form of my drawing. She
then set the vessel aside in the basket. Within two days
it shrank about one inch in twelve, leaving the basket far
too large." * It could then be removed.

We may tarn aside one moment from this detailed ac-
count of technique to inquire into the number of occupa-
tions, the variety of thought, and the ingenuity involved
in an operation of this character.

Quarrying, carrying, washing, assorting, mixing, tem-
pering, modelling, moulding, coiling, smoothing, polishing,
shaping — all with humble enough tools, but with artistic
instinct, a marvellous knack, and an educated eye that a
modern builder might envy — the savage potter finishes her
vessel. It is now less than one eighth of an inch in thick-
ness. These processes have not been repeated thousands
of times, but millions of times, as any area will testify
where such work went on. They were the daily occupa-
tion of Indian women.

The good housewife of nowadays has her last thought
of the evening as wrell as her first waking thought upon
those associations with crockery that have become a second
nature to her, and they frequently monopolize her dreams.

*Cushing, Fourth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 500. Consult the
whole chapter, pp. 407-521, Figs. 490-564.

THE POTTER.

103

If we only knew how many imaginings and volitions and
studies the Pueblo woman experiences in a day over her
ceramic work, there would be little wonder that she does
it so well.

For the delicate
glazes with which pot-
tery would be surfaced
in our modern facto-
ries savagery has a
poor substitute. The
primitive workwoman
used a wash or " slip "
made of the finest
clay she could procure
by her simple process-
es. Among the Pueblo
people " this wash took
the place of the en-
amels used by more
accomplished potters,
and, being usually
white, it gave a beau-
tiful surface on which
to execute designs in
color." *

Aboriginal Ameri-
can potters were igno-
rant of vitreous glaze,

even of the Common Fig. 26.— The Processes in building up
Use Of Salt, as in the most Wished Type of Jar. (After

Gushing.)
making stoneware or

drainpipe. Now and then a piece is found whose sur-
face is true glass, and many other pieces have a lustrous

a'

* Holmes, Fourth An. Hep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 2G8.

10-1 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

coating due to the polishing before burning. This is due
to the accidental presence of alkaline matter in the water
used. In the arid regions of the Southwest the husband-
ing of drinking water is necessary, and at other times even
the drinking water becomes sufficiently alkaline to incrust
pottery made with it.

Perhaps the reader is impatient for the furnace ; but a
word must be previously said about ornamentation — that
is, the mechanical methods of effecting the decoration of
pottery. Variety in color of Pueblo earthenware is pro-
duced in the simplest fashion by the ingredients of the
native clay. Indeed, savage women in many lands under-
stand this, but none of them are far enough advanced in
their studies to mix oxides of iron with clav to vary the
color of the burnt vessels. However, the variety which
Dame Nature gives in color to vessels through the clays
found in different regions was not slow in being appre-
hended by her ready pupils.

In addition to these varied body colors, the resources of
decoration on the surface of the ware were, first, colored
clays and mineral and vegetal paints laid on with brushes
made of the shredded fibre of tough plants. These colors
would be oxidized or carbonized in the burning. The
further surface ornamentations were parts of the corrugat-
ed surface, intentionally left there in the smoothing, in-
dentations and reliefs produced by the fingers when the
clay was soft, tool markings, impressions laid in with cord,
or nets, or basket work, or stamps, and, finally, modelled
ornaments made up separately and glued or luted on
with soft clay. In speaking particularly of the Pueblo
potters we are really describing those of all parts of the
world.

Mr. James Mooney collected a number of potters'
stamps for the United States National Museum from the
Cherokee Indians. They look like the old-fashioned

THE POTTER. 105

butter paddles, with geometric designs cut on the sur-
faces.

One hundred arid fifty years ago Dumont wrote thus
graphically of the Choctaw women in Mississippi : " More-
over, the industry of these girls and women is admirable.
I have already alluded to the skill with which, by means
of the fingers only, and without a wheel, " that great per-
verter of the plastic tendencies of clay," they make pieces
of pottery. The following is their method of work : After
having collected a proper quantity of the proper kind of
earth, and having cleaned it thoroughly, they take shells,
which they break up and reduce to a very fine, loo.se pow-
der; thev mix this fine dust with the earth which they
have collected, and, moistening the whole with a little
water, work it with their hands and feet into a paste, from
which they make rolls six or seven feet long and as thick
as they may desire. If thev wish to make a dish or a vase
they take one of these rolls by the end, and, marking ou
this lump with the thumb of the left hand the centre of
the vessel, they turn the roll around this centre with ad-
mirable rapidity and dexterity, describing a spiral. From
time to time they dip their fingers into the water, which
thev are alwavs careful to have near them, and with the
risrht hand thev flatten the inside and outside of the vase,
which without this would be uneven. In this way they
make all kinds of earthen utensils, dishes, plates, bowls,
pots, and jugs, some of which hold as much as forty, or
even fifty, pints. This pottery does not require much
preparation for baking. After having dried it in the
shade they make a large fire, and as soon as they think
they have enough embers they clean a place in the middle,
and, arranging the pieces of pottery, cover them with char-
coal. It is thus that the pieces are given the necessary
heating, after which they are as strong as our pottery.
There is no doubt but that we must attribute their strength

106 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

to the mixture which these women make of powdered shells
with the earth which they employ.*

As hinted by Dumont, the burning of the vessels was
a very simple affair. Open fires made of charcoal, or in
the desert country of chopped straw and dried dung, were
the savage woman's kilns. There is little wonder that the
pieces are not uniform in shade, and often show stains and
burned spaces. Colonel Stevenson, who knew much of our
Southwestern country, told the writer that a very attractive
black ware was produced by secondary burning. When
the fire of chopped grass and dung was at white heat, the
burning mass was raked off and fresh fuel applied. A
smudge was produced which seems to have been inhaled
by the cooling vessel, dyeing it a permanent black almost
through and through.

The Nicobarese are a race of savages whose reputation
has rested upon their piracy. But the women are excel-
lent potters, and their mode of procedure is a good exam-
ple of the question frequently discussed by ethnologists,
whether the same art has arisen independently in widely
separated areas or is an evidence of contact.

They prepare and cleanse the clay precisely as the
Pueblo women do, kneading it with fine sand. The oper-
ator seats herself on the ground and places before her a
piece of board on which she lays a ring of cocoanut leaves
neatly bound together. Upon this ring she sets a shallow
dish lined with a circular piece of plantain leaf. With a
lump of clay the bottom of the vessel to be constructed is
moulded in the dish. Upon this basis, by means of roils of
clay, the work is built up, the operator meanwhile turn-

* Butel-Dumont, Mom. sur la Louisiane, Paris, 1753, vol. ii. pp.
271-2?:J. On the Indians of South America, C. P. Hartt, American
Naturalist, February, 1879, pp. 83-80. Also, E. A. Barber and Cap-
tain Moss, for Ute Indians. All quoted by Holmes, Fourth An.
Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 270.

THE POTTER. 107

ing the pot round and round, shaping it with her eye and
hand. The vessel is set aside on a platform under the
hut for a day or two to dry; only the smallest kind can
be got ready for the kiln in one day.

The dried pot is taken from the platform and scraped
with a shell, after which it is reversed and all excess of
material externally removed by means of a fine strip of
bamboo, moistened with water, as also are the fingers of
the potter, and gently passed over the inner and outer
surfaces of the vessel in order to smooth them. The pot
is then replaced on the platform for ten days.

The kiln is prepared by sticking bits of broken pottery
in the ground a few inches apart, and on these the pots
are set upside down. In the space under the pot a layer
of fine wood ash and a quantity of cocoanut shells and
scraps of firewood are heaped. A wheel-like object, larger
than the circumference of the pot, is laid on its upturned
base, and against this the firewood is stood on end. The
fuel is kindled, two or three women fan the flame, and
they also with pokers of wood prop up and replace the
fuel. When a vessel is baked, it is removed with the same
implement and laid in dry sand. The stripes are laid on
by means of strips of unripe cocoanut husk placed against
the vessel while hot. The acid juice turns black the mo-
ment it touches the heated surface. Finally a handful of
moist strips of husk are passed over the inner and the
outer surface, imparting a light copper color to the parts
not stained by the deeper dye. The vessels are stored for
a year or so to season.*

The technical materials and processes having been
considered, attention may now be given to what Aristotle
would denominate the formal cause of aboriginal ceramic,

* E. H. Man, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, London,
1893, vol. xxiii, pp. 21-27, with plate.

108 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the thoughts that were in every savage woman's mind
whenever she laid her hands upon a mass of accommo-
dating clay. It must not be forgotten that the vessel was
al ways the result of the thought, and not vice versa. There
is no doubt, also, that the making of the vessel was the
occasion of much thought; but invention, in the last re-
sort, is always a subjective process.

For holding, carrying, storing, cooking, serving food
and drink, vessels have existed among all peoples. Of
what they shall be made Nature has a deal to say, but in
what shape they must appear the Mother of Invention
will dictate in that matter. But the whole , cause of the
form is a little further to seek. For instance, our Bristol
Bay Eskimo woman makes her rude lamps to burn blub-
ber, but she continues to make them partly like the soap-
stone lamps and partly after her own fashion. So one
might truly say that the absence of soapstone, the pres-
ence and docility of the clay, the need of a lamp-stove
that will burn blubber with a moss wick, the patterns of
the soapstone lamps, the stimulus of necessity, the inge-
nuity of the woman — that one and all of these were causes
of the clay lamp and gave it its form. But the funda-
mental fact remains that the Eskimo woman was the true
cause of the lamp of clay, and she was the inventor of it.

There is no doubt that all fictile artists primeval stum-
bled upon many forms, some of which were relegated to
the company of rejected patents, and a limited number
that have survived in the test of experience as the best for
the purpose. Many of these forms they learned in Na-
ture's art school, imitating here a gourd, there a shell, in
other places more complicated vegetal and animal shapes.*

* Henry Balfour, The Evolution of Decorative Art. London,
1893, Percival ; Holmes, Evolution of the iEsthetie, Proc. Am.
Assoc., Salem, 1892, vol. xli. pp. 239-255.

THE POTTER. 100

This varied curriculum, this numerous corps of able in-
structors, have frequently been noticed in works on the
origin of art forms. Here attention is drawn to the peda-
gogic limitations within which all pottery-making women
have wrought. They rarely imitate canoes or other ob-
jects with which men have to deal. Their natural insti-
gators were the things of daily experience. Moreover,
when the potter's art passed largely out of the hands of
women the shapes remained the same. This imitation of
Nature is also supplemented by an imitation of woman's
own art in other substances. Pottery is a laggard among
the industries, and the ancestresses of the first potters had
long been going to school in other materials. Mr. Holmes
thinks that the potstone globular olla of California's south-
ern coast could possibly have antedated the globular pot-
tery ; that the wooden tray is older than a similar form in
clay, or the horn ladle than one in pottery. Even bark
vessels and baskets for all purposes could have suggested
forms in the softer paste. The same law of imitation
could just as easily have worked the other way. That is
not in question now. If it be granted that the soapstone
olla was woman's creation and woman's implement which
she invented, that is all that is asked. The wooden proto-
type would have been one that she dug out of a log, the
birch-bark vessel of all uses, the basketry jar or carrying
device or bottle, or what not — all were hers from first to
last. Nowhere before the introduction of machinery and
the potters wheel does the stream of her activity in clay
inn into or come out of forms invented by men.

A pattern once acquired, there sets in with the priscan
artists something akin to those linguistic softenings and
abbreviations which Muiler attributes to phonetic laziness.
That is to say, a kind of plastic laziness, rounding of coi-
ners, inflating of sides, shortening of limbs, atrophying of
parts nonessential or actually pernicious, until it requires

HO WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

a ceramist to reinstate the missing portions, to read back-
ward the visible speech of generations of women who have
kept the thought but varied the expression. A better
name for this process would be " plastic economy," since
most of the changes are wrought to save labour in the
making; or to render the thins: made more serviceable.*

Not only is form borrowed from the things personally
familiar to women, but the study of added features will
show how little help she had from men.

The functional additions to pottery — the parts that
are to serve some use — grow out of the experiences of
women in the handling of the plain, round wares, in sup-
porting or carrying them. The flaring out of the rim
would admit of a string. The addition of handles, bor-
rowed or original, are for the purpose of lifting. The lit-
tle ring of fibre placed on the head to aid in carrying
may be made in clay and stuck to the vessel in mak-
ing. We have then the base, which may be secured also
by punching up the bottom as in a bottle.

The structural element
in the addition of orna-
ment or of useful parts
is extremely suggestive.
The coil is ever present
before the imagination of
the potter in her own art,
and so also is the great
variety of indentations
produced by her hands and finger tips. Seams, stitches,
plaits, twists, knots, and the like are easily carried over
from the textile art by moulding from them or by imitating
them. And all these are ready in woman's special labo-
ratory.

* See Holmes's analysis of ceramic ornament, Fourth An. Rep.
Bur. Ethnol., p. 453.

Fig. 27. — Clay Vessel modelled after
a Shell Vessel. (After Holmes.;

THE POTTER.

Ill

Fig. 28. — Vessel of Shell as Model
for one in Clay. (After Holmes.)

The suggestions from accidents attending construc-
tion drop into receptive minds, whether made by the
dainty fingers engaged, by the implements employed, or
by the moulds in or upon which the material is wrought.
The last class in Holmes's
table is made up of those
ornamental features which
have no ideographic or
pictorial significance to
the artist, but which are
derived from more intel-
ligible forms that had real
meanings, just as there
are hundreds of derivative
words in our language,
used by us every day, of whose etymology few, if any,
know aught. To declare that the stories and pictures hid-
den in all aboriginal designs on pottery of this class relate
to woman's life and work and experiences alone would be
going too far. Yet a review of the progress of the art of
painting on pottery may reveal further woman's connection
with the early nurture of designing. The colors employed
were such as Nature furnished — white, black, and a great
variety of reds. In following the patterns derived from
other sources, the free hand produced creditable work, but
when it left these leading strings and wandered into the
imaginary or the descriptive area the operation is tentative
and enigmatical. Still, an economy of effect was ever in
mind. Those surfaces were chosen for painting that were
most exposed ; bowls received the ornament on the inside
and on the outer rim. Jars with incurved rims were deco-
rated on the outer, upturned border ; bottles and ordinary
jars were painted only on the exterior surfaces. The ex-
posed surfaces were either covered with ornament in elabo-
rate patterns, or the design was placed merely upon medal-

112 WOMAN'S SHARE IX PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

lions, areas, or zones about the vessel. Where there is
room for a multiplicity of designs these need not be re-
lated to one another, and the greatest liberty of grouping
is allowed. The artist follows no special design, never
traces in sand, or on skin, or any other surface the pat-
terns she will produce. The formal cause of the decora-
tion is in her mind ; her working drawings are sketched
on the walls of her imagination. It would consign a
modern potter to retirement if his panels and pictures
were not geometrically accurate. But the savage artist
seems to relish asymmetry. She is not the least embar-
rassed if, with four repetitions of the same group in mind,
she finds by and by that three of them have nearly ex-
hausted her space. The quaint manner in which she
compels the fourth to squeeze itself into the allotted area
has been the delight of more than one civilized artist.
The Pueblo woman seems to have passed through three
well-marked stages of development in her pictorial, plastic
art. In the first the forms of expression are mainly geo-
metric. The elements are chiefly checkers, zigzags, chev-
rons, meanders, fretted figures, and scrolls, all developed
out of woman's work in other technical fields. The sec-
ond stage is the introduction of pictures, totemic em-
blems, mythic symbols and beings, and so forth, drawn
out quite fully or in such half -abbreviated form as to
contain still an intimation of the original. Compared
with rhetoric, this* stage is a species of trope in clay — ce-
ramic metaphors, similes, and synecdoches. The third
stage is that in which the pictorial, the synecdochical, the
hieroglyphic art becomes still more abbreviated, synco-
pated, apocopated, until the relics of former ideograms be-
come mere letters in an alphabet on the way to a higher
language or, under the pressure of a higher civilization,
degenerates into a jargon. At this point the savage
woman stands vis-a-vis with two important roads forward

THE POTTER. 113

of which she does not seem to have taken either one.
The first leads to sculpture, to modelling, the creation in
the willing clay of new forms quite apart from her homely
work in savagery. The other leads to the potter's wheel,
the application of machinery to the production of sym-
metrical and exact work. The mere mention of machin-
ery startled her. You must go to China for the simplest
form of this device, where you will see a man kicking the
spindle around with his naked feet without the aid of
wheels to multiply the speed. He is producing cylinders of
clay, which he will cut into two or three segments length-
wise for making tiles for roofs of houses. Other male
descendants of this primeval artist is the brickmaker, the
draintile maker, the village potter. But with them her
poor out-of-door lire is replaced by kilns and furnaces
capable of producing a vitreous glaze and organizing a
new art with which she has little to do.

This chapter would not be complete without a brief
reference to the functions of pottery. Long ago women
made pottery for themselves to wear out and only a little
for the convenience or delight of men. The very first
woman that made pottery, perhaps, set the vessel on her
head and went to the spring for water. A procession of
women have been walking about over the earth ever since
with jars on their heads. This first woman used another jar
to cook food and another to serve it, and another to keep
it clean and away from vermin and insects. Pray, what
are millions of her great-grandchildren doing this very
day but the selfsame things? It matters not who makes
pottery, they are making it for women. Their conven-
ience alone is consulted in its form, its temper, and ma-
terial. Its decorations are borrowed, and, though her
hands be no longer grimed with the paste, her wants and
her imagination preside over the wheel.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BEAST OF BURDEN".

Exdeavor to comprehend all that is involved in the
word " transportation " or the " carrying industry." Take
your stand as near as safety will allow to a passing freight
train or a flying express, and drink in the excitement of
civilization which it represents. Or, perchance, it may be
your fortune from some commanding place to look upon
a great harbor by day or by night and to reflect upon the
time and money, the tons of freight, the miles of voyag-
ing, the endless variety of things involved. Besides the
train and the ship, there are innumerable occupations
subsidiary to their management. Indeed, everything that
is being moved would seem to be on its way to or from a
car or a ship.

But these steel rails and steamships are of our century.
There are men and women alive who remember when
there were none of them. So we are not here concerned
with the tedious operations by which the locomotive and
its followers have been Avrought out of the forest and the
mine, nor of all the workshops that have co-operated in
the making of a ship, but of something very much ante-
dating these. Neglecting even all the wagon trains, mule
trains, couriers, pack horses, dog trains and sleds, rein-
deer sleds, donkeys, elephants, camels, llamas, and other
beasts of burden, we come at last to the common pack
woman, for she was the first beast of burden on the earth.

From woman's back to the car and the stately ship is

(114)

THE BEAST OF BURDEN. H5

the history of that greatest of all arts which first sent our
race exploring and possessing the whole earth, and when
they had acquired wealth and knowledge and refinement,
brought these discrete civilizations together again for the
purpose of developing humanity as a whole. I do not
wonder that the ship carpenter carves the head of a
woman on the prow of his vessel, nor that locomotives and
railroad appliances should be addressed as she.

It might be denied that women were the first burden
bearers, as there are innumerable examples of animals trans-
porting materials to distant places to utilize them. The
nest-building birds, the beavers, the lamprey eels, the bees,
the ants, are all carriers. Many animals also modify natural
objects and substances in using them. I shall not here
inquire how much more industrious the females of all
animals are, but the idea of modifying a natural object
for the purpose of creating a carrying tool seems first to
have occurred to the human female. She was primarily
the only creature that transformed nature to produce an
apparatus for the carrying of burdens. And this is in
the line of our fundamental proposition.

There are two sets of motives in the harnessing of an
engine or a draught animal and in the freighting of
vessels and pack beasts. They may exist separately or
combined in the same device, and they were as active in
the mind of the earliest woman carriers as they have ever
been. These two motives are conveyance and freighting,
or the carrying of human beings and the carrying of
things.

The former may, indeed, be older, for devices in which
to carry infants may have been first in the order of inven-
tion. But in that early day the backs of women were
palace car and freight car, and the woman herself supplied
the energy.

Many other industries were created, stimulated, and
9

116 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

modified by this carrying trade. The member of pristine
society who went to the fields to gather nuts and seeds
and fruit must necessarily have brought them home.
Hence the burden bearer must be a basket-maker, and the
pack woman is patron of husbandry and of the textile art.

Clay and fuel must
be brought to make
pottery, and pottery, in
turn, has to be shaped
to carry water and food,
so the potter and the
carrier are sisters.

In short, the burden
bearer stands between
each industry and its
successor, passing the
more or less changed
material from one to
the other.

It can not fail to be
interesting to know how
ingeniously those early
passenger cars were con-
structed. It will be no
disparagement to the
vestibule train, so lux-
urious and so complete
in all its appointments,
to think of the savage
woman, with papoose
cradle strapped to her
weary forehead, as the starting point of its elaboration.

When we consider how largely the comforts of the
palace car minister to the ease of women, we may also
think that the daughter is only reaping the harvest sowed

Fig. 29. — California Cradle Frame.

(After Mason.)

THE BEAST OF BURDEN.

m

by the mother. Though immensely less complicated, the
earliest form has some points of interest that can not be
neglected.

The primitive passenger-coach builders were strictly
scientific in their methods, as we shall see — that is, they in-
geniously adapted structure to function and environment.

-

10&*"'

jltf"**^

Fig. 30.— Eskimo Mothers. (After Healy.)

The Eskimo mother knows full well that her babe
can not keep up the heat of its body when the tempera-
ture outside is forty below zero. To strap the little
creature to a cradle board would insure its death at once.

118 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

So she makes a baby carriage of her hood, and her off-
spring, when she takes it abroad or when she is on a
journey, is safely ensconced between the soft fur and the
mother's warm neck. We need not stop to inquire how
the modern parent would enjoy having a naked infant
crawling about her equally naked shoulders all the day.

Between the land of the Eskimo on the north and the
Tropic of Cancer on the south there dwelt in America
many stocks of aborigines, speaking different languages,
and having separate social organizations, but all charac-
terized by the use of a papoose frame of some sort. The
distinguishing marks of this apparatus were the back, the
sides, the lashing, the bed, the pillow, the covering, the
awning, the decoration. All of these were present in some
form, but in each stock, and especially in each natural-
history region, there were just such variations as were
necessary and proper. In Canada the cradle was made of
birch bark and the bed was of the finest fur. In the coast
region of British Columbia and southward little arklike
troughs were excavated as the boats were, and beds and
pillows and wrappings of the finest shredded cedar bark
took the place of furs.

Farther south still, as the climate became milder, the
ark gave place to a little rack or gridiron of osier, sumac,
or reed, and the face of the child was shaded from the
sun by a delicate awning.

Across the Rocky Mountains, in the land of the buf-
falo, the papoose frame looks like a great shoe lashed to
an inverted trellis or ladder, and nowadays the whole sur-
face is covered with embroidered bead work. It matters
not where we travel within the limits assigned on the
Western Continent, the primitive passenger car was exactly
suited to the meteorological and other local conditions.
A carriage made in Chicago would not suit the work to
be done in California. Home products out of home ma-

Fig. 31.- Turkish Beggar in the Streets of Washington.

(Alter Thomas Lee.)

THE BEAST OF BURDEN. H9

terial, and made by home labour, were the rule. Upon the
same isotherms in Asia children are borne as with us, but
the peoples are far above savagery. In South America,
outside the tropics, the conditions of North America
exist.

When we come within the tropics, the papoose frame
and all such inventions fail, and for a good reason. The
preservation of the life of the infant is of greater im-
portance than carrying it around. Hence the woman
again must set her wits to work. Among savages in the
tropics the head, shoulders, and limbs of the mother are
usually unclothed, and the loins are in some way clothed,
if only with a girdle and a sash or apron. Further-
more, the child is also unclothed. The only place for
the passenger is on the locomotive. He has to strad-
dle the mother's hips as best he can and hold on to the
girdle. Where a serape or shawl of any kind is in use,
the rider can crawl into that ; and when the mother, in
addition to being passenger car, has also freight to carry,
the youngster rides on top of the freight.

It is interesting to note that among the animals most
nearly resembling man in structure — the anthropoids —
the mother travels always with the young holding on to
her neck or riding on the hips. But there is no provision
for the passenger in this case in the shape of a girdle or
the shawl. The long hair of the mother bars her out
from ever inventing anything of the kind.

In the division of labour, which in the progress of civ-
ilization enabled some adult persons to ride, the carrying
of passengers fell to the lot of men. W7ith this we have
naught here to do. The silhros and cargadores and pa-
lanquin men and coolies have had enough to bear to com-
mand our respect and eulogy, but they are not now under
examination.

In our later civilization the infant has come around

120 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

from the back to the left arm usually, but the curious
train of baby carriers moves on from the beginning of
human history, one of the few occupations that culture
has not replaced.

In British New Guinea young infants are carried in
small baskets over the mother's left shoulder. It is a
common occurrence to see the mother carry on her back
a basket of food, a large bundle of firewood — both being
supported by a band extending round the forehead — and
on top of all her little two-year-old baby. The women
are habituated from early life to carrying enormous
burdens.*

The top of the head and the forehead are almost uni-
versally used to help support a load resting on the back.
But the Papuan mothers of Port Moresby, New Guinea,
put their babies in a net sack, which is borne in front
against the stomach and suspended by a line reaching
over the bregma or crown of the head.f

If any one doubts that woman is a burden bearer by
inheritance as well as by necessity let him take his stand
near any market house or along a shopping street. There
does not seem to be any bone in the body that is not in
some way called on to bear its load. On the head it is
toting. The Indian woman hangs a small weight on the
very crown of her head, by means of a buckskin band, and
lets it hang down her back. If the weight be increased, the
strap is drawn to the forehead and the load falls more on
the shoulder blades. But the Pueblo female has 2 more
world-wide custom ; she sets her water jar on her head,
with or without the milkmaid's pad. The negroes of the

* Thomson, British New Guinea, London, 1892, Philip, p. 121.
Dodge says : " I have seen a Nez Perce woman playing a vigorous
game of ball with a baby on her back." Our Wild Indians, Hart-
ford, 1883, p. 186.

\ Ibid., p. 80.

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THE BEAST OF BURDEN. 121

Southern States brought with them the custom of toting,
and the Irish as well as the Italian women are able to poise
delicately almost any load on the calvarium. Descending
to the neck, there is a fashion of hanging all sorts of fa-
kir's merchandise on the nape by means of a broad strap
supporting a miniature counter ; but men are the fakirs
in our country. The shoulder is also a great bearer of
burdens, even for women, as the millions of travelling
satchels will testify ; but lower down than this intermina-
ble caravan of satcheled females are the true pack women,
whom you may see by thousands in most Continental cities
wearing knapsack fashion some sort of a device for bear-
ing the impedimenta of life's struggle. By means of a
Holland yoke the shoulders and the atlas are all brought
into requisition, not to mention the hands and arms. No
doubt many of my readers have seen a milkmaid bearing
a pail of milk on her head and two more on her shoulders
and arms by means of such a yoke.

The Chinese and other Oriental peoples use a yoke on
one shoulder at a time, pointing the way the bearer is go-
ing. Away down in Arizona hay is delivered at the agency
by Mojave Indian women, who go out and cut with com-
mon house knives the " grammar grass," put it up in im-
mense sheaves, and bring it to the agency on their backs —
on their shoulders rather, we should say, for they trudge
along like Chinamen with poles resting on the shoulder
and a sheaf of hay sticking on either end of the pole.
What shall we call them ? Mowers and rakers and com-
mon carriers all in one poor body. This hay is brought
to the agency for the benefit of the beasts, and these poor
creatures will undertake to deliver a ton of hay cheaper
than it can be got in any other way.

From the shoulder we come to notice the back. Those
who have no loads to carry complain of backache, but
if all the serious loads resting on women's backs could

122 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

be added up they would rival those of railroads and
steamers.

As a beast of burden, whether in Germany or Mexico,
or among the savage American tribes, woman in her car-
rying basket moves the food and household effects while
her husband shoulders the gun or more primitive artillery.

I pass over the millions of tiny packages that are borne
in the hands all day long and everywhere, amounting in
the long run to a great deal and about Christmas time be-
coming quite burdensome. But we must not overlook the
poor man's wife, who goes every day to the market and,
after studying maxima and minima — that is, how to get
the most provisions for the least money — to the extent of
her ability and of the advice of her numerous confi-
dantes, hangs from twenty- five to fifty pounds of eatables
on her elbow and rests the basket on her hip. It would
take a practiced physiologist to tell how many bones and
muscles and nerves and brain cells are in active operation
during this fatiguing exercise.

We should be extremely ungrateful to the washer-
women and lose a most interesting scheme for hitching
up a pack woman if we did not note them holding to the
lugs or ears of a tub or boiler which they were supporting
on the limbs just above the knees. A very heavy load may
be carried in this way, the burden being shifted from one
knee to the other as the woman steps along.

From this review it is very easy to see that a woman
has more ways of being hitched up than any of the pack
animals. At this point it is necessary to look more mi-
nutely at some of the appliances for sustaining loads upon
the various parts of her body.

There is in the National Museum at Washington a
series of rings of vegetable fibre. The various substances
of which they are composed show that they are from
lands wide apart. But all are labelled " carrying rings or

THE BEAST OF BURDEN. 123

pads." They were made to fit on the tops of savage
women's heads when they were bearing jars of water
or other loads. When the jar of water or basket of seeds
is lifted from the head the pad is set on the ground
and the jar rested upright thereon. One day some clever
savage woman bethought herself to make the bottom of
her jar or basket concave a little bit by pushing the
clay or frame splints upward. Presto ! The carrying pad
is antiquated. From that day to this every basket and
bottle and tub has stood on its own bottom. It is wonder-
ful how this method of freighting has stuck to women.
The nesresses of the South, not less than the dark-haired
and dark-eyed Europeans practice toting everywhere.
But the blue-eyed and blond-haired women take their
loads on their backs.

Before dismissing the top of the woman's head as a
place of attachment for loads attention may be recalled to
the Apache and other tribes of Arizona, whose women
carry water in jugs made of basketry and dipped in pitch.
The maker ties two strong loops of horsehair to the bulg-
ing sides, to which are fastened the ends of a long buck-
skin strap. The middle of this hangs to the very toj3 of
the head and enables the carrier to walk tolerably upright
because the load is not heavy.

There is an engineering device called " parbuckle,"
and the International Dictionary, if speaking in the lan-
guage of this volume, would call it " a kind of purchase for
hoisting upon a woman's back a bundle of fagots or other
cylindrical load." The middle of a long rope (flat and
soft) is made to pass aloft around the woman's forehead or
brow and both parts are looped under the load behind
her and brought back over her shoulders to her hands.
The load is rolled up on to her back or let down by haul-
ing up or paying out the ends. Such " burden straps "

or ropes, are made of hide or textile stuffs, with a broad,
10

124 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

flat, soft piece in the middle. In some tribes the women
make a pad in shape of a diadem to keep from wounding
the forehead. It would be curious to find out whether
such a plain thing were the starting point of the regal
decoration. The stitch and material of these objects must
be studied under the substance of which they are composed.
In form they are bags of leather or woven work, inverted
cones of basketry or network with or without frames and
even gourds sustained in netting. Each one of these with

its load rests on the
back of its bearer, and
is kept from slipping
down by the band of
soft leather passing
from the vessel to the
forehead. Where the
loads to carry are com-
pact and heavy the
baskets are small, but
where the load is bulky
and light the apparatus
is so large as to conceal
the carrier under the
burden. It is in the
manufacture of this
peculiar class of car-
rying inventions that
the reactions of trades
upon trades may be
studied advantageous-
ly. The basket-maker has a good customer in the car-
rier, and her wits are stirred to devise something light
and strong for the purpose. Many of the forms of primi-
tive basketry, and even some of its stitches, were devised
exclusivelv for the burden bearers.

Fig. 34. — The Knapsack in "Woman's
Work. — German Peasant Woman.

Fig. 33. — Ute Children* carrying Water in Basket Bottles.

(After Powell.)

THE BEAST OF BURDEN. 125

The knapsack, we say, belongs to soldiers and school-
boys. Let us not be too sure of that. If you will get up
early some morning and walk around the busy portions
of a German city you will see upon a box or table a cylin-
drical basket, holding half a bushel, more or less, with the
sticks of the frame projecting an inch or two downward
from the bottom, and two broad straps fastened at one end
to the rim of the basket, and having eyelets or loops at the
loose ends. Presently you will see a woman back up to
the basket, draw the straps over her shoulders, and pass
the ends backward around the projecting frame sticks
below. She is now hitched up and may walk off with such
load as the basket may contain. Perhaps this is older
than the knapsack.

In the interesting lecture of Lieutenant Peary on his
trip across Greenland he represents an Eskimo woman
carrying a rough stone for the foundation of a house, and
computed that it could not weigh less than three hun-
dred pounds. The distance travelled was about twenty
yards. The rock was slung in a walrus line and borne
on the back. Murdoch says that the Eskimo women
of Point Barrow have great flexibility of body, and
show a power of carrying heavy loads superior to most
white men.* Collinson says that among the Eskimo whom
he visited all the drudgery falls upon the women ; even
the boys would transfer their loads to their sisters.f

This faithful creature, whose sturdy back sustained so
many tons of the world's commerce at first until it had
gained some momentum, was in those early times, as she
is now in many places, among the toilers of the sea. The
Eskimo, who occupy the entire arctic shore of America,

* Murdoch, Ninth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., Wash., 1892, p. 38. See
also Cruise of the Corwin. Wash., 1885, p. 49 ; Petroff, Trans. An-
throp. Soc., Washington, vol. i. p. 33.

f Collinson, J. Roy. Geog. Soc., London, 1855, vol. xxv, p. 201.

126 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

have two kinds of boat — the kaiak, or man's boat, a sort of
man-of-war, covered with sealskin all over instead of steel ;
and the umiak, or woman's boat, for freight and passengers.
The skin of the ground seal (Phoca barbata) is prepared
by the Eskimo women by removing the hair and the inner
integuments and stretching it like a drumhead over the
excellent frame, which her husband constructs out of drift-
wood. In the propulsion of this boat she uses often
an oar and not a paddle, and her rowlocks are worthy of
a patent, for each one consists of two loops of rawhide in-
terlocked like the links of a chain and fastened to the gun-
wale at a proper distance. Between these loops the oar is
thrust, and Boas tells us that three or four women work at
each oar. There are no patent devices for steering, the
oar serving also for that. Once in a while, with a fair
wind, a sail is set, made of the intestines of the seal care-
fully sewed together. In these craft the women of the
Eskimo are accustomed to move the family and their effects
from place to place when the exigencies of hunting
demand.

Mrs. Allison, in her account of the Similkameen In-
dians of British Columbia, reveals in a few lines an in-
structive mixture of trades and traffic involving much
carrying. The service berry was a staple with the Simil-
kameen s. When the berries were ripe mats were laid
under the bushes and the berries beaten ofT them and
dried in the sun. A portion was then reserved for home
consumption ; the rest were put into sacks made of rushes
strung together by threads of wild hemp, and traded with
either the Hope or Okanagan Indians for dried salmon
or water-tight baskets, in the' manufacture of which the
Hope Indians excelled. These baskets were used for boil-
ing water or meat; they were filled with water and hot
stones were thrown in till it boiled. To roast the meat
it was transfixed with stakes which were driven into the

THE BEAST OF BURDEN. 127

ground in front of their fires. The Hope Indians wove
mats of cedar bark, and these the Similkameen Indians
greatly preferred to those they made themselves with tule
or rushes threaded on twine, as they were stronger and did
not harbour vermin. The summer dwellings were made of
these mats thrown over a circular frame of poles. The
winter houses were simply pits dug in the ground and
roofed with poles and earth. A hole in the top afforded
ingress and egress to the dwellers (a notched ladder serv-
ing as ladder or stairway) ; this orifice was also the sole
chimnev.*

In Hearne's delightful old narrative we read : " He
attributed all our misfortunes to the misconduct of my
guides, and the very plan we pursued, by the desire of the
governor, in not taking any women with us on this jour-
ney, was, he said, the principal thing that occationed all
our wants ; ' for,' said he, ' when all the men are heavy
laden, they can neither hunt nor travel to any consider-
able distance : and in case thev meet with success in
hunting, who is to carry the produce of their labor?'
1 Women,' added he, ' were made for labour ; one of them
can carry, or haul, as much as two men can do. They
also pitch our tents, make and mend our clothing, keep
us warm at night, and, in fact, there is no such thing as
travelling any considerable distance, or any length of time,
in this country without their asistance.' ' Women,' said
he again, ' though they do everything, are maintained at
a trifling expence ; for, as they always stand cook, the very
licking of their fingers in scarce times is sufficient for
their subsistence.' This, however odd it may appear, is
but too true a description of the situation of women in
this country : it is at least so in appearance, for the women

*Mrs. S. S. Allison, J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1892, vol. xxi,
p. 308.

128 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

always carry the provisions, and it is more than probable
they help themselves when the men are not present."*

The most primitive ferry women belonged to the Sioux
tribes on the Missouri River, of whom Mr. Catlin re-
lates that the old chief, having learned that he was
to cross the river, gave directions to one of the women
of his numerous household, who took upon her head a
skin canoe, made of a buffalo's hide stretched on a
frame of willow boughs, which she placed in the water.
When Catlin and his two friends were seated in this wicker
tub the woman stepped before the boat and, pulling it
along, waded toward the deep water, where she turned her
buckskin tunic over her head and, throwing it ashore,
plunged forward, swimming and drawing the boat. In
the middle of the stream they were surrounded by a dozen
young girls from the opposite shore. They all swam
in a bold and graceful manner, gathering around the
boat with their long black hair floating about on the
water. They had discharged meanwhile the conductress
from the other shore, and were playing with the boat,
whirling it around in midstream in hope of larger pay,
which, indeed, they received in the form of bead neck-
laces which the distinguished traveller placed over their
necks as they rose out of the water. The party were then
towed ashore by the dusky mermaids much to their own
delight. In the days of plentiful buffalo hundreds of
these wicker-lined tubs of rawhide were made and navi-
gated on the Missouri River by Sioux women, f

" A Dyak woman generally spends the whole day in
the field, and carries home every night a heavy load of
vegetables and firewood, often for several miles, over
rough and hilly paths ; and not unfrequently has to climb

* Hearne, Journey, etc., London, 1795, Strahan, p. 55.
f Cf. Catlin, Sraithson. Rep., p. 4G9.

TIIE BEAST OF BURDEN. 120

a rocky mountain by ladders, and over slippery stones, to
an elevation of a thousand feet. Besides this she has an
hour's work every evening to pound the rice with a heavy
wooden stamper, which violently strains every part of
the body. She begins this kind of labor when nine or
ten years old, and it never ceases but with the extreme
decrepitude of age."*

The Egyptian women of the laboring classes work
very hard. They draw the household water supply from
the river or from a neighboring canal, carrying it in large
earthenware jars of native manufacture on their heads.
In addition to household duties they also work in the
fields among the crops, and one may frequently be ob-
served leading out to water and to such scanty pasture as
may be found the family gamoos or black-skinned buffalo
(Bos bibulus), the native milch cow of Egypt.f

In Africa, Sir Samuel Baker " observed that women
were constantly passing to and fro with baskets on their
heads, carrying' salt from Gondokoro, and each returning
with a goat led by a string." J

The Quessama women of Angola carry large baskets
made of plaited grass slung upon their backs, supported
by a band or strap which passes across the forehead.
This band is generally ornamented with the teeth of
animals they have killed themselves, such as the leopard,
hyena, etc.*

Among the Bedouins, when the elders had " decided
to emigrate in search of better pasture, the men set off
with about eighty camels. Immediately after their de-
parture the women in the camp broke out into bustling
and noisy activity. As if by magic the tents fell to the

* Wallace, Malay Archipel., New York, 18G9. p. 102.

f Robert Wallace, J. Soc. Arts. London, 1892, vol. xl, p. 599.
% Sir Samuel Baker, Isma'ilea, New York, 1875, p. 135.

* Price, J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1872, p. 189.

130 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

ground, were bundled up and placed on the few camels
left for that purpose, and ir. an inconceivably short time
the whole caravan passed up the river and disappeared.
The women did the whole work, while those 'lords of
creation,' their masters, sauntered otf in utter uncon-
cern." *

In the Holy Land, even in our day " the daughters of
the men of the city come out to draw water" (Gen. xxiv,
13). Thomson says: "The only well is at least half a
mile from the village, and women and girls, in many
groups, were passing to and from it all day long, with
tall black jars perched upon their heads." f

The loads borne by Kurdish women are thus graph-
ically described : " Soon we came to a place where the
road was washed away, and we were obliged to 2:0 around.
We saw a woman there with a loaded donkey which could
not pass with its load. The woman took the load on
her back and carried it over and led the donkey over.
She also carried a load of her own weighing at least
one hundred pounds, and she had a spindle in her
hands. Thus she went spinning and singing over the
rugged way which I had passed with tears and pain.
In the evening they spin and make sandals ; when they
lie down they place under their heads the ropes used in
binding the heavy loads of grass and wood which they
bring down the mountains. After midnight they,, go
up to get loads. In the early morning I often saw the
women, looking like loaded beasts, coming down the pre-
cipitous mountain path, one after another, spinning and
singing as they came. I saw women with great paniers
on their backs and babies on top of these or in their arms,

* Thomson, The Land and the Book, New York, 1880, vol. iii,
p. 603.

f Ibid., vol. i, p. 80.

THE BEAST OF BURDEN. 131

going four days over that fearful Ishtazin pass, carrying
grapes for sale and bringing back grain. Men said that
women must suffer much more before God forgave Eve's
sin. A few years ago a woman from Jelbo came to my
home in Geogtapa. Her husband, who was almost a
giant, sickened in Gawar, and she told me she had carried
him on her back all the way, four days' journey. I did
not believe her then ; now I do, for my eyes have seen
what loads these women carry." *

One of the interesting survivals of the old into the
new time is shown in the report of Consul Dithmar con-
cerning the working women in Silesia. f

The number of women engaged in hard manual labor
in mines and furnaces is actually increasing. In zinc
furnaces they are employed in removing the product and
the refuse. In the morning the women must tend the
ovens while the place is filled with dust and zinc va-
pors, and their severe physical labor is performed in
an overheated atmosphere tempered only by dangerous
drafts.

In the ore mines the women are employed mainly at
the hoisting shafts and at pushing cars. At a depth of
twenty-two yards the task of four girls is to hoist eighty
tubs, containing from one to one and a half hundred-
weight of ore each, to the surface in a shift of eight hours.
That workwomen prefer this severe labor to domestic
service is owing to the restrictions placed on house serv-
ants and their long hours of labor.

In the foundries, steel works, and rolling mills women
perform day laborer's services. But the condition of fe-
male laborers in mines, furnaces, and factories is not so

* Woman's Work for Women, November, 1888, p. 29G.
f U. S. Consular Rep., 1889, March, No. 103, p. 431 ; also British
blue book on the condition of woman's work.
11

J 32 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

deplorable as that of the women and girls who endeavor
to earn a livelihood by hand labor in the cities.

One of the interesting sights of Copenhagen is the
canal, where hundreds and hundreds of sturdy-looking
women are engaged in the fisheries. There are men, of

*o"to

Fio. 35. — The Danish Fish Woman.

course, among the hardy folk, and they have their toils
and their emoluments, but one never tires in leaning over
the rail in looking at the women. They manage the
boats, they transfer the fish from one craft to another,
they sell them by wholesale and by retail, they deliver
them. Furthermore, they prepare the fish in every way

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THE BEAST OP BURDEN. 133

demanded by the tastes of the people. And one must visit
the Scandinavians to find out how many ways there are
of getting sea food ready for the table.

In this the women of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark
are following in the footsteps of very ancient and very
primitive sisters. Had they visited northern California
only a few years ago they would have seen the Indian
women gather the wild hemp, hackle it with their teeth,
spin it with the hand on the thigh, manufacture out of it
most excellent nets for eels and fish, and handle the crea-
tures as skillfully as themselves. The Danish men and
women have always been of hardy stock, and now the
women are among the most industrious and laborious in
the world.

The women in France who are successors of the primi-
tive burden bearer are on the land what the Danish
women are on the sea, chiefly concerned with harvesting.
It is true that in Paris, the ideal capital of the world, one
who is abroad early enough Avill see bread women and
vegetable women hauling waggons about the street. But
the peasantry are the true folk. They do not use the
head band. European women are quite emancipated
from that, and have adopted the shoulder strap, which is
akin to the knapsack.

The soldier, with his back load of equipment and am-
munition, and the peasant woman, with her back load of
all sorts of industrial products, repeat the ancient story
of civilization from the beginning. As long as the peace of
Europe demands so much preparation for war the woman's
back will continue to support the civil government.

At the Art Exposition at Venice in 1887, Gioli's pic-
ture of the wood carrier showed us that in sunny Italy, as
in France, woman is the beast of burden.*

* Of Prof. Gioli's painting. Mrs. Zelia Nuttall, the distinguished
anthropologist says: "It has fairly haunted me day and night. I

134 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

According to Mr. Kennan, the Russian women who
take part in building or in moving heavy loads have the
co-operative method of transportation, well known in the
African carrying chair or the palanquin. In this case a
frame resembling the top of a bier is borne by two women
who together transport at least two hundred pounds.
Besides this method of their own,
the Russian women know every
form of bowing the neck or the
back to heavy burdens.

The German pack woman may
be seen on any morning especially
near the markets, and she is an
interesting creature, because, if
her face were brown and her hair
coal black you could take her for
an American sister before the dis-
covery. There is this difference :
that all American pack women
wear the band across their fore-
heads, while the German type load
the shoulders. A basket of willow
or rattan, holding a bushel, flat at
least on one side to fit the car-
rier's back, having a strap or rope fastened to either cor-
ner of the flat side at the upper edge, and looped at the
lower end to pass easily over a projection at the bottom
of the basket — that is the harness or furniture of this
beast of burden. By this device — which works very much
like a soldier's knapsack, only she gets out of it much
easier — the German woman supports the throne of her
emperor in time of peace. Her shoulders, and back, and

Fig. 37. — German Bread
Woman Supporting the
Sinews of War.

am yet aghast at the idea that hundreds of Italian women carry
such immense loads of wood in our day and within a few miles from
Florence."

THE BEAST OF BURDEN.

135

groins, and hands, all take part in the exercise, and it is
difficult to think of any more effective arrangement for
getting work out of a human being. Really, in the light
of this picture, Atlas should have been a woman, and if
the originator of the myth or the designer of the picture
had not been a man we should everywhere now behold an
idealized female carrying the globe on her back in a basket.

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- -'-■■■'• '■■■T'—'-h-- jL i)1' I /7!

• i r
j 'i i-

I !

r^YWiiV '

Fig. 38. — German Market Women.

Apropos to this wonderful survival of this ancient
pack woman the folio wins; is taken from the New York
World : *

" Work doesn't kill. If it did, the average German
woman would die before she completed her girlhood. As
it is, she is driven from the age of fourteen years until she
reaches her second childhood.

* Sunday, August 7, 1892 ; cf. also Pit Girls in the Black Dis-
trict, vol. lix, p. 410.

136 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

" In the market place opposite the Frauenkirche, Nu-
remberg, there are two remarkable studies — ' The Fountain
of Beauty ' and the little cherry woman. One has been
there since 1361, and the other for the last sixteen years.
IS he comes into town with a handcart as big as a bed ; at
one end is her brown baby, at the other her black cherries,
and between them a garden of vegetables. This woman —
mother, horse, and huckster — sits in the market from five
o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock in the evening,
with a pot of coffee and a loaf of bread for what she is
pleased to call her 'second breakfast, dinner, and supper.'
In the evening the cherry woman packs up the unsold
greens, tucks the hay about her sleeping baby, puts her-
self in the traces, and drags her waggon home.

" But she doesn't go alone. The weary ]:>rocession is
a long one, and as varied as life itself. One truck has a cow
and an old woman in harness ; another, a dog and the
farmer's wife ; in a third, grandmother and grandchild
make the team ; and in the rear come the children, stunted
in growth and rudely clad, with baskets bigger than their
little selves strapped to their young shoulders.

" The life of the woman who picks up a living is not
harder, though more uncertain. When she applies to the
farmer for work she has no choice but to work. She fells
trees, chops wood, hauls coal, cleans the cattle pens, gives
the fattened hog a scrubbing when he needs it, oils the
machinery, puts an edge on whatever tools she uses in
the field, and performs the roughest kinds of stable work.
In the city the woman who hires out by the day does, and
is expected to do, anything and everything. She washes,
scrubs, and irons; she hauls every drop of water that she
uses from the fountain or neighboring pump, carrying it
in a tin can from five to eight feet tall strapped on her
back ; she sweeps the stretch of cobblestone paving from
the doorstep to the centre of the street.

THE BEAST OF BURDEN.

137

" Perhaps the most distressing figure in the rank and
file of this involuntary servitude is a woman — wife and
mother — of the last decade of the nineteenth century toil-
ing up a plank to the top of a building in course of con-
struction with a load of mortar on her back.

" One of the most pictur-

esque of the eight gates of
Nuremberg is the Ladies'
Gate. It was designed by
xVlbert Durer in 1555. Early
in the spring an appropria-
tion was made by the city,
and the work of restoring
the old tower and the me-
diaeval arches began at once.
Assisting the staff of masons
and mechanics are two fe-
male hod carriers, and it is
not an exaggeration to say
that they are harder worked
than anv day laborer on the
force. They arrive at the
tower at six o'clock in the
morning, and at once begin their labors. The tin in which
the mortar is carried is perhaps eighteen inches in diameter
at its greatest width, and three feet deep. By means of a
leather strap it is adjusted to the shoulders. Each woman
takes the shovel in her own hands, fills her can, slips her
arms through the strap, shoulders the load, plods up to
the scaffold where the masons are at work, and unloads
her burden without assistance of any kind.

" It all seems such a cruel waste of good material — her
complexion tanned and tough as whitleather, her figure
robbed of every line of grace and beauty, her poor willing
hands rough-grained, gross, and callous as a ploughman's,

Fig. 39.

-Hod Carriers in Jsu-

REMBERG.

138 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

and her body bent like the pictured slaves in the galley.
She wears a hempen sack tied about her waist to protect
the shapeless cotton dress and a melancholy kerchief tied
over her head to shield it from the broiling sun ; a pair
of worthless boots cover her heavy feet, and the luxury of
stockings neither burdens nor bothers her. Apparently she
is impervious to the weather. At eight o'clock the men rest.
The women do, too, after they have brought the tankards
of beer and cut the bread for the second breakfast. At
noon these beasts of burden lav down their mortar cans,
untie their aprons, and go home to prepare the dinner for
their husbands. The meal over, the cottage is made tidy,
and at two o'clock they are back at the building, where
they remain until seven o'clock, toiling along the plank
walk and straining under the load that seems so cruelly
heavy for a woman living in this generation to be allowed
to bear.

" After the day's work she has her household duties to
perform. Her earnings amount to five cents an hour. If
there is a daughter at home to provide for the creature
comforts of the family the mother works ten hours a day.
If not, the law restricts her employment to six hours.
But in either instance she is in harness between 6 a. m.
and 7 P. M."

CHAPTER VII.

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES.

There are other industrial arts and activities subsidi-
ary to those already described which were fostered in
their infancy by women. Moreover, there is a higher
law in culture that must not be overlooked in this con-
nection. It is the law of co-ordination and co-operation.
Among the marks by which civilization is characterized,
number and variety of material used, of parts in the ap-
paratus, and of products desired are prominent. By num-
ber is also meant the aggregate of individuals that can be
brought to work out a single idea acting in harmony.
By variety is to be understood the number of distinct op-
erations'that one individual performs in a given time.

It is not enough, in speaking of savage women, to say
that they, as a class, do this or that. It should be also
asked how many of these are performed by one woman — in
short, by every woman? Recalling what was previously
said about the user of an implement having to be the
maker of it, one sees to what a diversity of occupations
this would naturally lead.

For example, in the stone age women used, as has
been shown in describing their function of food bringer,
knives, hammers, mortars, cooking pots, and many other
implements of stone. The lapidary art in olden time in-
cluded the following operations :

1. Spalling, flaking, chipping.

2. Battering, pecking, bushhammering.

140 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

3. Cutting, sawing, boring.

4. Grinding, smoothing, polishing.

In the beginning every one was his own lapidary. The
men performed the foregoing operations in the manufac-
ture of whatever entered into their warrings, the women,
in like manner, practiced them in their peaceful works.
By and by, doubtless, there came to be cunning men and
cunning women who wrought in stone alone, and then
the number and variety of such workings consumed the
entire life of an individual.

LA

jr,G. 40.— German Women as Housewives, Gardeners, Domesticators,
Draught Animals, and Merchants. (After Chandler.)

Mr. dishing and Dr. Palmer both say that when the
women go out to quarry clay or to gather food in the
canons men accompany them, but this is for a body guard,
and the custom is still kept up, though the men have been
disarmed and there is no need of protection.

In his various papers on the aboriginal quarries of the
United States Mr. Holmes has worked out the diversity

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 141

of processes and implements concerned. When an Indian
woman demanded a stone knife she might indeed knock
off a sharp ilake from the nearest pebble having conchoidal
fracture and sufficient toughness, but no savage woman
with whom ethnologists are acquainted was satisfied with
such an implement. Even the Tasmanians and Fuegians
and Andamanese, on the outskirts of savagery, desired
something better. Knowing that stones lying on the sur-
face and exposed to the sun are hard and brittle, and
that pebbles buried in wet earth are tough and best
adapted to this operation of chipping, the knife-makers
sought their materials there. See now what a diversity
of occupation this cutlery work involved :

1. The digging out of the pebbles or masses of rock
with sticks sharpened and hardened by means of fire, fre-
quently the breaking of masses with stone sledges and the
dislodging of bowlders with rude picks of antler and with
crowbars. The work of both sexes.

2. The blocking out of implements by striking one
stone with another. This operation required great strength,
dexterity, and patience, since not one piece in ten turned
out at last to be fit for an implement. The wrork of men
and women.

3. The carrying home of the products of this quarry-
ing, often many miles distant. Should we find out that
the digging and blocking out were done by men only,
there would be no doubt concerning the back upon which
the half-finished material would be loaded.

4. The turning of the blocked -out material into knives
for skinning animals, scaling fish and opening them, carv-
ing meat, preparing hides, cutting leather and fur skins.
This work was frequently done in exquisite fashion, and
the only implement the woman used was a bit of hard
bone or antler pointed at the end like a corn-husking peg.

For the second style of stone working which our sav-

142 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

age woman was expected to do we must turn to Mr. Mc-
Guire, who has studied the uses of the stone hammer.*
It is astonishing to see what a variety of work men have
accomplished by simply pounding one stone with an-
other ; but here we are concerned with women. The
American aboriginal millers used several kinds of mills
for the reduction of food to meal or flour.

1. A hollowed log and a wooden pestle.

2. A hollowed log with a stone pestle.

3. A hollowed stone, fixed or loose, with stone or
wooden pestle.

4. A flat table or metate of stone operated on by a
muller or rubbing stone.

Now, each one of the stone elements in the four classes
was always made in the way indicated — namely, by pound-
ing off the unnecessary part of the stone. To produce a
pestle the savage woman selected from the brook or the
quarry a piece as nearly in the proper shape as possible.
This she did to economize her labor. Then with a hard
disk-shaped stone hammer she battered away the useless
projections.

By the very same process she produced mortars and
metates, only she had to be much more careful and dex-
terous, for some of these objects are not only shapely and
symmetrical, but they are also ornamented with much
taste.

In the hulling of acorns, grinding of maize and grass
seeds and rice, the mortar was universally used in the
temperate parts of North America. But the rubbing of
food to reduce it commences at about the thirty-sixth par-
allel of the Interior Basin and was practiced along the
Cordilleras and in the West Indies. All throuffh Latin
America the women rub one stone up and down upon

*Ara. Anthropologist, Wash., 1892, vol. v, p. 1G5.

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 143

another by the same motion as the washerwoman prac-
tices on the washboard. This apparatus is now manufac-
tured and sold as a regular article of commerce, but we
are speaking of a period when the women had to batter
them out for themselves. It would not do to affirm that
women invented the stone hammer. The men of lona"
ago pecked away most patiently upon their peculiar im-
plements and weapons with this wonderful tool, and with
it they worked out the rudiments of the art of sculpture.
But millers and cooks and bone breakers were up and
stirring quite as early in the morning of time as the fash-
ioners of clubs and axes of stone.

James Mooney says that the Moki women have fifty
ways of preparing corn for food. They make all the
preparations necessary for these varied dishes, involving
the arts of the stonecutter, the carrier, the mason, the
miller, and the cook. The women go over to the canons
to get the stones for the mill. Having brought in a num-
ber of laro-e sandstone slabs, thev trim down the edsres
with hammers of hard stone. They next scoop out
trenches, and in them set up the slabs, making a sort of
box seven feet long and twenty inches wide, divided into
four equal compartments. The box is set up near a
wall, in order that the women may brace their feet when
grinding. One of the women measures the right space
by kneeling with her feet and back against the wall, while
another marks off the line in front of the knees. After
the boxes are set up the joints and corners are plastered
with clay.

The stone slabs or metates on which the corn is to be
ground are then placed one in each compartment. Each
has a different granular surface, and they are placed in
the compartments in order, the roughest for the coarse
meal at one end, the next finest for making meal like our
corn meal, and, last, a smooth stone for producing maize

144 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

flour. The roller or muller that goes with each slab cor-
responds in grain. The metates are set in the four
compartments at an angle of about forty-live degrees and
plastered in firmly with clay mortar.

In grinding, the women kneel behind the box, brace
their feet against the wall, throw some corn upon the
sloping metate, and then, grasping the muller in both
hands, bear down with it upon the corn, bending over
and giving the roller a half turn at each movement.
This milling is hard, slow work, but the women make it
lighter by the soft, musical, grinding songs which they
sing in time with the motion of their arms. They con-
struct a furnace for baking the bread by setting up two
slabs against the wall about fifteen inches apart, and plac-
ing across these as a top another slab of the same hard stone
as the metates and rollers, its upper surface, upon which
the bread pastes are spread, being perfectly smooth.*

In this connection it may be safely affirmed that stea-
tite— called also potstone, lardstone, and soapstone — has
belonged to woman from the earliest times. It has one
characteristic which makes it priceless to savages — it will
not crack in the fire. Used flat, it is the oldest of grid-
dles, as it is the latest. Hollowed just a little, it is a
baking pan as well as a lamp. In semiglobular form it
becomes the faithful dinner pot, and in shape of a sjniere
it is the olla, grandmother of all teakettles.

It will be instructive to pay minute attention to this
steatite art on account of the jack-at-all-trades activities
which it stimulated. The mineral itself occurs in all
sorts of qutcroppings, but not in great abundance any-
where and infrequently free from flaws and pits. On the
whole, it is a rare material, and the aborigines deserve
great credit for finding and developing it.

* Mooney, The Republic, St. Louis, Mo., May 21, 1893.

THE /IACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 145

After removing the surface soil from a ledge, or out-
crop of the material, the quarry women proceeded with
their sharp axes of quart zite to work off a block large
enough to make the desired vessel, allowing a bountiful
amount for waste and accidents. This block they hewed
down, both within and without, into nearly the designed
shape at the quarry. The marks on many hundreds of
rejected pieces show that the trimming was done with an
adzelike or chisel-like tool, the scars resembling those left
on wood by such an implement. Thus far we have seen our
workwomen handling pick, shovel, crowbar, and adze, and
next they must take up their ever-recurring burden and
transport the half-finished product to their home. There
they scraped down the object to its desired shape and
carefully seasoned it to endure the fire.

This soapstone working is truly a stone cutting, since
the marks of an edged tool are left upon it. But savage
woman knows as well as any one else that one stone will
grind away another, will smooth another and polish it;
she also knows that nothing will give a more beautiful sur-
face to pottery than a close-grained stone. The smooth-
ing stone is also useful in her bark and textile art, and
serves her in good stead in grinding down shells for deco-
ration.

Before leaving the mineral kingdom as a field for
woman's versatility we may pause a moment to consider
the harvesting and preparation of salt. Aboriginally it
was not used in preserving meat, but in seasoning food.
Many animals before man had learned to look upon salt
as indispensable to their happiness. As the food bringer
it became woman's duty to procure salt, and there were
any number of subsidiary trades involved in the getting
of it.

In Mexico we are told the best salt was made by boil-
ing the water from the saline lake in large pots. It was

14:6 WOMAN'S SHARE IX PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

then preserved in white cakes or balls. The work would
seem to have been done by women, since Sahagun speaks
of the women and girls employed in the industry as danc-
ing at the feast in honor of the goddess of salt in the
month Tecuilpuitontli.* The fact that salt was under
the protection of a goddess is also prima facie evidence
that the industry belonged to women, as will be seen in
the chapter on religion. Bancroft has gathered all the
authorities upon this subject, and mentions that the Aztec
kings monopolized the commodity so that the Tlascalas,
who kept their independence, were forced for many years
to eat their food unsalted.

In the neighbourhood of salt springs in the Ohio Valley
fragments of immense earthen vessels are discovered in
great numbers bearing the imprint of the well-known
aboriginal twined weaving. This would further demon-
strate woman's share in salt-making, and also furnish an-
other example of composite industry. The Ohio salt boil-
ers were weavers, potters, quarry women, and common
carriers as well as salt producers.!

The connection of woman with the plant world at first
was most beneficial. Unwittingly she bent her back to a
burden that turned to gold and rubies. The exploitation
and domestication of the fruits and food stuffs and textiles
not only developed in her the most varied and refined
feelings and practices of which human beings were then
capable, but opened the way to the vast storage of plant
materials which give to men and women in highest culture
the stimulus to industrial activities and the leisure for
contemplation. One can not look upon the picture of a
lono- train of Ute women coming home with their carrv-
ing baskets full of seeds upon their backs, supported by

* Bancroft, Native Races, vol. ii, p. 353.

\ Sellers, Pop. Sci. Month., N. Y., vol. xi, pp. 573-585.

THE JAOK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 147

bands across their foreheads, holding also in one hand a
gathering wand and in the other a winnowing and roast-
ing tray, without profound thought. For these women
are indeed the forerunners of all farmers and harvesters
and thrashers and common carriers and millers and cooks.
The National Museum at Washington possesses a collec-
tion of food plants used by savage women, and in the
Royal Kew Gardens in London may be seen a techno-
logical museum ranged on the basis of plants. Unwit-
tingly both these national institutions have erected a
monument to the manual labor and skill of savage
women.

Powers tells of Yokaia women in central California
cultivating little gardens of corn which belonged to them-
selves. They employed neither plough nor hoe, but the
squaws sat down on the ground beside the hills and worked
probably fifteen minutes at each one, digging the earth
deep and rubbing it all up fine in the hands. By this
means they tilled only an extremely small area, but they
did it excellently well and got a greater yield than Ameri-
cans would.*

The greatest tribute paid to savage women as tillers of
the soil is by Lucien Carr. This author has noted down,
after an extended reading of many years, the testimony of
all the ancient discoverers and explorers of North America
concerning the Indian women as farmers. It is true that
they were helped by the men to clear the ground and to
do some of the work. But it was the genius of the women
that invoked the aid of the fire fiend to devour the for-
ests; it was they that cleaned up the fields, planted the
seeds, gave to the growing crops of maize and pumpkins
all the cultivation they got, without the help of horse or
dog or any other creature. The aid they received from

* Cont. N. A. EthnoL, Wash., 1877, vol. iii, p. 1G7,
12

148 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the men varied, being greater among the tribes south of
the Ohio and less among the Iroquois or Six Nations.*

In a general council of the magnates of the Six Nations,
Brant, in a controversy with Red Jacket, taunted him
with being a squaw and a coward. This was because the
latter was a man of peace and had condescended to go
to farming. And all along the line of history it has been
the women who were willing to leave off savagery and take
the higher step in the industrial pursuits.

In modern Palestine " the men do the ploughing, for
you never see a woman guiding the plough ; but they fol-
low after and drop the seed — simsum, cotton, or ' white
corn ' — in the furrow. They also assist in reaping, and
drive the mowraj round the summer thrashing floor."!
Civilization has changed little in the Holy Land since
the days of the patriarchs. There now, as of old, the
wells, the flocks, the fields, the thrashing floors, are
haunted by women and girls. And the country people
when they pass an abandoned well or winnowing place
often hear voices talking or singing as if the spirits of the
dead still lingered there.

On the paddy fields of Borneo the women have their
share of work. In removing the forests, the women and
boys clear away the undergrowth and the men fell the
trees. The land is then burned over. As soon as the
ground is cool, the men dibble the soil, the women fol-
low, drop in the paddy seed and cover up the holes by
scraping the earth into them with their feet. The Dyaks
have many weary duties to perform before they reap the
fruit of their toil, but it too often happens that these are
left to the women and children. As a rule, the women
do all the weeding by themselves, and this is a laborious

* Liucien Carr, Ky. Geol. Survey, no date.

f Thomson, The Land and the Book, New York, 1880, vol. i, p. 80.

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 140

task. When the paddy is ripe all turn out — men, women,
boys, and girls — and harvest the crop.*

The women of Teita, East Africa, are the agricultur-
ists; they till the soil with implements of the rudest and
simplest form. The land is so rich that after the under-
growth is burned off it is merely loosened with a haftless
hoe and scraped up into little heaps. A small cavity is
made with the finger, into which a few seeds are dropped,
covered over loosely, and Nature is left to do the rest.
Their planting season is anticipatory of rain, and the only
further attention they give their crops after the seed is
sown is an occasional weeding. In some districts they
get three or four crops annual 1 v. They store up a supply
in their huts, or use well-selected trees covered and almost
thatched over with dried grass and banana leaves. f

East African women till the soil, care for the cattle,
carry the loads, attend markets, play spy and intermediary
between provinces, even in war. J This multiple function
of farmer, herdswoman, carrier, merchant, political and
military spy covers the general series of great industries
in civilization. The African aboriginal tribes when dis-
covered were further along in some lines of culture than
those of temperate America. Wherever the wild beasts and
more ferocious insects would allow, flocks were reared, farms
were tilled with iron tools, and great markets were held.

As any student knows, there are two kinds of medical
practitioners in savagery — the sorcerer and the empirical
doctor. They both have a wrong theory of sickness —
namely, that all disease is demoniacal possession. That
can be excused, however, in view of the diversified ways

* Compare Ling Roth, J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1892, vol. xxii,
p. 26.

f French-Sheldon, J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1892, vol. xxi,
p. 3G2.

% Ibid., p. 3^9.

150 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the doctors nowadays have of describing the rationale of
our commonest ailments. The practice of the two schools
was, however, radically different. The sorcerer invited the
disease out, tried to frighten it away, coaxed it to leave,
and finally proceeded to eject it by force. Among the
practitioners of this school were some Avomen, but most of
them were men. The empirical school, by a kind of rude
induction, ascertained the qualities of drugs and became
skillful in dressing wounds, in nursing, and even in abat-
ing fevers. If the reader should be inquisitive about who
these early empiricists were, let him walk about the mar-
ket houses of our Southern cities. By and by he will
come upon a little patch of crouching women, daughters
of iEsculapius, sisters of Hygeia. They have no cup from
which a serpent drinks — symbol of health — but you will
find small bundles of snakeroot among the stores of barks
and roots and dried herbs, whose virtues are well known
to them.

The Shastas of % California use the root of a parasitic
fern found growing on the tops of the fir trees (Collque
nashul) for a general medicine. In small doses it is an
expectorant and diuretic ; hence it is used to relieve diffi-
culties of the lungs and kidneys ; in large doses it becomes
sedative, and is an emmenagogue. It relieves fevers, and
is useful in uterine troubles and to produce abortion.*
With the co-operation of the Surgeon-General of the
United States Navy, there have been collected in the Na-
tional Museum many hundreds of specimens of drugs
used by savage tribes in their crude medical practice.

In the progress of the world from naturalism to arti-
ficialism, which is the true line of advance, domestication
of animals marks a wonderful epoch. Those lands that
have few tamable animals doom their inhabitants to per-

* Bancroft, Native Races, New York, 1874-76, vol. i, p. 354.

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 151

petual savagery. Now, the first domestication is simply
adoption of helpless infancy. The young wolf, or kid,
or lamb, or calf, is brought to the home of the hunter.
It is fed and caressed by the mother and her children,
and even nourished at her breast. Innumerable refer-
ences might be given to the caging and taming of wild
creatures. The Eskimos and the Indians south of them
capture the silver fox, and the women feed them until such
time as is best for stripping off their hides. The Pueblo
people cage eagles and hawks for their feathers, and the
women feed them. Every native hut in Guiana is the
abode of many species of birds, kept for their bright plu-
mage. The great domestic animals left off the ferine
state so long ago that no one knows their aboriginal
home. Women were always associated especially with
the milk- and fleece-yielding species of these. Before the
domestication of milk-yielding animals, and in the two
continents where they were not known in aboriginal
times, the human mother had to suckle her young two or
three years, until they were able to walk at her side and
partially take care of themselves. The effect of this
upon her nature and all social life was on one side in her
favor, but on the other dreadfully increased her burdens,
and retarded the growth of population.* The Mandans
and other Northern tribes give the care of their ponies to
the women, who allow them to graze about the wigwams
in the daytime ; but at night the squaws gather the ponies
into the wigwams and feed them upon the boughs and
bark of the cottonwood. The squaws cut down the trees
and carry the branches, and the horses feed on their bark
and the tender ends. In northwestern Canada women
manage the dog teams. f

* See Payne, Hist, of America, New York, 1892, p. 320.
f See Coues. Lewis & Clarke, New York, 1893, vol. i, p. 233 ;
Warburton Pike, Barren Grounds, etc., London. 1892, p. 1G0.

152 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

There are certain kinds of domestication begun in
savagery that are only now having their proper develop-
ment. Fish ponds were very common in Hawaii, and
were mostly made by women. They were formed in the
small bays along the coral reefs where the outlet was very
narrow. Across the entrances to the bays the natives piled
pieces of coral rock so as to admit the sea water, but to
prevent the fish from escaping. It was no uncommon
thing to see a number of women up to their waists in mud
and water, busily employed in clearing out these ponds.
While they were at work their husbands and brothers were
equally hard at work on sea catching the fish which were
to be transferred to the pond.*

It would really seem that the first of human beings to
conceive the idea of shelter for herself and helpless infant
was the woman. The Eskimo snow hut is built by men.
The Indian skin loci™ is from first to last the work of
women. The earth lodge and the pueblo are the work of
both sexes; but these are not so primitive as the cave and
the bark or skin shelter. In all the Malayan and Malayo-
Polynesian area house building is a joint affair. The same
is true of Africa, as the following example will show :

Among the Mendis, a Sierra Leone tribe, house build-
ing is a joint affair between the sexes. AYhen the house
is completed the walls and floors are smeared by the
women with cow's dung, which gives a hard, smooth sur-
face. The men do the heavy portion of the daily work
and clear the bush, but the women till the ground, fetch
water, go fishing, prepare and cook the food. They also
spin the cotton into thread, dye it, and make mats; but
the men weave, sew, and make their own clothing. The
Mendis are noted for the beauty of their cloths. j-

* Wood, Unciv. Races, Hartford, 1870. vol. ii, p. 431.
f Garrett, Sierra Leone and the Interior, Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc.,
London, 1892. vol. xiv, p. 436.

O

<

o

H

>

—

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 153

In the Andaman Islands the dntyof erecting the light
shelters during a halt or a short visit devolved on the
women. The order of arranging their lints with reference
to married and unmarried women is shown in one of Mr.
Man's drawings.* Not only in house building, but in
other wood-working trades women assist the men.

Dr. J. F. Snyder has seen women in California assist-
ing in felling trees. The men with the edges of their stone
axes hacked around a tree, above and below, a long kerf,
then pounded all around to break the annual layers. The
women, with wedges of wood or antler, worked off a slab of
these layers. The process was repeated until the tree came
to the ground. He has also seen women with stone adzes
scraping away the charred wood in hollowing a canoe.

The diversification of work or function in the life
of a woman is well exemj)lified in the manufacture and
erection of a common tepee or skin tent among the tribes
of the Plains region. »The tepee is a conical tent made
of dressed buffalo skins. The immense amount of hard
labour involved in the preparation of the hides has been
sufficiently described. The separate skins are cut and
fitted on the ground into a single piece resembling the
cover of an umbrella. The seams are all sewed tightly from
top to bottom except one, which is fastened by a lacing
from the top to within four or five feet from the ground.
The opening thus left is the doorway, the door itself being
a buffalo robe or piece of cloth, fastened above and left to
hang loose, except in bad weather, when it can be tightly
stretched by thongs, attached to the lower corners. The
ground being selected, the tepee is spread out upon it.
Three poles are lightly tied together near the smaller
ends and thrust under the covering, passed through the
orifice at the top, raised upright, and the lower ends

* Man, Andaman Islanders, London, 1883, pp. 38, 40.

154 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

spread out as far as possible. A rope or rawhide thong
attached to the top of the covering is then thrown over
the crossing of the poles. One woman pulls on the end
of this rope, while another adjusts the tripod of poles
until the covering is stretched vertically and laterally.
The other poles are then carried in one by one; the small
end, thrust through the top opening, is laid against the
point of crossing of the first three, the large end being
carried out as far as possible. When all the poles are in
they are arranged equidistant, in a circle, stretching the
covering as tightly as possible, a few wooden pins are
driven into the ground through slits in the bottom of the
covering on the outside, and the work is done. When the
tepee is to be taken down all the loose poles are carried out,
the rope or line holding the covering in place is loosened,
the lower ends of the poles forming the tripod are brought
near to each other, and the covering comes down of its own
weight. Two quick-working women can put up a tepee
in live minutes and take it down in three. To prevent
the wind from blowing directly down the top a sort of
winged cap is provided, managed from below with strings,
or a deerskin fastened between two poles is set up on the
windward side of the opening. It is shifted with the
wind.*

The Loucheux women are literally beasts of burden to
their lords and masters. All the heavy work is performed
by them. When an animal is killed, they carry the meat
and skin on their backs to the camp, after which they
have the additional labour of dressing the skin, cutting up
the meat, and drying it. They are the hewers of wood and
drawers of water ; all the household duties devolve upon
them ; they have to keep up the fires, cook, etc., besides all
the other work supposed to belong to the women, such as

* Dodge, Our Wild Indians, Hartford, 1883, p. 233.

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 155

lacing the snowshoes for the family, making and mending
the clothing of husband and children, etc. In raising
the camp, or travelling from one place to another, if in
winter, the woman hauls all the baggage, provisions, lodge
poles, cooking utensils, with probably a couple of children
on the top of all, besides an infant on the back, while the
husband walks quietly on ahead with his gun, horn, shot
pouch, and empty hunting bag. In the summer the man
uses a small light hunting canoe, requiring very little exer-
tion to propel it through the water, while the poor woman
is forced to struggle against the current in a large ill-made
canoe, laden with all the baggage, straining every nerve
to reach a particular place pointed out beforehand by her
master as the intended camping ground.*

Woman's connection with lire has been mentioned.
No other of her activities affords such an excellent oppor-
tunitv to bring out her many-sided life. With illumina-
tion she has had less to do. Dodge considers it a godsend
that the Indian woman did not know how to make a light
sufficient to work by at night. But the Andamanese
women make torches of the resin of several plants and
wrap them in the leaf of Crinum lorifolium, to be used in
fishing, dancing, and travelling. Slow matches are pro-
cured from the heart of rotten logs of Dipterocarpus Icevis,
and tongs are fabricated by bending a strip of bamboo. f

While on the subject of house life it may be a joy to
all washerwomen to know that their industry is a very
primitive one. Matthews recounts the myth of an old
Navajo man whose sons had been utterly unsuccessful in
hunting, so he commanded them to take a sweat bath.
When they had perspired sufficiently they came out of

* Hardisty, The Loucheux Indians, Smithson. Rep., 180G, p. 312.
f Man, Andaman Islander?. London, 1883, Trubner, p. 185;
Dodge, Our Wild Indians, Hartford, 1883, p. 252.

156 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the sudatory; this they did four times. The old man
directed his daughters to dig some soaproot and to make
a lather. In this he bade his sons wash their hair and
the entire surface of their bodies well. It is needless to
remark that the myth goes on to tell of the great success
these young hunters had after that.*

Tools preceded machinery. The cylindrical log or
rock with which a savage woman triturates foodstuffs is a
tool ; so is the muller, with which grain is reduced to meal
on a metate. But it is next door to a machine — that is,
a contrivance in which a vertical shaft is used, fixed in
the upper stone and loosely piercing the nether. Hand
power, beast power, wind and water power, and steam
power, follow naturally. But the earliest form of this
meal-producing machine is found in the hands of women
whose genius, energy, or effort was arrested as soon as the
powers of Nature were invoked to do their work. The
first continuous motion, however, was by the spindle in
the hands of women.

Dall sketches the dailv round of an Eskimo house-
wife in early winter, and his account is abridged here, to
show how manv activities of our civilization are hinted at
in this one poor woman's work. Rising in the early hours
when a faint glimmer through the parchment cover of the
smoke hole indicates the peep of dawn, her first care is to
carry the necessary wooden vessels to the antechamber of
the house, where the contents are preserved for tanning
and other useful purposes.

This done, she removes the cover of the smoke hole
and searches the hearth for embers, places some light dry
sticks upon them, and, going outside, arouses the sleepers
by pitching down a quantity of fuel through the aperture
in the roof. Before coming in she arranges some bits of

* Matthews, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 390.

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES. 157

wood to aid the draught through the smoke hole and
brings water for drinking or cooking. Keturning, she
rolls up beds and mats. While the family are dressing
she prepares a meal of boiled deer or seal flesh or of boiled
fish with oil. The men then go to their traps or other
occupations. The remnants of the meal fall to the share
of the dogs, the dishes are cleaned, and the mistress sets
about her work, preparing deerskins for boots or clothing
or cutting and sewing the skins into garments. During
the day a morsel of deer fat or a bit of dry salmon is
eaten. In the middle of the day visiting begins and chit-
chat is mingled with instruction to the younger women.
If a stranger comes he is directed to a sitting place, one
of the women removes his wet boots and places them in
the smoke to dry, and refreshment is offered. After long
silence the visitor slowly tells the story of his journey and
the news of his village.

At nightfall the fire is made to blaze, and the whole
household go up on the roof to look for the returning,
hunters. The wife receives her husband in silence, re-
moves his weapons, puts his boots to dry, offers him a bit
of meat and fish, and when he has taken his place calls
attention to the stranger. She then trims and lights the
lamp. Conversation becomes general. All eat together,
served by the mistress of the house. At last when the
fire has burned low the good housewife tosses the large
embers from the smoke hole, carefully covers the coals,
replaces the parchment to keep in the warm air, unrolls
the beds, and when the inmates are all asleep she puts
out the light and enjoys her well-earned rest.*

In Guiana the women clean the house, fetch water
and firewood, cook the food, make the bread, nurse the

* Compare Dall, American Naturalist, Philadelphia, 1878, vol.
xii, pp. 8-10.

158 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

children, plant the fields, dig the produce, and when the
men travel carry whatever baggage is necessary in large
baskets, which fit on the back and are supported by bands
across the forehead. They also make hammocks, and if
there is a little time to spare they weave bead aprons, or
queyus, their only dress, or spin cotton or weave small
hammocks for their children.*

When the day has at last come to an end and the
women have gathered enough wood for the fires under
the hammocks during the night, they throw themselves
into their swinging couches, and all talk together. Till far
into the night the men tell endless stories. At last, in
the middle of the narrative, the party drop off to sleep,
and all is quiet for a short while. Presently some woman
gets up to renew the fires or to see to some domestic work.
Roused by the noise, the dogs break into a chorus. This
wakes the children, and they begin to scream. The men
turn in their hammocks and resume their stories for a
brief time, f

It would be possible to go on multiplying the varied
industries of early history, which were at first no greater
than a woman's hand, fostered by the weaker sex to be-
come afterward the sources of the world's great wealth.
But something more must be said concerning this com-
posite activity of primitive woman in which we have styled
her the jack-at-all-trades.

It is not enough to say in any case, as Ave have seen,
that she was food bringer, weaver, skin dresser, potter, or
beast of burden. This view of her is absolutely mislead -
ins:. It is not sufficient to sav that the modern lucrative em-
ployments originated with her. We are bound to keep in
mind that each woman was all of these. As in the ani-

* E. F. im Thurn, Indians of British Guiana, London, p. 215.
f I in Thurn, op. cit., p. 210.,

THE JACK-AT-ALL-TRADES.

159

mal world one part of the body performs many functions,

in the social world one woman is mistress of many cares.

This diversification of duties in well-regulated homes

among the civilized nations produces the matron. The

Fig. 42. — The Matron of Isleta, New Mexico. (After Wittich.)

savage woman is really the ancestress and prototype of
the modern housewife and not of our factory specialists. It
can be seen how this versatility of talent and mnltiplica-

1G0 WOMAN'S SHAKE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

lion of industries would react on her offspring, both male
and female, and bring them all at last around to her pris-
tine industrialism.

How sharply in all the course of history does this
combination of abilities in one woman stand in contrast
with co-operation of many individuals at one duty or ac-
tivity among men ! The modern farmer with his " weight
of cares " would seem to be an exception. But all his
present labours were primitive woman's work from morn
till eve. In co-operation women have always been weak.
There are few duties that they have in common. Even
as beasts of burden they seldom worked in pairs.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ARTIST.

In" the creation of the arts of pleasure what has been
woman's share? That there were arts of pleasure in
the remotest past, archaeology abundantly testifies. The
earliest people of whom there is any record at all made
things shapely and covered them with decoration, which
in some examples must have interfered with their use.
The study of the present would guide us somewhat as to
the kinds of art we should look for, but, as much of
woman's ancient art is now in men's hands, their art also
must be scrutinized.

As in the practical industries, so in the aesthetic, an
inquiry into their origin or invention includes several
questions :

1. As to the beginning and development of the art
forms, at first extremely simple and little if at all removed
from natural shapes. In short, if a. common invention is
a slight change in a natural object to improve its use, an
art form is a slight change in an object to increase its
beauty. The progress of beauty is an increase of com-
plexity in these changes with higher and better defined
functions.

2. As to the mental processes involved in the creation
or invention of the beautiful. Here the law is the same.
The first effort was extremely simple and undifferentiated ;
the highest effort involved the combined genius, the co-

(161)

1G2 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

operative effort of many minds — architects, sculptors,
painters, ceramists, weavers, landscape gardeners.

3. The rewards of the artists. They are found at first
in the granting by the public of some present material
good or happiness or self-satisfaction. The inventor of
cooking got a better husband and reared better sons.
The first artists were quite similarly rewarded. The last
result is the creation of a tribal or national feeling, crite-
rion, taste, which leads the people to bestow the highest
rewards upon those who give the greatest pleasure. Too
much must not be expected of the savage woman in her.
art work. She did not sit down deliberately to compose
a form, a pattern, or a song — " she piped but as the linnets
sing." The determinate purpose followed up with the
accumulated apparatus and experiences of the ages is al-
ways the latest manifestation of invention. The first in-
ventor in art, like the first inventor in the industries, was
the happy thinker, the acute observer, the apperceiver —
the one whose senses were open to the forms and colours
and movements and sounds of Nature.

No more should be expected of her than that she should
be seized with pleasure in the presence of these and desire
to imitate them. The first woman making a change in
any natural object for the gratification which ii afforded
her is the starting point of three evolutions : that of the
art itself, whether textile, plastic, or musical ; of herself
in the practice of it, growing out of a mere imitator to be
a creator; of the universal or public appreciation of art,
of what might be called the racial or the tribal imagi-
nation.

As we have found that in the practical affairs of
life comprehensiveness is the noticeable characteristic of
women, the same ought to hold true in the realm of
beauty. We ought not to look for great personal spe-
cialization, but for a multitude of kinds of pleasing work

THE ARTIST.

163

done with the same pair of hands and co-operation of
many in one operation. It need astonish no one to wit-
ness the plastic potter suddenly becoming a painter and
then a weaver or embroiderer, nor a whole tribe of women
erecting and organizing a camp. As for the drama and
music, even these, as will appear later on, in the posses-
sion of women should be more homelike and less warlike.

Fig. 43. — The Origin of the Scroll. (From ancient Pueblo pottery,

after Holmes.)

In considering the aesthetic element of the textile art,
Holmes includes three subdivisions of phenomena, con-
nected with (1) form, (2) colour, and (3) design.

In executing the forms, colours, and designs there are
three degrees of predominance of the art idea.

1. That in which a useful object had to be made of a
certain shape, but in the making the woman wrought as
symmetrically and deftly as she knew how. It is as
though a needlewoman of our own dav had a contract to
fill, but, by her own refinement, was compelled to add a
touch or two not in the contract.

2. That in which a vessel or a garment or a house
convenience is the object in view, and just as much deco-
ration is added as will not interfere with use. The
Apache woman covering the outside of a mush bowl with
superb ornament would be an example.

3. That in which use is sacrificed to the aesthetic mo-
tif, as in all ages women have busied themselves in mak-
ing textures too good and beautiful for use.*

* Cf. Holmes, Sixth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., Wash., 1888, pp. 197,201.
V6

104: WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

The first beauty aimed at in the textile art by the
savage woman is uniformity, just as the beginning of
music is monotony, the prolongation and repetition of a
single tone. This uniformity is concerned with the tex-
ture and the shape of the product.

As there are no piece goods woven by these primitive
artisans, to be cut afterward into comely shape, the form
of the product must first be in the maker's mind, at least
as an intention. Piece goods begin with the cutting and
making uj3 of articles in fur and skins. The universal
mat, robe, or sail, according to the material and the use of
common forms everywhere prevailing, has come to have
a tribal outline and proportion. These are sometimes
called conventional, as though the artist were bound by
conditions against which she was struggling. The fact is,
that her whole effort and struggle is to be conventional.
The wallet, the bowl, the tray, the pot, the jar, the bottle,
the basket, after acquiring a family trait, goes on to per-
fection in its monotony. : The fact of their being of a piece
stimulates the workwoman. She must get her result
now or never. In civilization there are ways of hiding a
fault beneath an afterthought, but with this poor woman
none.

The monotony of texture is the glory of savage
women's textile work. In the great exposition at Chi-
cago many thousands of Indian baskets were shown.
Upon their surfaces hundreds of thousands of stitches or
meshes had been wrought. In one example counted,
eighty thousand stitches made of splints of wood, not
over the sixteenth of an inch wide, were so uniform in
dimensions as to excite the wonder of artists. Every
sewing woman knows how much pains it requires to get
at such a result with the best of needles and thread. The
securing of variety, which, with unity, constitutes the
charm of art, comes later. The student of primitive art

THE ARTIST. 1G5

will not safely follow the evolution of the former until the
latter is firmly in his mind. The same is true of man's
art, as any one can testify who has examined the flaking
on the ancient flint blades, the pecking on the surface of
granular stone implements, or the engravings on Hervey
Island ceremonial adze handles.

Changes of colour on the surface are produced by va-
rieties of the fundamental monotonies. The geometric
decorations on basketry are variations simply in number
and colour, the size of the mesh remaining uniform.
This part of art evolution was almost exhausted by savage
women. Hence one sees on basketry and on soft textiles
alike patterns which the modern weaver and the jeweller
are never tired of copying, which have become classic,
and entered the great world-encompassing stream of art
forms, pleasing to the whole species.

The Alaskan Eskimo woman selects her straws of wild
rye, and adds thereto little bits of red flannel or beads.
Her southern neighbour on the Pacific coast digs up the
long, slender roots of the spruce tree, and sjolits them with
astonishing uniformity. When dried, her filaments turn
to a clear light-brown colour, and the surface of a water-
tight wallet made therefrom is a marvel of regularity.
The overlaying of this surface with patterns executed in
straws, coloured or uncoloured, give opportunity to secure
variety in beauty.

On going southward one finds that Nature has pro-
vided dyes and natural colours in material in greater
abundance, which the savage woman has been swift to
recognize. In Arizona the yucca leaf presents two shades
when split, a dark green on the outside and a whitish
green on the inside. So the Moki woman, by wisely turn-
ing outward first one, then the other side of the fillet,
creates most pleasing effects.

The California and other Indian women introduce the

1QQ WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

stem of the maidenhair fern, the martynia pod, and such
natural black and brown filaments into the body of their
work.

The women of the eastern part of North America re-
lied upon splints or thick shavings of tough wood, like the
birch, ash, hickory, and white oak. The beauty element
in these splints was their ribbonlike characteristics and
the readiness with which they lent themselves to dyes,
while their southern sisters had an abundant resource in
the ever-present cane. In both substances, however, the
rigidity and structure of the libre held the artist within
certain leading strings of manipulation.

In addition to these hard materials used in eastern
North America the Indian women of the temperate belt
were intimately acquainted everywhere with the willow,
7'hus, cedar bark, Indian hemp, bullrushes, cat-tail, vernal
and other grasses, and many other kinds of filament ; with
their colours, and the best way of dyeing them ; and, what
is most noteworthy in this connection, these cunning sav-
age women knew so well what to do with each kind, and
what each kind could and could not do, that every effort
to improve their methods has failed. As soon as the
tropical belt is reached and the palm tree waves its grace-
ful fronds before the quick fancy of the rudest woman of
human kind, it seems to lay a spell upon her and to excite
her even to the finger tips. Whether in Mexico or northern
South America, or in Africa and Polynesia, the result is
the same. The natural colour of the leaf and of the stem,
as well as the extreme tenuity to which the filaments may
be reduced, offered a variety of form and technique to the
aboriginal artisans. To these delicate filaments we must
add in tropical countries the pita fibre, cotton, Phormium
tenax, and such other materials as could be spun into fine
threads. But their use, as well as that of silk, belong a
little further along in culture than the stage here alluded

THE ARTIST. 167

to. High colours are seldom used artificially, reliance
being had upon texture and surface patterns. -

The textile art of Asia is more barbaric than savage,
yet one can scarcely fail to note what a wonderfully refin-
ing effect the rattan and the bamboo must have had upon
the primitive East Indian and Chinese and Japanese
women. There is no wonder that they cling tenderly
to these plants, and have never sought to improve them
by artificial dyes. In very little of their work is there
any effort to introduce variety of shade in the native
colour. The very absoluteness of monotony gives to the
surface all the embellishment it needs. The production
of diaper effects is extremely easy and attractive in such
ware.

Into the body of the textile the savage women of North
America had learned to entwine or weave animal products
■ — sinew thread, yarn from the dog and mountain sheep
and mountain goat ; and in South America there were sev-
eral species of animals which yielded their fleece for the
beautifying of human arts. The historic period at its very
beginning on the Eastern Continent finds woman with the
distaff in her hand spinning the hair of camels, goats,
sheep, and. other animals, and no one can tell when the
Chinese did not have silk. And all these substances and
productions therefrom were in their aesthetic stage when
discovered. Indeed, wherever among the cults of the
world the textile art is mentioned it is the Fates or the
goddess who presides thereover. By this is meant that
women had perfected the industry on its purely industrial
side, had developed the art to a finish on the simpler
aesthetic side, and had gone to live beyond the sky in the
imaginations of many peoples before the days of looms
wrought by men.

The Polynesian women add their coloured decoration
to the tapa cloth by means of beating clubs, pencil brushes,

168 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

stamps, pouring cups, ruling brushes and sticks. In Af-
rica some of these devices are employed to lay on colour
after the completion of the shape, but these fabrics are not
textiles, strictly speaking. Almost universally in savagery,
the filaments are coloured before the textile work begins,
as before intimated, and both Nature and the dyer's art
are invoked to furnish the materials.

Aside from colour, the lights and shades of the woven
pattern, the innumerable varieties of interlacing within
the limits of each tribal technique, and the different kinds
of raw material in hand, form a group of aesthetic expres-
sions on which the savage woman's fancy never tires of
improvising.

The filaments of the textile art are either flat or round-
ish, rigid or flexible, coarse or fine. In the interlacing of
these filaments for purely aesthetic effects the artist has
her choice of making plain checker, wicker, diagonal, and
diaper work. By varying the width and mixing the char-
acteristics named above she has practically an endless va-
riety of patterns at her disposal. In twined weaving there
is the same diversity of prepared materials and the same
resources. Furthermore, the two almost independent sur-
faces for embroidery or overlaying furnished by this style
of manipulation has not been overlooked by decorators.

In the coiled work there are excellent opportunities of
introducing a new element at every turn.

Now every different kind of material and style of in-
terlacing and tribal fashion gives a new character to the
textile. Upon these the fancy of savage women has run
riot. The work is so easy and the leading strings are
never hard to follow.

Besides the ordinary forms of textural work — basketry,
matting, and cloth — there are to be found among savage
women, braiding, netting, knitting, and lace-making. In
every one of these beauty is secured by technique, by

THE ARTIST. 1G9

variety of texture, and by colour. The Indians of the
Yuma stock in Arizona make their carrying baskets of
coarse yucca twine, but by a kind of crocheting with
figured patterns combining brown, blue, and red twine
in pleasing contrast. The ordinary netting of savagery
is devoid* of ornament, but the women of the Sandwich
Islands and of other Polynesian regions used the net
as the foundation of a type of ornament soon to be de-
scribed.

The arrangement of thread shown in Fig. 14, under
the term "Lace," in Chambers's Encyclopaedia, as pro-
duced by Lever's machine, is precisely that of a Mojave
earning: basket in the United States National Museum,
and the same figure has been found stamped on pottery
from the mounds and graves of the Eastern United
States.*

When she chose, however, and that was quite fre-
quently, the savage woman invented processes of changing
the surface of her texture, either by addition, by omission,
or by elimination. The Sitka woman inserted into the
outer filament of her twine in weaving, strips of grass
stems, coloured and uncoloured, producing on the outside
merely of the fabric rich designs of brown and yellow and
black and red. This same overlaying was produced else-
where with bark and quill and stems of various colours,
of martynia and birch bark and maidenhair fern. It
was, indeed, embroidery, only the work was done when the
object was making, the woman being at the same instant
designer, weaver, and decorator.

Furthermore, beads, and seeds, and bits of shell, and
feathers, and hair of every hue were applied to the ex-
teriors of fabrics closely or as pendants. In some cases

* Mason, Rep. United States National Museum, 1887, p. 264, Fig.
7: Holmes, Third An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 403, Fig. 70.

170 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the entire surface is concealed by extraneous ornaments.
" Nowhere in the world has the use of pretty feathers at-
tained the refined magnificence seen in the Hawaiian Is-
lands. Feather hunting was a special vocation. Some-
times nets were spread, but more frequently birdlime was
smeared on the branches of trees. The arrangement of
feathers on necklaces, capes, cloaks, helmets, or wicker
gods was the principal occupation of noble women." *

The process of decoration by omission or by elimina-
tion is quite universal. It is simply the production of
openwork suggesting lace by methods differing from tribe
to tribe. f

To this omitted or reticulated fabric the workwoman
superadded the combination and intertwining of the re-
maining warp threads in various ways. Indeed, Holmes
figures one example of monochrome embroidery. " In
design and method of realization it is identical with the
rich coloured embroideries of the ancient Peruvians, being
worked on a net foundation. The broad band of figures
employs bird forms in connection with running geometric
designs, and still more highly conventional bird forms are
seen in the narrow band." J

As mentioned under the industrial side of textile
work, the ornamentation of stuffs must of necessity be a
matter of counting spaces. It is geometrical. So the
savage basket-maker and weaver and embroiderer has
brought to pass two results. She has taught the potter
and the architect both geometry and a thousand plain,
standard decorative features. It seems a long and tedious
training, but it was a kind of kindergarten in which

* Brigham, Catalogue of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum,
Honolulu, 1892, Pt. I, pp. 9-21.

f See Mason, Basketry of the American Aborigines ; and Holmes,
Sixth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., 1888, Figs. 300-311.

\ Holmes, op. cit.

THE ARTIST. 17J

those early imbued with a sense of beauty could be taught
preparatory to free-hand work in colouring and modelling.

On the other hand, she has introduced into rectilinear
network curvilinear designs. In her first artistic ventures
she rounded corners to produce beauty, but in her highest
flights vegetable and animal and even human figures are
squared up and conventionalized to fit the texture and the
spaces. These conventions analyzed, figures are again
seized upon by artists in other materials, plastic and
hard.

It may safely be said that the whole body of decora-
tion that has come out of the textile industry originated
in woman's brain. The word " textile," in the aesthetic
acceptation, includes (1) the preparation and colouring or
choosing the colour of filamentary material; (2) the mak-
ing of yarn, thread, string, twine, braid, and the endless
catalogue of prepared material which enters into the tex-
tile art and adorns it; (3) the technique of thatching,
basketry, matting, netting, lace making, weaving, sewing,
and embroidery.

Another line of invention in decorative forms was fol-
lowed by women working in plastic material. They had
the same problems of shape and surface ornamentation to
work out, but the material offered its peculiar character-
istics and possibilities. It is not necessary here to repeat
what was said in Chapter V on the industrial processes in-
volved and the results achieved. But a word will not be
out of place as to the primitive methods of securing pleas-
ure through the plastic arts. In the paper by Mr. Holmes
before mentioned and in Mr. Balfour's book on the evo-
lution of decorative art the lines of the elaboration here
laid down are followed, better for our purpose by the
former than by the latter, because Mr. Balfour had be-
fore him in the Oxford Museum chiefly specimens wrought
by men and is concerned with imitative patterns. These

172 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

are later than the monotony just dwelt upon. Holmes
has worked this out most elaborately, though he does not
mention that in America the potter's art was exclusively
woman's industry.*

With respect to the artistic element in the primitive
potter's art, the most noteworthy operations are, first,
the copying of natural forms such as fruits and animals
and, second, the transfer of textile motives to the soft
material either by taking impressions or by copying in
paint.

In the matter of discipline the clay and the paint are
above the textile material. The textile artist worked in
grooves, the painter and the ceramist wandered at will.
The former had a parallelogram of external forces to
guide in forming the pattern. As children at play but
poorly imitate the serious work of their elders, the ear-
lier women colorists produced paintings which half re-
vealed and half concealed the patterns which Nature set
before them.

Ceramic inability and economy rounded a corner here,
united two designs there, and in another place by a sort
of artistic synecdoche made a small part of the pattern to
do the work for the whole. There were also everywhere
shortcomings, technical difficulties and limitations which
helped to constitute the result, and for which the art stu-
dent must make allowance. The mythical and religious
motive is also ever present with the early potters. Look-
ing over the tens of thousands of specimens of vessels
in the United States National Museum, one is constantly
reminded of the religious feeling in the artists who have
thrown in a prayer in one corner, a little hymn in another,
and a complimentary allusion to the friendly totem in a

* Holmes Fourth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.. pp. 257-472; Balfour,
Evolution of Decorative Art, Lond., 1893, Pereival.

Fig. 44. — P^lucidation of Decora-
tion on Tusayan Dipper. (Alter
Holmes.)

THE ARTIST.

173

third. In like manner, the painters and the embroiderers
of the historic past have introduced the wings of angels,
the crucifix, and the star. The figure of a dipper with its
decorative patterns studied out is here introduced to show
how intricate the
savage methods be-
come by the pro-
cesses described.

These primitive
arts have come to
belong to the lowest
caste in the social
life of the white
race : vet the rich
woman adorns her
parlour with the
ancient spinning
wheel, and with the
products of savage
looms and potteries.
Around . the walls
lowly implements
of woman's original
handicrafts have an
honoured place,
while the most costly
museums are erect-
ed to protect and ex-
hibit the works of
her hands. .More
than this, modern
and ancient art of

Fig. 45.

-Ancient Tisayan Dipper, Arizona.
(After Holmes.)

the highest grade never tired of immortalizing these very
artists in painting and sculpture and ceramics. Among
such decorative works it must not be forgotten that figures

174 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

of burden bearers and handicraft women are the pictures
of real persons aesthetized.

The first achievement in music for women as well as
for men was the monotone. The evolution of musical
instruments includes the apparatus for the prolongation
and repetition of the monotone, beginning with the sav-
age rattle, which scarcely produces more than an instan-
taneous noise and ending with the toll of the bell. The
evolution of vocal music, like the uniform meshes of tex-
tile work, begins also with the monotone, whose prolonga-
tion on the same key, whose repetition on the same key,
whose pronunciation by many voices at once lead up to
unison, and then to melody. At their work, many doing
the same thing at once, in their mourning, several voices
joined in wailing, we have the beginning of vocal and in-
strumental music. Among the modern savages men have
more to do with these matters than women. For musical
voices women have, in our century, been more celebrated
than men, but in composition only men thus far have
world-wide fame. It is only recently that women have
escaped from the meshwork of the piano, and have begun
to be famous with more flexible instruments.

Among the birds, it is the male that sings ; the female
only chatters all day long about her nest, weaving and
food getting, and pursuing other domestic industries. A
very careful observer informed the author that the Kaiowa
Indian women have no musical instruments of their own,
and that they never play on those belonging to the men.
He goes further and asserts that he is not acquainted with
any savage tribes in which the women have musical in-
struments of their own. It is quite evident, however, that
he had in his mind the American savage woman and in-
struments producing melody; because, in describing the
ghost dance, in which he participated, he mentions a large
rawhide, held about waist-high by as many performers,

THE ARTIST. 175*

chiefly women, as could get round it and grasp the edge
of it with one hand, while they beat it with a stick held in
the other. While thus drumming, they circled around,
rawhide and all, keeping up one of those weird, high-
pitched dance songs without meaning, so common among
the prairie tribes.*

The Kaiowa woman beating on the rawhide is doing
the identical thing that the fine Spanish duenna accom-
plishes with her castanets or the Italian donna with her
tambourine — namely, keeping time. Every tribe of sav-
ages has its primitive and peculiar method of marking time.
It may be with the naked feet, or with the hands upon the
legs, or with a log of wood, or with rattles of gourds,
shells, seeds, or carved from wood, or cast in bronze, or
made of rawhide or parchment ; the thing most convenient
is utilized, and women join their efforts with men in se-
curing unison. Let not this awkward first effort be gain-
said. Do you not see that these poor Kaiowa women
beating on the rawhide are themselves an aboriginal co-
operating association, keeping time together, and do you
not see that the men dancing there are all keeping step to
the music? It is a kind of drill in which the women are
the drill masters.

Melody is older than harmony, and free melody that
wanders up and down the " trails " of sound is much
older than the melody that climbs pentatonic or diatonic
ladders. The physicists and the students of the evolution
of music are now discussing the question whether there is
any measurable scale for savage melodies. It is gravely
hinted that instruments have compelled the human voice
to go this way or that way until the fashion has become
the second nature ; but there were many sweet singers be-
fore Saint Cecilia.

* James Mooney, Am. Anthropologist, vol. v, p. 282.

17(3 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

It was with genuine pleasure that the author heard
Mr. Gushing say that the women of Zuni, though they
never play upon any of the musical instruments of the
tribe, sing songs of their own, which are invariably asso-
ciated with domestic and industrial pursuits. As they
nurse their children they croon a lullaby, and more novel
than that are the little melodies which they chant as they
plant the corn or beans or melons to encourage their
growth. The theory of the Zuni woman seems to be that
there is some mysterious connection between the voices or
sounds of things and their increase. When she kneels by
her stone bread -making trough she sings a song which
has many little imitations of the mealing stone. The
theory in her mind is that the implement will do far
better work under those circumstances. It is the same
when she sino;s to her baby. Her bov she calls her little
man, and speaks of all she hopes he may become, believ-
ing that these are necessary to his growth. This serious
intent goes through all her music.

The following Zuni baby songs furnished by Mr»
Cushing exemplify what has just been said :

Lullaby to a Girl.

Little maid child !

Little sweet one !

Little girl !

Though a baby,

Soon a-plaving

With a baby

Will be going.

Little maid child !

Little woman so delightful!

Lullaby to a Boy.

Little man child !
Little man child !
Little boy !
Though a baby,

THE ARTIST. 177

Soon a-hunting

After rabbits

Will be going-.

Little man child !

Little man, so delightful!

Oh, delightful !

So delightful !

The following instances of women associated with
primitive music are contributed by Mr. Henry Balfour, of
Oxford, England. In the South Pacific the " nose flute "
is very generally played upon by women. A figure of a
Tonga woman playing upon this instrument is shown in
the account of the voyage of Cook and King. A similar
figure is seen in Labillardicre's Vova^e de la Perouse
(Plate XXVIII) and in Melville's Four Months' Ptesidence
in the Marquesas Islands playing on the nose flute is men-
tioned as a favourite recreation with the females. Wilkes
gives a description of the Fiji " nose flute," and states that
no other instrument is played by the women as an accom-
paniment to the voice. Dr. Otto Finsch states that a type
of the musical bow, called "pangolo" is only played, upon
by women of Blanche Bay, New Britain. Guppy says
that the women of Treasury Island produce a soft kind of
music by playing, somewhat after the manner of a jew's-
harp, on a lightly made, fine-stringed bow about fifteen
inches long. Livingstone speaks of women using a small
musical instrument, which produced a kind of screeching
sound as an accompaniment of the death wrail.*

This book would be lacking in an important particular
if it did not call attention to the beginnings in savagery of
what may be called the fine lady — the climax of personal

* Travels, etc., in South Africa, New York, 1858, p. 470. Consult
also Ellis, Man and Woman, London, 1894, chap, xiv, and Edith
Brower, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1894.

178 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

grooming and of intellectual refinement, an ideal of su-
preme art in looks and behaviour.

She varies nowadays in the different European and
American capitals, in Peking, Bangkok, or Pondicherry.
But, wherever she be, there is no one who does not know
when she appears that she is a fine lady.

It is a title to which all ambitious young women aspire,
and the poorest of them dreams that, Cinderella like, she
will some day come to be admired with the aid of the kind
fairv. No dictionary defines her, there does not seem to
be any assemblage of words that will just include all of
them ; but the fine lady is the beau ideal in every time and
clime of what a woman ought to be. King Lemuel devotes
a chapter to her charms as he saw them (Proverbs of
Solomon, xxxi), and the literatures of the world abound in
her portraits.

A very intelligent frontiersman once informed the
writer that the ordinary voyager never sees the beauties in
any land. He must be invited into the society of the place
before they appear. Furthermore, it is his testimony that
after living a dozen years in daily contact with a tribe one
learns to appreciate the canons of beauty and understand
his own surprise at first. But there is no savage people in
the world that does not admire a fine air and carriage, lithe-
ness, and grace. Polynesian girls sit in a row for hours
going through a Delsarte movement that is fascinating in
the extreme. The habit of carrying loads upon the head,
of daily exercise of every part of the body, of the study of
proportion in pottery and weaving, give to most girls in
savagery an unconscious mat'sta, which heightens the
beauty thereof. Indeed, among the Bechuanas, especially,
it is the correct thing for an old woman to take the girls
who are candidates for young ladyship to the open coun-
try, and to teach them to walk straight and to carry bur-
dens. This reminds one of the practice in some girls'

THE ARTIST. 179

schools of compelling the misses to walk around with
books on their heads. The object in both cases is the
same — to secure una bella aria.

The industrial and humanizing element in savage cul-
ture as fostered by their women is exemplified in their
tribal ceremonies. It was the author's pleasure on one oc-
casion to witness the dance of the Kwakiul Indians, of
Haeltzukan stock, which symbolizes the overcoming of
the cannibal spirit. The conduct of the men was most
noisy. The cannibal actor was naked as to his limbs,
and wore only his ceremonial toggery. His motions
were wild and ferocious in the extreme. But his perform-
ance was followed by a dance of the women. They wore
long blankets of blue strouding, upon which were sewed
mythic patterns cut from red flannel and decorated with
rows of white buttons. They also had on aprons fringed
with puffin beaks, but their small feet were bare. While
the men were pounding with sticks upon a plank in
front of them, the women swayed their bodies and
swung half way round, to and fro, giving to their dra-
pery most graceful motions. With their hands also they
kept time, moving them to and fro by a sort of mild
gymnastic.

There is a slight contrast in the matter of costume be-
tween the savage and the civilized fine lady.* But women
in primitive society had their share of vanity. " Fe-
male dandies," says Im Thurn, " occur among Guiana
Indians about as frequently as in more civilized communi-
ties and in as pronounced degrees. A young woman in
the prime of life, conscious of a fine figure and good looks,
often takes infinite pains with her person and manages to
put on oils, paints, feathers, and teeth so delicately and
becomingly that she gives herself exactly the neat and

* Thomson, British New Guinea, London, 1892, p. 68.
14

180 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

well-dressed appearance one is accustomed to associate
with a young and well-bred lady." *

According to Ellis, the island of Tutuaroa was also fre-

Fig. 46.— The Pretty Girl —A Moki Beauty. (After Wittich.)

quented by the females of the higher class, for the purpose
of haapori, increasing the corpulency of the person, and
removing by luxurious ease under the embowering shades

* Indians of British Guiana, Lond., 1883, p. 200.

THE ARTIST.

181

of the cocoanut groves the dark tinge which the vertical
sun of Tahiti might have burned upon their complexions.
So great was the intercourse formerly that a hundred
canoes might have been seen at one time on the beach. *

Fig. 47. — The Ute Standard of Beauty, Utah. (After Wittich.)

The open air was the dressing place of both sexes, and
a group of females might often be seen sitting under the

* Ellis, Polynes. Res., Lond., 1859, Bohn, vol. i, p. 21.

182 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

shade of a clump of wide-spreading trees, or in a cool
mountain stream, employing themselves for hours in
arranging the curls of the hair, weaving wreaths of flowers
and filling the air with their perfumes. Their mirror was
one supplied by Nature, and consisted of clear water con-
tained in a cocoanut shell. *

In the vicinity of the ancient ruins of Palenque this
same devotion of women to springs of water prevails. Says
Morelet : " In retired places deep excavations may be seen,
where the women bathe during the heat of the day. Here
they gather beneath great trees festooned with vines on
mossy banks and indulge in protracted lustrations, braid-
ing their long hair and smoking their cigarettes the while,
in garb as primitive as that of the naiads. When the sun
sinks beneath the waving fringe of trees they don their
blue skirts, fill their pitchers, and wend homeward, chat-
ting and laughing all the way." f

Tibetan women smear their faces with a thick black
paste composed of grease and cutch. They say it is to
protect their skins from the drying wind. But the Lamas
say it is because one of the saints commanded them to do
so, to prevent their pretty faces from becoming a snare to
young monks, who were commanded to keep their eyes on
the ground in their walks abroad. J

This is not the only human conduct wrhich takes on a
different color from the point of view. It is true, how-
ever, that a great many of the apparently senseless actions
of peoples are thoroughly justifiable in the light of truth.

The Andamanese women mix up white clay and water
and paint not only their own bodies and those of their
relatives, but all their utensils. When the paint is still

* Ellis, Polynes. Res., Lond., 1859, Bohn, vol. i, p. 136.
f. Morelet, Travels in Cent. Am., N. Y., 1871, p. 85.
X Rockhill, Land of the Lamas, N. Y., 1891, p. 214.

Fig. 48. — The Yuma Fine Lady, Southern California. (After Wittich.)

THE ARTIST. 183

wet, with the outspread finger tips the surface of the skin
is decorated with patterns.*

" Nearly every morning the Patagonian men have their
hair brushed out bv their wives, sisters, or female friends.
The women then adorn the men's faces with paint.
They also paint each other's faces, and, if they possess a
small piece of looking-glass, also decorate their own." f
On the eve of their wedding night they cover their bodies
all over with white paint, and a child on its birth is simi-
larly whitened. J

The introduction of women barbers into European
and even into American shops recalls that in savagery
women are the hair cutters and occasionally the shavers.
Within a few hours after its birth the Andamanese baby
has its head shaved by its mother, who uses a sharp piece
of flinty rock or bottle glass, moistening the hair with
milk which she presses from her breast. In fact, women
are universally the barbers in the Andamans, and they not
only shave one another's heads, but those of the men.
The majority of women every week or ten days shave their
heads almost entirely ; the men have their own styles of
coiffure, but only in exceptional cases, when the services
of a woman are not obtainable, will men consent to oper-
ate on one another.*

A charming book could be written on the coiffures of
savage peoples. This bit of vanity is not confined to
either sex, but it is quite frequently women's work to " do
up " the hair of the men. ||

For artificial modifications of the human bodv, women

* Man, Andaman Islanders, Lond., 1883, p. 184.

f Musters, J. Anthrop. Inst., Lond., 1872, vol. i, p. 197.
X Op. cit., p. 197.

* Man, Andaman Islanders, Lond., 1883, Triibner, pp. 9, 114.

j| Livingstone, Travels, etc., in South Africa, New York, 1858,
pp. 486-488.

184 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

in our day are much more responsible than men. There
is not one person living in civilized society who did not
when in the plastic state of infancy undergo pinchings and
kneadings and sometimes surgical operations at the hands

of nurses. But it is even worse in
savagery. The North American
Indian mother strapped her infant
on a cradle board and compelled
the occiput to rest on a hard sub-
stance, much to its distortion,
while the Chinook baby had its
forehead flattened out intention-
ally by means of bandages and
padding.

The historians of Columbus'
day tell us that the Carib women
wove cotton bands on little girls'
legs just above the calves, which
remained there during lifetime,
constricting the limb and causing
the calf to swell. Among the rare
treasures recovered from the caves
of the Bahamas by the gatherers
of bats' dung for guano is a group of figures carved from
a single trunk of a tree. In these, both the arms near
the shoulders and the calves are represented as constricted
by bands of textile stuff. This distortion of the limbs
is mentioned also as in existence among our Southern
Indians.

The piercing of the lips and cheeks Dall has termed
labretifery. Plugs or labrets, worn at times in the up-
per lip, or at the corners of the mouth, or in the median
line of the lower lip, are peculiar to the women in one
tribe, to the men in another, and in still other tribes both
sexes decorate themselves therewith. " In most regions,"

Fig. 49. — Manner of pierc-
ing the Ear — Seminole
Indian Woman.

THE ARTIST. 185

says Dall, " which have been brought closely into rela-
tions with civilization the practice is extinct or obsolete.'1
But, as one example of conservatism among women, the
Tlinkit, who used to disfigure their faces with immense
plugs, have abandoned them, a little silver pin repre-
senting in the lips of marriageable girls the odious
kalushka*

The Bongo women thrust through the upper lip a cop-
per rivet, through the under lip a wooden labret, the latter
characterizing all the married women. Copper cramps are
attached to the corners of the mouths. In each nostril
blades of straw are stuck.

Besides these questionable decorations of the mouth,
these same women emboss tattoo marks on their arms.
Incisions and punctures are made in the skin, and the
healing is delayed by irritants, in order to impart to the
scars, in consequence of an exuberant growth of proud
flesh, the shape of embossed ridges. f

The rude and savage custom of tattooing is still in
vogue among almost all classes of Hindoo females and in
almost all parts of India. The face, chest, and arms are
generally tattooed with varied and fantastic designs. The
remnant of the savage custom of painting the person is to
be seen in the red paint over the forehead among the mar-
ried women of India. The up-country women, besides the
tattooing and painting, bore the lower lobes of the ears
and insert large wooden plugs which almost sever the lobes
of the ears. The Marwaree women also ornament their
upper incisors by drilling holes and plugging them with
gold, and sometimes with engravings. The women of the

*Dall, Masks, labrets, etc., Third An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., pp.
73-204, pi. v-xxix.

f Schweinfurth, Artes Africans?, London, 1875, Sampson Low,
pi. iii, Figs. 3, 5, 8, 19, 20 ; pi. xx, 1 ; xxi, 5. French-Sheldon, J.
Anthrop. Inst., London, 1892, vol. xxi, p. 361.

186 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Northwest Provinces, Behar, and Bengal colour their teeth
black with a kind of astringent tooth powder.

Painting the feet scarlet has been prevalent among
Hindoo women from a remote age. The Mohammedan and
Hindoo women paint the tips of their fingers and palms
with the leaves of the Lawsonia alba. Burmese women

look down with contempt
on men who fail to tattoo
their persons, and would
not marry a man who had
not been tattooed.* To a
certain extent the artistic
instinct has had its own
growth, because it has been
trained under circumstan-
ces different from those of
industrial life. But, on the
whole, the daily life and
activities of savage women
have been the school in
which they were trained.

Modern and classic art
are indebted to women for
the beginnings of land-
scape gardening, including
the aviary and the zoologi-
cal garden, for poetry and
music associated with the
home and its surroundings, for the cone and the dome in
buildings, for the whole plastic art in ceramics and sculp-
ture, for all geometric ornament of every sort whatsoever,
for textiles, tapestries, embroideries and laces, and largely
for free-hand drawing and painting.

Fig. 50. — The Mother of the Cary-
atides— Low caste Indian Woman.

* J. Anthrop. Soc, Bombay, 1890, vol. ii, p. 94.

THE ARTIST. 187

In art, as in practical work, the necessities of the case
developed in women great comprehensiveness. In the
Pueblo of Oraibi, Arizona, the same woman is most skill-
ful in three types of basketry, in loom weaving, and in
pottery, with their separate forms and decorations. This
characteristic struggle for beauty in every direction by
every woman had a most reforming effect upon society in
its infancy.

15

CHAPTER IX.

THE LINGUIST.

There have been many ways imagined for the begin-
nings of speech. The chief among them are the emotional
or interjectional, the imitative or mimetic, and the re-
sponsive or intuitive, utterance of thought, will, and
feeling.

When the true origin of language shall be explained,
all of these theories and others will have to be taken into
account, and in any event women will receive their share
of credit. It will doubtless also be proved that the crea-
tion of speech was a very practical and prosy affair.

In the consideration of woman in the light of any one or
of all these theories, her special part in early speech must
be studied in relation to its invention, its dissemination,
its conservation, and its metamorphosis. For, it must not
be forgotten that language is one of the great classes of
human inventions, created just as were tools, processes of
activity, artistic designs, institutions, and even worships.
The invention of language has followed the line of evolu-
tion pursued in other activities, beginning with almost
purposeless changes, and ending with co-operative and
purposeful modifications. The earliest language, at any
rate, was not a set of nouns and verbs and quantifying
and qualifying elements, all differentiated as in our dic-
tionaries and grammars. It was made up of brief sentence
terms, in which thoughts and emotions and wishes were
couched in a single complex utterance, which was eluci-

(188)

THE LINGUIST. 189

dated and enforced by accentuation and by gestures of
the body. The sentence was the unit of speech, and the
grammatic components are even now called " parts of
speech." The savage tribes, the primitive men and women,
invented these utterances, and, leaving out the common
expressions, the very nature of the case is convincing that
women developed and owned more than half of the sen-
tence terms that were not common property.

Women, having the whole round of industrial arts on
their minds all day and every day, must be held to have
invented and fixed the language of the same. In our own
households, two women have it in their power to converse
about a dozen subjects for a long time intelligibly to each
other, but entirely beyond the comprehension of men who
are present. It was the same in early times.*

If women in savagery had to do with butchering and
tanning, and gleaning and carrying, and milling and
cooking, and the interminable list of drudgeries before
mentioned then women's continual mockings or chatter-
ings or stammerings or ejaculations thereabout, repeated
and repeated to one another and to their daughters, and
even to their infant sons, became a considerable addition
to the general stock of speech. Furthermore, women
have invented terms for men to use — at least have put ex-
pressions into the mouths of their male infants to become
a part of their stock.

Dr. Brinton, in a private letter, says that in most early
languages not only is there a series of expressions belong-
ing to the women, but in various nations we find a lan-
guage belonging to the women quite apart from that of
the men.

Says Edward John Payne, in his History of America :

* On this point consult Whitney, Language and the Study of
Language, New York, 1868, Scribner, p. 22.

190 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

" The steps by which language was developed are still
obscure ; but it may reasonably be concluded that the
food quest had a considerable share in the process, and
that not long after emotional exclamations and demon-
strative names came primitive adjectives signifying
4 good ' and ' evil,' applied to animal and vegetable spe-
cies with reference to the purpose of food, in the sense in
which the African guide classes all plants into ' bush '
and ' good for nyam ' (the latter including the eatable
ones, the former the residue). In the discovery of the
qualities of the plants women had the largest share, the
males being occupied in hunting." * AVhat is said con-
cerning the food quest would be equally true of all the
substantial occupations of savage woman's life. Indeed,
the Mexicans say, " A woman is the best dictionary." f
This unpremeditated confession is based upon an early
induction made by the aborigines of that country cen-
turies ago. Savage men, in hunting and fishing, are
much alone, and have to be quiet, hence their taciturn-
ity ; but women are together, and chatter all day long.
Away from the centres of culture women are still the
best dictionaries, talkers, and letter writers.

In the provision of names for the thousands of things
that men make and that men and women have in com-
mon the latter must certainly have also chosen names of
their own. For women's appliances and methods, as they
appeared to the opposite sex, men also helped to enrich
the languages of the earth with terminology derived from
their point of view. This interchange of linguistic mate-
rial still goes on in every household. One scarcely passes
a day at home without hearing familiar things greeted
with unfamiliar names brought in by the opposite sex.

* Hist, of America, New York. 1892, vol. i, p. 307.
f Dodge, Plains, etc., p. 428.

THE LINGUIST. 191

Moreover, the infinite number of gestures which are
believed to be necessary for the enforcement of any
thought must surely conform to woman's special employ-
ments. The pantomime of conversation is always in har-
mony with the subject, and so is the drama of ceremony.
Men imitate the animals they hunt ; women, both by voice
and gesture, imitate what is theirs. I have somewhere
heard of a Pueblo woman who all the time she was build-
ing up a vase imitated with her voice the ring of a sound
vessel to encourage it to remain firm and not crack in the
baking. This last suggestion leads on to that inquiry how
far women have helped to the selection and preservation
of language through onomatopoeia. The female vocal
apparatus is singularly adapted to the imitation of many
natural sounds, and the female ear is correspondingly
quick to catch the sounds within the compass of the voice.
The former has harvested the sounds, the latter has gar-
nered them. Indeed, the attempt to catch the sounds
easily within woman's capabilities has necessitated the
cultivation of the falsetto voice in men.

The same rule holds true with regard to the wdiole
series of poetic figures. As every one knows, analogy lies
at the basis of most savage reasoning, and is the source of
many applications of words. But for one moment con-
sider that analogy is for some fancied resemblance the
applying of a term with which we are familiar to some
thing with which it is not generally associated. The poet
who compared life to a weaver's shuttle drew his inspira-
tion from woman's work. In the use of simile and meta-
phor, especially all through the daily ministrations, neces-
sarily the tropes will conform to the easiest imagery of the
speaker. Whole hosts of sound combinations are con-
stantly acquiring special meanings in the minds and in
the language of women for this very reason. Many of
these survive to swell the general stock of language and

192 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

to add to its richness. INTo attempt has been made, per-
haps, to separate the imagery of language naturally be-
longing to men from that which belongs to women. Per-
haps it can not be done, and we must rest in the general
statement that all the poetic imagery in language derived
from the occupations of women was either devised by
them or was inspired through them. In looking through
any dictionary of a savage language, it will be found that
while things change, names endure. The point in this
assertion is that many arts originated by women in sav-
agery passed afterward into the hands of men and became
theirs ; but the name survived. The modern Navajo
liogan, or house, is supposed to be the descendant of a
brush hut covered with earth. It is frequently built of
stones and mud. The Zimi name for the hogan is liam'-
pon-ne, a " brush or leaf shelter." And long, long ago
the Zuni probably so built their homes. At any rate the
old name endures.

These facts come out in a remarkable manner in the
rise and application of what in the classical languages is
termed grammatic gender. This differentiation in the
forms of speech does not exist in the lower languages, the
separation of words into classes being upon a quite differ-
ent basis — namely, the possession of life or some imagi-
nary characteristic. As will appear more clearly in the
chapter on religion, personification is the most common
act of the primitive mind. Men and women personify
alike the thoughts and the things which they use in com-
mon. Men personify the results of women's labour.
Women personify the observations and the results of
their own and of men's labour. In each case the appro-
priate sex word, whatever it may be, comes to be joined
with the root word. Real gender and some way of indi-
cating it in speech have always been known to men and
women, and it is not to be supposed that there was ever

THE LINGUIST. 193

a language in which its distinctions could not be clearly
stated. To transfer this method, whatever it may be, this
mark of personality to impersonal things and this mark
of gender to things associated with males and females is
the most natural instinct in the world.

No one knows how far back the custom goes of giving
gender to things by reason of association with them.
The modern sailor calls his ship " she " because he is at-
tached to her, and so also did the Roman sailor and the
Greek sailor before him. They are in a sense married to
the ship. Among the ignorant men in civilization almost
every object with which they have to deal gets the so-
briquet of " she." This custom does not prevail so far as
as known among women. But the fashion of grouping
things in pairs as belonging to opposite sexes is common.

In a special sense, and in innumerable ways, not only
objects, but men and women are united socially, intellec-
tually, religiously. In his Essays of an Americanist, Dr.
Brinton devotes one chapter to the conception of love in
some American languages,* especially the Algonquin, Na-
huatl, Maya, Quichua, and Tupi-Guarani stocks, with the
following results : In three of the stocks the terms of
love are simply cries of emotion. In four of them the ex-
pressions are built on a " root like amare, which brings
us to the Greek a/ta, 6/aos, both of which spring from the
Sanscrit soin; from which the Germans in turn get their
words sammt and zusammen, while we obtain similar and
same." Three of the stocks yield terms asserting union,
conjunction, attachment, and four of them have words as-
serting wish, desire, longing. The Cree, an Algonquin lan-
guage spoken in central Canada, contains expressions for
all four ideas, and hence we infer from the studies of the

* Brinton, Essays of an Americanist. Phila.. 1890, pp. 411-431,
referring to Carl Abel, Linguistic Essays, Lond., 1882.

19Jr WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

distinguished Americanist — the superficial observations of
travellers to the contrary — that among American aborigines
of both hemispheres the distinctions of which I have been
speaking existed already. It is to be regretted that our
studies must end with this general assertion. The share
of women and of men in developing the sentiment, and
then the language of the sentiment, and. then the transfer
of the language of this sentiment to associated things, and
finally, through poetry, to ideals, must remain to be studied
later.

Dr. Brinton says : " A most instructive fact is that
these notions are those which underlie the majority of
words for love in the great Aryan family of languages.
They thus reveal the parallel paths which the human mind,
everywhere pursued in giving articulate expression to the
passions and emotions of the soul. In this sense there is
a oneness in all languages which speaks conclusively for
the oneness in the sentient and intellectual attributes of
the species." That the lowest peoples have not attained
the highest comprehension of this term, but have been
engaging themselves in giving definition to its lower and
material inclusions, is exactly in line with all the studies
we have been making thus far.

This brings us to the invention of written or recorded
speech. The first written speech was in the form of
pictures. The artist was unskilled, the pencils were not
of the best, and repetition of the same design was out of
the question. Mr. Henry Balfour makes this very ap-
parent in his work on the evolution of art. He made a
sketch of a snail crawling over a stick and gave it to a
friend to copy. The copy he gave to a third, and so on to
twelve persons in turn. The result is the drawing of a
bird perched on a limb. Pictography has in the long run
undergone a similar evolution. Pictures, bad enough,
were succeeded by abbreviated pictures, and these by

THE LINGUIST. 195

further curtailments, with by unci by not a suggestion of
the original. Finally came hieroglyphs, then logographs,
then syllabaries, then alphabets. But what has all this to
do with women?

We have studied minutely enough the associations of
woman with textile and with plastic art to discover how
on baskets and blankets and robes and pottery she spoke
a language eloquent to the eye. Men modified their
pictographs because they could not draw. Women first
modified theirs because they were in leading strings. But
when they came to the ceramic art they were in the best
field for pictography. The honours were divided between
the pointed stick and the rude paint brush.

The robes of buffalo hide on which a great deal of
picture writing was done were all wrought by women, and
Dr. W. J. Hoffman, one of the acutest observers, who is
familiar with the picture writing of the American ab-
origines, says that the first pictograph he ever saw made
was executed by an Arikara woman. Birch- bark love
letters indited by Indian maidens are in existence.

Tattooing is a species of sign writing or pictography.
There are manv tribes in which women alone tattoo, and
in those where it is common to both sexes the women do
their own share of the work. In many cult societies they
record the songs, and the assertion has been made, but it
can not be proved here, that among the Plains Indians
the women have a picture language unknown to the
men.

Both gestures and pictures obey the usual law.. There
are very many that are common to the sexes, and some
that are peculiar to each.

An excellent example of the species of sign language
or telegraphing growing out of the work of womeu ex-
clusively is given by Brigham, in speaking of the tapa-

cloth making in Hawaii, who says : " I have usually seen
16

196 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the old women' establish their kua kuku (beating logs)
under some tree near a brook or kalo patch. It is inter-
esting to note that the women engaged in the beating had
a system of signalling by blows and intervals from valley
to valley."*

This is a very primitive kind of telegraphy 'or signal-
ling, which finds its parallel in our modern marine and
military language of signs. The drum languages of
Africa, understood by both men and women, will recur at
once to the reader.

In the dissemination of speech in primitive times it is
almost safe to say that woman had the larger share — at
least before the commencement of that world-encompass-
ing commerce which mingled the languages as it did the
productions of the nations. In Australia, in Africa, in
America, tribes belonging to different linguistic stocks
over and over again jn-essed on each other's boundaries
and went to war.

But in these conflicts women were not killed as a rule.
They were seized as spoils, and either enslaved or adopted
into the conquering tribes. Indeed, with many tribes and
nations systematic kidnapping of women was carried on.
They took with them to their new homes mouths full of
words and hands nimble in arts that were perhaps un-
known to their captors.

If the migrants were in considerable numbers, as hap-
pened many times, they kept up conversation in their own
tongue and learned the new one. Whatever novelty thev
brought with them for which there was no word in the
new home they supplied with the old name, and that I ■• -
came a loan word in the new tongue. Just as the Gem
women who came to America have given us both the u;
and the thing pretzel, so this endless train of captive

•::-

Brigham, Cat, Bishop Mas., Honolulu, 1892, p. 23.

THE LINGUIST. 197

women who for many thousands of yearsVandered over
the earth in dreary exile unconsciously enriched each
tongue from the vocabularies of the others.

The phenomenon to be witnessed in the North Central
States of the Union of foreign mothers keeping alive the
native speech among children to such an extent as to re-
quire the intervention of the laws to have English taught
in the schools is common enough. But there are localities
where the matter enters into politics and the law has been
defeated.

A historic example of the same character among abo-
rigines is furnished by the Arawaks, of whom Brinton
says : " They were the first of the natives of the New
World to receive the visitors from European climes, and
the words picked up by Columbus and his successors on
the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hayti are readily explained by
the modern dialects of this stock." *

Now these Arawaks had just before the discovery of
America been driven from many of the southern islands

■J

of the West Indian archipelago by the Caribs. Yet on
these very-islands two languages were spoken — the Arawak
by the women, and the Carib by the men.

Mrs. French Sheldon assures us that the women in
those parts of eastern Africa which she visited played the
part of intermediary between tribes in the times of peace
and acted as spies in war. For this work they are pe-
culiarly fitted both by their common duties and by their
knowledge of the languages. f

Between the Klamath and the Mutsun, of northern
California, languages belonging to different stocks, the

* Brinton, The American Race, New York. 1891, Hodges, p. 242 ;
Trans. Am. Phil. Soc, 1871. Lucien Adam. Du Parler des Homines
et du parler des Femmes dans la langue Caraibe, Extr. d. Mem. de
l'Acad. Stanislas, 1878, Paris, 1879.

f J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1892, vol. xxi, p. 0o9.

198 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

only corresponding words are tcJidya, shallow basket
in the former, and tchdla and tchakela, two kinds of
root baskets in the latter. Compare also Selish tenas,
young ; Klamath, to-iniivi-asJi, young woman ; tenase,
infant in Aht of Vancouver Island ; Klamath, fculu,
female animal ; Maidu, kiile, kula, woman, wife, female
animal.*

This is an interesting fact in connection with another
regarding language. The American Indians practiced
tribal or national endogamy — that is, marriage within
the tribe or nation. The introduction of strange women
was practiced, but it was not the rule. Hence these
American linguistic stocks are distinct and easily classi-
fied. The student has little trouble in keeping them
apart. As Brinton has shown, however, the tribes or na-
tions of middle America were more mixed and foreign
women were more frequently brought in. The conse-
quence is the multiplication of loan words. Now in Af-
rica the language problem is in a very different condition.
Over immense regions there are groups of languages that
are akin. Omitting the Eurafric element in the North,
the Semito-Hamitic element in the Northeast, there are
at least three types which must be grouped together —
the Soudanese, the Bantu, and the Hottentot. In these
three areas borrowing and lending both wives and words,
through war and slavery, have gone on for ages. This,
however, has not been worked out carefullv either bv the
students of marriage or by the philologists. The exist-
ence of widespread language types is a proof of constant
communication of some kind, especially where this diffu-
sion is in spite of blood, latitude, climate, natural scenery,
and resources. In the absence of writing and through
change of living, two members of the same tribe soon

* Gatschet, Cont. to N. A. Ethnol., vol. ii, p. li et seq.

THE LINGUIST. 199

forget the mother tongue, except the numerals and the
commonest words for things familiar.

Tylor says that " civilization is a plant much of fcener
propagated than developed," and Arthur Mitchell holds
that " no man in isolation can become civilized," which
opinions Mr. Gomme strenuously maintains in his work
Ethnology and Folklore.*'

These statements should be held to mean that every
civilization is stimulated and enriched by new arts and
new thoughts and new words from without. And this
scattering has been largely woman's work. A curious
illustration of the share of woman in the scattering of
language is furnished in Australia. The whole nation
is the supremum genus. "A native who travelled far and
wide through Australia stated that he was furnished with
temporary wives by the various tribes with whom he so-
journed in his travels ; that his right to these women was
recognized of course, and that he could always ascertain
whether they belonged to the division into which he could
legally marry, though the places were one thousand miles
apart and the languages quite different. Hence it often
happens that husband and wife speak different languages,
and continue to do so after marriage. Indeed, in some
tribes of western Victoria a mau is actually forbidden to
marry a wife who speaks the same dialect as himself : and
during the preliminary visit which one pays to the tribe
of the other neither is permitted to speak the language
of the tribe whom he or she is visiting." f

In China, on the contrary, where women do not mi-
grate notablv, the dialects are extremelv unlike — so much
so that a man from one province can not read aloud to

* Tylor and Mitchell, quoted in G. L. Gomme. Ethnology and
Folklore, New York, 1892. D. Appleton & Co., p. 9.
f J. G. Frazer, Totemism, Edinburgh, 1887. p. 67.

200 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

one from another province a document which either one
could read to himself. In this same line of inquiry the
capabilities of women in all ages as linguists and players
upon language as an instrument in literature may be ex-
amined. Between savagery and our modern civilization
there was an age of sentimentality in which women's
tongues became atrophied. But it was not so from the
beginning. The Hindu woman, as set forth in the fol-
lowing extract, represents the feeble type. But the share
of woman in the creation of language and its dissemina-
tion shows how capable she should be in its management.

In 1679 was born, near Pandharpur, Shridhur, the
famous poet who gave to the people the stories of the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata in the popular Marathi.
He tells us that he wrote his poems for the weaker sex.
Said he : " Women do not understand Sanskrit, and in
this respect their helplessness may be likened to that of a
weak person distressed with thirst standing at the mouth
of a deep well. Now, if that person has no rope and pot,
how will he draw water to quench his thirst? "Whereas,
if he comes to a tank he can quench his thirst at once.
In the same way to quench the thirst of the weaker sex
and lead them into the paths of salvation the Almighty
has ordained that works shall be composed in the Pra-
krit tongue. It is true that the original storv of Rama
being in Sanskrit, it is better to peruse it in Sanskrit.
But the weaker sex can not master that language any
more than an elephant can be restrained by a rope made
out of the fibres of a lotus. If the weaker sex can not
understand, how will they be saved?" *

The fact is that women are naturally more voluble

* J. Anthrop. Soc, Bombay, 1892. vol. ii, p. oil. A modern book
equally silly in tone is William Alexander's History of Women,
published a hundred years ago in London.

THE LINGUIST. • 201

than men, have more things to talk about, are captured
and carried about more, and spread the seeds of new words
and their underlying thoughts. In an equally remarkable
degree women have been the conservators of speech. The
conservation of speech is quite as necessary as its invention.
Women very early invented industries which were to last
until the end of time. That they worked at them day in
and day out without talking about them is not to be sup-
posed. They did prattle about them, and gave names to
them and to all the raw materials and tools and apparatus
and methods and rules and productions and their thou-
sand and one uses. As all these were to endure, the words
and sentences which were attached to them became an
integral part and symbols of them, and had the best
chance of preservation. Over and over again women have
been characterized as the conservative sex. In the light
of these studies they could scarcely be otherwise. The
Hindu god Vishnu is called the preserver of forms, not
because he has been requested to hold all things together,
but he e:ot his name by reason of all his c^ood deeds in
this direction. The name came after the fact. It is no
violation of language to call her the conservator of Ian-
guage whose words endure. Without noticing the reasons
here assigned, Buckle dwells on the same thought and
quotes from a multitude of authorities."

A casual glance at any list of old-time verbs in the
English and other cultured languages — sow, sew, sweep,
spin, weave, grind, wind, wash, bake, and so on to the
end of the list — confirms the suspicion that a goodly
stock of enduring words have come to us in the occupa-
tions of women. Indeed, that most brilliant of linguistic
achievements, the identification of Indian, Iranic, and Eu-
ropean languages, rests upon the common heritage of

* Buckle, Works, and Fraser's Magazine, London, April, 1858.

202 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

words, most of which belong to women. " It is only the
most rudimentary terms connected with agriculture that
agree in Greek and Latin. The names for the various
species of grain, for the various parts of the plough, for the
winnowing fan, for the handmill, and for bread, are all
different. So also are the words denoting the most ele-
mentary legal and political conditions, as well as the words
relatiug to metals, seamanship, fishing, and war, the names
of weapons, . . . none of them can be traced in Greek." *

It is a threadbare fact that among dying tribes the
ambitious linguist generally finds at the last moment one
old woman who still holds on to a part of her vocabulary.
Of Minnie Froben, a Klamath woman, Mr. Gatschet
says : " She and Subchief Hill were the most important
contributors to my mythic and other ethnologic anthology,
and the pieces dictated by her excel all others in com-
pleteness and perspicuity. Moreover, 1 obtained from her
a multitude of popular songs, the names and uses of
esculent roots and plants, the Klamath degrees of relation-
ship, etc." f Lalia Rookh, last of the Tasmanians, and
others will occur to those familiar with collecting vocabu-
laries.

In the conservation of the historv of language women
have played a prominent part through what is commonly
termed folk speech. The folklore that abides in the
minds and habits of cultivated persons came there in
childhood, largely introduced into nursery instruction by
mothers and servants. Nursery rhvmes, Mdrchen, riddles,
and jingles, infolding bits of ancient philology, are passed
from nurse to child, and have been for centuries. While
many thousands of books have perished, these traditional

* Isaac Taylor, The Origin of the Aryans, London. 1892, Scott,
p. 194.

f Gatschet, Cont. to N. A. Ethnol., vol. ii, pt. i, p. 7.

THE LINGUIST. 203

examples have endured with a tenacity of life that is truly
astonishing.

Lastly, besides producing profound modifications of
language through its dissemination, women have them-
selves taken part in those changes of form and meaning
in words and the construction of sentences that constitute
its life history. Many schools in our country employ both
men and women to teach French and German, because
the two sexes do not, in fact, speak these languages alike.

To begin with, the vocal apparatus is different, and
has not undergone a great deal of modification since the
days of savagery. Mr. Moonev's Kiowa women beating
upon a rawhide for a drum were singing treble, ut-
tering their own fancies and dreams and experiences and
hopes. There is no tribe where music awakens the same
sounds or words among the sexes. As a matter of fact,
savages are not so stationary as the civilized nations.
The women of an Athapascan tribe in central Alaska, in
that cold and barren land, exclaimed and mocked with
their voices the things of Nature around them, and ut-
tered the- thoughts that arose in them by reason of their
environment. When they moved over the coast ranges
and southward to California and Oregon, they gave to old
roots new meanings and found a new heaven, a new earth,
a new climate and a new soil, new minerals, plants, and
animals. These excited, proposed, and awakened a new
batch of words and sentences and gestures. When the
tribes of the same stock wandered into Arizona, another
entirely new series of forces created further changes in
vocabulary. Lastly, one half of the Southwestern tribes
became pastoral. Hence the Tinne woman, working in
birch bark and quills ; the Hnpa woman, gorgeously
dressed in pinon-seed skirt and hat of hazel twigs and
pine root and fern stalk ; the Apache woman, loaded with
gaudy jewellery in a desolate land ; and the Navajo woman

20-1 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

•

in highly-coloured blankets of her own dyeing and spinning
and weaving, though of the same blood — have been tutored
of different climates and environments. There is enough
of the primitive Athapascan left in them all to confirm
their unity, but the charming part of the study of them
all is the curious metamorphosis of old words, their adapta-
tion to new uses, and the variety of new forms of speech
which each set of natural conditions has effected.

Furnished with a vocal apparatus differing from that
of men, engaged in industries growing more and more
complex and tabooed to men, talking to one another more
than to men from day to day, women have modified
language and fixed its colloquial form at home as well as by
dispersion. Theirs is the speech of common parlance
largely — that which all children learned from them to
prattle, the vulgar dialect, the ungrammatical and greatly
abbreviated talk of the day. But all observers tell us that
in their councils the men spoke a different tongue — more
sonorous and oratorical, and frequently incomprehensible
to women.

CHAPTER X.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY.

If there is in savagery any operation in which the
women have always and everywhere " trodden the wine-
press alone," it is in the supreme moment of motherhood.
The following quotation, if the tribal name were erased,
might have been written among any aborigines in the
world : " Upon the approach of childbirth the Quissama
woman [Angola] departs from home, as she has the idea
that neither man nor woman should see her, into the
forest, where she remains until she has succeeded in de-
livering herself of the child. Shortly after the birth she
returns to her hut, and no questions are asked."*

Among the Indians of Guiana before the birth of a
child the father abstains from certain kinds of animal
food. The mother works up to a few hours before the
infant is born. At last she retires alone, or accompanied
only by some other women, to the forest, where she ties
up her hammock, and then the babe is born. Then in a
few hours the woman gets up and resumes her ordinary
work. Xo sooner is the event announced than the father
takes to his hammock, and, abstaining from every kind of
work, from meat and all other food except weak gruel of

* J. Anthrnp. Inst., London, 1872, vol. i. p. 189. In the Index

Catalogue of the Surgeon General's Library, Washington, under the

appropriate catch words, many hundreds of references to this fact

will be found.

(205)

206 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

cassava meal, from smoking, from washing himself, and,
above all, from touching weapons of any sort, is nursed
and cared for by all the women of the place. The child
is not weaned till a late age, sometimes not till the third
or fourth vear. When there are too many children claim-
ing food from one mother, the grandmother occasionally
relieves her of the elder. The mother, even when work-
ing, carries the child against her hip or slung in a small
hammock from her neck or shoulder. As soon as chil-
dren can run about they begin to mimic their parents.
Even the youngest girls can peel a few cassava roots,
watch a pot, or collect a few sticks of weed.*

This practice of letting ^}ie father, to bed is called
couvade, and is of extreme antiquity, as the following
quotation from Apollonius shows :

In the Tibarenian land.
When some good woman bears her lord a babe,
'Tis he is swathed and groaning put to bed ;
Whilst she arises, tends his baths, and serves
Nice possets for her husband in the straw. f

The fate of the tinv creature thus ushered into society
depends with savages upon a number of circumstances.
The first question is, whether it shall live or die, and this
question, wonderful to relate, is not infrequently raised
by the mother herself. Among the Eskimo, in times of
scarcity, if a child be born for whom food can not be
provided, it is exposed to die of cold, having its mouth
stuffed with a bunch of grass to prevent it from crying.
This is done as a matter of duty. The child must not cry,
or its voice will be heard about the house. One of these

* Ira Thurn. Ind. of British Guiana, London. 1883. p. 219.

f Apoll. Rhod.. ii. 1012, quoted by H. Ling Roth, in J. Anthrop.
Inst.. London. 1803. vol. xxii, p. 214. The whole paper on couvade
by this author should be consulted (ibid., pp. 20-4-244).

Fig. 51, — The Maiden in Savagery,

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 207

little ones picked up and adopted owes lifelong service to
the foster parent.*

The very same thing would be done by any other
primitive people, and for similar reasons, without excit-
ing horror. The Australian mother or father would till
the baby's mouth with dry sand; the poor woman in
a great city would place her hand over its mouth, wrap
it in a coarse cloth, and lay it in some dark alley, the
motive in many cases being the same. Infanticide, how-
ever, is social suicide in any way, shape, or form, and
female infanticide is the worst form of the infatuation.
Price says : " There are few women in comparison to the
number of men among the Quissama, Angola, which I
think would be accounted for if we could determine that
at some time past they destroyed their female offspring." f
Of the Angola people Livingstone also writes : " The
height of good fortune is to bear sons. The women will
leave their husbands altogether if they bear daughters
only, and childless women often commit suicide." J That
men should dote on male children is natural enough, and
that they on occasion weed out the females has over and
over again been shown ; but the curious attitude of the
Angolese women toward girl babies is worthy a moment's
reflection, in the light of what civilized women say and
do on the same subject.

The little girl in savagery, if her life was to be spared,
^vew up at the side of her mother and her mother's sis-
ters. The time she passed between her third and her
thirteenth year was the period of her education. She was
then expected to be ready to fill a woman's place. Ten
years of pupilage had their effect upon her physical edu-

* Dall, Am. Naturalist, Philadelphia, 1878, vol. xii, p. 6.
f Price, J. Anthrop. Inst., London. 1872, p. 189.
X Travels, etc.. in S. Africa, New York, 1858, p. 446.

908 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

cation, her mental training, her morals. In the different
races there were characteristic codes of child training.
Climate also, and even religion, entered into this savage
pedagogics.

In all of them, however, as the little girl grew to be
the maiden, there was no home circle to guard her
morals. Her ears were saluted with talk that hardened
and vulgarized her mind. Yet her education was of the
most practical character. You have only to look in the
great museums to find among savage woman's handiwork
innumerable examples of tiny pieces of basketry, pottery,
bread, or weaving, labelled " children's work." In the
industrial schools of the times the little hands learned
dexterity. In the Mexican codices, mother and child
are represented as teacher and scholar through years of
tutelage, with the rewards and punishments clearly set
forth.

In ancient Mexico, annexed to the temples, were large
buildings used as seminaries for girls, a sort of aboriginal
Welleslev or Yassar. Thev were presided over bv ma-
trons or vestal priestesses, brought up in the temple. Day
and night the building was guarded by old men. The
maidens could not leave their apartments without a
guard, and if anv one broke this rule her feet were
pricked with thorns till the blood flowed. When they
went out, it was together, and accompanied by the ma-
trons. The maidens had to sweep the precincts of the
temple occupied by them, and attended to the sacred
fire; they learned how to make feather work and to spin
and weave mantles; they were obliged to bathe frequent-
ly, and to be skillful and diligent in all household affairs;
they were taught to speak with reverence, to humble them-
selves in the presence of their elders, and to observe a
modest and bashful demeanour at all times. They rose at
daybreak, and whenever they showed themselves lazy

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 209

or rude, punishment was inflicted. At night the pupils
slept in large rooms in sight of the matrons, The
daughters of nobles, who entered the seminaries at an
early age, remained there until taken away by their
parents to be married.*

In the old tribal life of the Omahas the girl was kept
in a state of subjection to her mother, whom she was
obliged to help when the latter was at work. When she
was four or five years old she was taught to go for wood,
etc. When she was about eight years of age she learned
• how to make up a pack, and began to carry a small one
on her back. If she was disobedient she received a blow
on the head or back from the hand of her mother. As
she grew older, she learned how to cut wood, to cultivate
corn, and other branches of an Indian woman's work.f

The Quissama women [Angola] have an excellent way
of bringing up their pickaninnies. In order to keep them
out of harm's way, all the children belonging to the many
scattered huts of a district are brought together every
morning, and are kept under the strict supervision of an
old woman during the day ; at night they return to their
parents. This arrangement enables the parents to attend
to their agricultural pursuits, of which both sexes are
very fond. The women, while doing field work, always
have the young infants strapped upon their backs J

As will be seen a little farther on, girl children are
named in some of the lowest social units more surely than
boys. They bear forever the clan name. But the custom

* Bancroft, Native Races, New York, 1875, vol. ii, p. 245.

f Dorsey, Third An. Rep. Bur Ethnol., p. 265.

X Price, J. Anthrop. Inst,, London, 1872, vol. i, p. 189. The same
author describes a girl with a calabash of manioc, palm oil, and
mealies feeding a row of these babies hung up in their frames upon
beams, just as they had been unharnessed from the mothers' backs
(op. cit., p. 191).

210 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

is well-nigh universal of adding to this name others as they
grow older and to accompany the giving of the name with a
religions ceremony. Indeed, the parents frequently re-
ceive a title from the child named, so that thev are known
tis the father or mother of such a one. The following
custom, taken from a very lowly people, would find its
counterpart anywhere :

When the Andamanese girls arrive at the period which
divides childhood from maidenhood they receive " flower"
names. There are eighteen prescribed trees which blos-
som in succession, and the " flower " name bestowed in
each case is taken from the one in season when the girl
attains maturity. This, added to her prenatal name, con-
stitutes the personal address of the girl until she marries
and is a mother, when she receives the more dignified title
of Chan^a (madam or mother).*

The training completed, the girl graduate had to pass
through a ceremony of initiation, a kind of " bringing-
out" ordeal. This was oftentimes painful, but never so
terrific in its tortures as those which young men had to
endure on reaching manhood. In some tribes a girl
had to begin in her eleventh year to fast and to abstain
from doing this or that. The tilings she ought not to do
wTere quite as many as are the interdictions on the modern
miss. She had to walk ever-increasing distances with a
jar on her head and to carry burdens made heavier every
day. In fact, she was drilled in endurance and skill and
every wifelv exercise.

A life of single blessedness is possible in savagery, but
far less happy than in civilization. It is doubtful whether
a single human being could prosper for any length of time
alone in any part of the earth. And this state would be
worse for a woman than for a man. A definition of civili-

* r1

Cf. Man, Andaman Islanders. London, 1883, Trubner, p. GO.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 211

zation might be framed as " the ever-increasing possibility
of the number of unmarried females that might exist in a
community." Dall narrates the story of two Eskimo
women who, eschewing the tribal customs, set up estab-
lishments of their own, and Hearne tells of a regular
woman Crusoe in the Hudson Bay region of Canada.

A young Eskimo woman, fine looking and of remark-
ably good physique and mental capacity, held herself aloof
from the young men. She said she was as strong as any
of them, as they could testify. She could shoot and
hunt deer as well as the men, and set snares and nets.
She had her own gun, bought from the proceeds of her
trapping. She did not desire to do the work of a wife,
preferring that which custom allots to the men. When
winter came, having made a convert in a smaller, less
athletic damsel, the two erected their own house, and
here lived and traded in defiance of public sentiment.
When on one occasion they were off on a deer hunt " out-
raged public opinion combined in a mob which reduced
their winter quarters to a shapeless ruin. The next year
they gave up the unequal contest and returned to the ways
of the world."*

Though cut-and -dried marriages are the rule in sav-
agery, as some would have them with us, these do not lack
a cloud of witnesses to the existence of romantic love
among lowly peoples.

Ellis relates a charming account of this phenomenon at
Tahiti. A chief of Eimeo, about twenty years old and of
great personal beauty, became attached to the niece of the
principal raatira in the island, and tendered proposals
of marriage. She declined every proposal, though no
means to gain her consent were left untried. He was
seized with the deepest melancholy, and leaving the other

* From Dall, Am. Nat., Philadelphia, 1878, vol. xii, pp. 4-6.
17

212 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

members of the family to follow their regular pursuits,
from morning to night he attended his mistress, perform-
ing humiliating offices. At length she relented, accepted
his offers, and they were publicly married.*

The day of days to all young women who enter the
current of human activity is that of their wedding. Mr.
Man thus describes the ceremony among his Andamanese :
" On the evening of the eventful day the bridal party as-
semble at the chief's hut, or in one of those occupied by
unmarried women. The bride sits apart, attended by one
or two matrons, and the bridegroom takes his place among
the bachelors until the chief or elder approaches him,
whereupon he at once assumes a modest demeanour and
simulates reluctance to move ; however, after a few en-
couraging and reassuring remarks, he will allow himself
to be led slowly, sometimes almost dragged, toward his
fiancee^ who, if she be young, generally indulges in a great
display of modesty, weeping and hiding her face, while
her female attendants prepare her by straightening her
limbs. The bridegroom is then made to sit on her lap,
and torches are lighted and brought close to the pair that
all present may bear witness to the ceremony having been
carried out in orthodox manner, after which the chief pro-
nounces them duly married, and they are at liberty to re-
tire to the hut that has been previously prepared for their
occupation. On the morning after the marriage the par-
ties are painted by their mutual friends. It often happens
that a young couple will pass several days after their nup-
tials without exchanging a single word or even looking at
each other." f

The marriage relation in its broadest sense must be

* Ellis, Polynes. Researches, London, 1859. vol. i. pp. 267-2G9.
See also Musters, J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1872, vol. i, p. 201.
f Man, Andaman Islanders, London, 1883, Trubner, p. 69.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 213

studied in Morgan, Lubbock, Tylor, McLennan, Letour-
neau, Starcke, and Wake. Their comprehensive works
abound in references to original observers, and form an
encyclopaedia on this topic.

Here, briefly, it is designed to observe how the civilized
woman stands related to primitive woman in this regard,
and how little by little the condition of the latter came to
be that of the former. It is said that woman was first
the wife of any, then the wife of many, and then one of
many wives. In this last condition her nuptial period
has been growing more and more stable.

The evolution of matrimony has been woman's work
in more ways than one. Of any bird or beast there is no
difficulty of telling who is the mother. The longer the
mother's care of the eggs or of the young was demanded,
the longer was it possible to vouch for the identical moth-
er day after day. Matrimony in all ages, then, is an effort
to secure to the child the authenticity of the father. So
the poor female, always the mother well known, has had
curious ups and downs as regards her spouse. The evolu-
tion of the husband, then, is the history of matrimony.
The motives of this evolution will appear as the various
standings of woman in this regard are unfolded. Paternal
feeling is just as strong as maternal affection, but its ex-
istence and strength depend upon the identification of
paternity either in a group or an individual.

In every social state a good wife, as wifehood goes, has
ever been considered among the most precious possessions.
Whether the bliss of undivided companionship be the
point of view or the gain of profitable service to him
alone, the man has always looked upon the best woman
as the pearl of great price. Hence the family or the clan
that owned the young woman, as well as the man who de-
sired the young woman, could not fail to see that he who
loses the service and he who gains the exclusive right are

214 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

dealing with commodities of acknowledged values. In
the higher forms of culture presents are given to the bride,
but down the hill a little way they demanded them.*

«■«£>

Fig. 52. — The Founder of Society, the Primitive Social Unit.

It will appear farther on why a present was demanded
by the bride's family. Even in our own day the union of

* See Bancroft, Native Races, New York, 1874-'76, sub voce
Woman, vol. v, p. 787, for numerous kinds of wife purchase or claim-
ing among North American tribes.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 215

young people in wedlock is not without its commercial
elements, especially where property is involved. But in
primitive aggregations the motive was more apparent and
the means more direct.*

Among the ancient Germans the wife did not bring a
dowry to her husband, but received one from him. " The
parents and relations assemble and pass their approbation
on the presents — not adapted to please a feminine taste
or to decorate the bride, but oxen, a caparisoned steed, a
shield, a spear, and a sword. By virtue of these the wife
is espoused ; and she in turn makes a present of some
arms to her husband. That the woman may not think
herself excused from exertions of fortitude or exempt
from the casualties of war, she is admonished by the very
ceremonial of her marriage that she comes to her hus-
band as a partner in toils and dangers ; to surfer and to
dare equally with him, in peace and in war. All this is
indicated by the yoked oxen, the caparisoned steed, and
the offered arms. Thus she is to live ; thus to die." f

From the point of view of this book the study of mar-
riage involves the following questions, based on the consti-
tution of the tribes in which it exists : 1. Who may marry
a woman ? 2. How many women may he marry, or how
many men may she marry? 3. For how long a time
may the woman marry the man — that is, after how long a
time, and under what circumstances may he put her away
or may she dissolve the union ? Now, the answer of these
questions, as hinted, depends largely upon the way in
which the community is held together, upon its constitu-
tion and government. The patriarchal family is insepa-

* See Livingstone, Travels, etc., in South Africa, Xew York,
1858, pp. 548, 667, 368. On the subject of wife purchase consult
also Wake, Marriage and Kinship. London, 1889, Redway.

f Tacitus, Germania, chap, xviii, Harper's Class. Ser., vol ii, p
308 ; other notes referring to German women.

216 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

rably connected with the patriarchal government, the
clan marriage can not be severed from the clan govern-
ment, and so on. We shall now examine some of these
forms of wife holding under the titles that have been
adopted by distinguished writers. As studied by the
eminent authorities above mentioned, society presents
itself to us in different phases with reference to wife
holding or husband holding. The following are the prin-
cipal conditions, imaginary or real, that have been con-
sidered necessary to a complete study of the subject :
1. A primitive condition, of which nothing is known, in
which unions were not for life, wherein any man might
marry any woman, or as many women as he pleased and
vice versa, as long as it suited them, or until the child
was weaned. In such a state our young woman was the
wife of any. 2. A condition in which female infanticide
was practiced, causing men to become much more nu-
merous than women. This led to several kinds of 'poly-
andry, in which all the men of a community held all the
women in common, or in which several men attached
themselves specifically to each woman. Here she became
the wife of many. 3. A condition in which, to increase
the number of women, those of other tribes or communi-
ties were carried off by force. Here polygamy has an
opportunity of arising legitimately, but as yet there would
be no law as to whom a woman should marry. In such
a state she is one of many wives. 4. A state of things in
which the daughters of the same mother, at least, are not
lost in the general melee. It will be learned that such a
time was the dawn of social history. There is no lower
condition known. This was the foundation of the gentile
system, in which the young woman is fenced by tribal re-
strictions. 5. A state of society in which men began to
lead industrial lives, to assume the role that had been
woman's alone, to have property, and to think it worth

65

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THE FOUNDER OP SOCIETY. 217

their while to own their daughters. Here began father
right, leadiDg finally to the monogamian family.

The old voyagers assert that many aboriginal peoples
practiced communal marriage — that is, any man and any
woman might be man and wife for just as long as they
pleased, and there was no social let or hindrance. The old
idea that everything came from nothing seems to demand
some such state of marriage at first in our species.
Closer study by patient scholars reveals the fact that no
such practice exists anywhere. Even pigeons mate for as
many as fourteen years, and hawks are monogamous for
life. The animal wTorld had got further along when the
human race appeared. Of the Andamanese, frequently
referred to in this book as among the lowliest of the low-
ly, " so far from the contract of marriage being regarded
as a temporary arrangement, to be set aside at the wTill of
either party, no incompatibility of temper or other cause
is allowed to dissolve the union, and, while bigamy, polyg-
amy, polyandry, and divorce are unknown, conjugal fideli-
ty till death is not the exception but the rule, and matri-
monial differences are soon settled, without the interven-
tion of friends." *

So far from promiscuity in married life are all the sav-
age tribes known on earth at present that the lower down
wre go the more stringent are the rules about who shall
take each young woman to himself. The modern physiol-
ogists are unanimous in declaring against the marriage of
cousins and those near of kin, and civilized nations have
enacted laws to prevent its occurrence, but customs far
more exacting and penalties far severer universally guard
the young female in savagery.

True, there may be no law against the children of
brothers marrying ; but in such tribes sisters' children

* Man, The Andaman Islanders, London, 1883, Trubner, p. 67.

218 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

only are deemed brothers and sisters, and these never
marry.

Who invented this benign arrangement is not known.
Even before marriage young savages are taught to heed
this rule, and relatives so near of kin as true cousins ac-
cording to the prevailing idea avoid one another as they
grow up.

Now, a moment's reflection shows that this subject of
who may marry depends largely on the limits of identifi-
cation of relationship. The American Indians had one
method, the Polynesians another, and the Australians a
third, but they were all struggling with the same diffi-
culties.

Among the American Indians and in certain parts of
Asia the gentile system of marriage prevailed, called by
Morgan the ganowanian or " bow-and-arrow " system. In
each tribe of Indians were several gentes or clans named
after some class of natural objects called their " totems."
Each clan was composed of a supposed female ancestor
and all her descendants through daughters. Descent was
in the female line, and the name of the totem adhered to
females forever. Under this system in its simplest form
a man went to marry a girl. The children bore her name.
A man could not marry a woman of his own clan. He
must marry into another totem.

" The social corner stone of the Pueblo," says Lummis,
" is not the family, but the clan, and this was almost univer-
sally the rule in America. Husband and wife must belong
to different gentes and the children follow the clan of the
mother. The spheres of the sexes are clearly defined.
The woman is complete owner of the house and all it con-
tains save his personal trinkets ; and she has no other
work to do than housework, at which she is no sloven.
Should her husband ill treat her she could permanently
evict him from home, and would be upheld in so doing.

Fig. 54. — The Australian Familt.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 219

The man tills the fields, and they are his ; but after the
crops are housed she has an equal voice in their disposi-
tion." *

Some notion of the effect of this clan system or its
equivalent in defending woman among lower peoples may
be had by the custom of slavery before the civil war.
Frequently a slave man desired to marry a slave woman
on the adjoining plantation. This could be done with the
consent of both masters. In every case the children be-
longed to the owner of the mother. The father could not
punish his own child, because he would be striking the
property of another man, who in this case stood for the
gens ; neither could he in any way abuse his wife for the
same reason. Even the mother and her kin would be
restrained in their violence through fear of a higher
power.

Perhaps the lowest people on the face of the earth are
the Australians. Thev have a marriage system which
decides just where every woman must look for a mate.
In Wake's Marriage and Kinship, as well as in Morgan's
Ancient So'cietv, the scheme has been worked out for the
Kamilaroi people of Darling River district. There are eight
classes of persons — four male and four female — recognized,
just as though there were only eight family names in the
United States. The Australian class titles are as follows :
Males, Muri, Kubi, Ipai, Kumbu ; Females, Butha, Ipa-
tha, Kubitha, Matha. In the following description, in or-
der to give them prominence, female names will all be in
Italics. The tables will show whom each one must marry,
what will be the names of the children, and how the gen-
erations return into themselves.

* Lumniis, Scribner's Magazine. Sept., 1892 ; also Dorsey, Third
An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., Wash., 1884, p. 225.

220 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Name of
male.

( 1. Muri.
( 2. Kubi.
i 3. Ipai.
f 4. Kumbu.

Must marry Their

female. * children.

1.. Butha.
2. lpatha.

Kubitha.

Math a.

1. Ipai.

1. lpatha.

2. Kumbu.

2. Butha.

3. Mud.

3. Matha.

4. Kubi.

4. Kubitha.

Their
nephews.

His

father's

sister's

and his

mother's

brother's

son or
daughter.
Cousins.

1. Kubi. Kumbu.
1. Kubitha. Butha.

2. Muri.
2. Matha.

Kumbu.

Butha.

Ipai.

lpatha.

Ipai.

lpatha.

Kubi.

Kubitha

Muri.

Matha.

Brothers

and

sisters

of man.

Muri.

Matha.

Kubi.

Kubitha.

Ipai.

lpatha.

Kumbu.

Butha.

Note also that all Muris are hypothetically brothers
and all Mathas are sisters, and Muris and Mathas are
brothers and sisters, though most of them never saw
one another. Furthermore, when it is said that a man
is compelled to marry his cousin — that is, his father's sis-
ter's daughter or his mother's brother's daughter — he
would probably not actually do that thing, but simply
take a woman belonging to that class. If there were
only eight names in the United States, four for males
and four for females, and they were compelled to obey
the Australian system, the family tree would look like
the following: The eight names are Green, Greenway ;
White, Whiting; Smith, Smythe; Brown, Browning.
The tables show how they must marry and what would
be the result, and, in order to trace the part that we are
interested in, the feminine names are in Italics.*

* This can be traced out at length in Morgan's Ancient Society.
New York, 1877, pp. 51-61, and in Wake's Marriage and Kinship,
London, 1889, p. 95 et seq., p. 334.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY.

221

Men.

Brown.
Smith.
Green.
White.

Must marry.

Whiting.
Green way.
Smythe.
Browning.

Sons. Daughters.

Green. Greenway.

White. Whiting.

Brown. Browning.

Smith. Smythe.

Cousins. His fathers

sister's or his mother's

brother's children.

White and Whiting.
Green and Greenway.
Smith and Smythe.
Brown and Browning.

The Pundluan Family. — In this system of inter-
marriage several sisters, own and collateral, have one an-
other's husbands in a group, the joint husbands not
necessarily being kinsmen to one another ; or several
brothers, own and collateral, have one another's wives in
a group, these wives not necessarily being of kin to one
another, although often the case in both instances. In
each case the group of men were conjointly married to
the group of women.* This form of marriage was com-
mon in Hawaii, and perhaps throughout Polynesia.

Polyandry —hi the punaluan system there may be
a plurality either of wives or of husbands. If under
such a system the husbands in each case were reduced
to one, that would give us an example of polygyny ;
but if the number of wives be reduced to one, we should
have an example of polyandry. And the different phases
of punaluan marriage reduced would give us the two
forms of polyandry — namely, that in which the hus-
bands were brothers or members of the same totem or
blood kinship, and that in which they did not claim
such relationship. The former type is called Tibetan
polyandry, the latter the Nair polyandry, and between
the two are many intermediate varieties. Chinese authors
ascribe the custom of polyandry to the superiority of the
women ; Rockhill believes it is due to the small extent of

* Cf. Morgan, Ancient Society, New York, 1877, index, Puna-
luan.

222 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

family possessions in lands no longer capable of subdivi-
sion ; McLennan regards polyandry to be one of the fun-
damental and widely prevailing systems of primitive wed-
lock. Among the Nairs of the Neilgherry Hills, India,
a simpler form prevails, wherein several unrelated men
have one wife in common. In the Tibetan region polyg-
amy prevails among the pastoral people and the rich, so
that there is a general provision for a home to each one.

Under the Tibetan system, " whatever be the marriage
custom," says Rockhill, " the wife is procured by pur-
chase, and as soon as the woman has entered the home of
her husband she assumes control of nearly all of his
affairs ; no buying or selling is done except by her or with
her consent or approval. She is the recognized head of
the house. This pre-eminent position of women in Tib-
etan society has been from of old one of the peculiari-
ties of the race, of which parts have frequently been
governed by women. One state of eastern Tibet is always
ruled by a queen, and to-day the principality of Pomo
has a female sovereign." *

Polygyny, from Greek roots, meaning several women,
is the type of marriage in which a group of females are
married to one man. If these women should be akin, the
union would be a variant of polyandry. If they are not
necessarily akin it would be polygamy, and the family
would be patriarchal.

" The simplest form of polygyny is that in which
several sisters become wives of the same man. It ap-
pears to have been known to the natives of America, it
is practiced among the Australian aborigines, and also
by the Ostiaks of Siberia and some of the Malayan tribes.
It was not unknown to the early Semites, as appears by

* Rockhill, Land of the Lamas, New York, 1891, Century Co., p.
213 ; also appendix, p. 339, on the Kingdom of Women.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY.

223

the marriage of Jacob with Rachel and Leah." Darwin
affirms that most savages are polygamists, and that polyg-
amy is almost universally followed by the leading men
in every tribe.*

What is usually called bigamy or polygamy is in re-
ality polygyny, because, as was shown under polyandry,

Fig. 55. — Mexican Indian Family.

the having of several legitimatized husbands by the same
wife is one of the rarest things in the world.

But the possessing of several wives occurs in different
forms, and may grow out of very different social systems.
" In the Australian tribes the monopoly of the women by
the old men is very common.

Descent of Man, quoted by Wake, op. cit., p. 181.

224 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

" The Fijians belong to the race of Oceanic negroes.
Polygyny is said to be universally practiced by them, and
a man's social position depends on the number of his
wives, all of whom, however, except the first, would be
treated as slaves." * In America, as appears from the de-
scription of clan or ganowanian marriage, when a man
went to live with the clan of his wife the possibilities of
practicing polygyny were limited almost solely to the first
kind — namely, that in which the wives were of the same
totem. But everywhere on the continent the system of
mother right was interrupted by father right, and the
man took the wives to live in his lodge.

The practice of polygyny appears to be known to all
the tribes of the Pacific coast, where the husband does
not live among his wife's relations.

" Among the Mexican nations either polygyny or con-
cubinage was allowed. In addition to the principal wife,
a man might have less legitimate wives, with whom the
' tying of garments ' constituted the whole of the mar-
riage ceremony. According to Garcillasso de la Vega, the
Inca of Peru had three kinds of children, placing women
in three marital attitudes: 1, Those of his wife, who, as
legitimate, were destined for succession to the chieftaincy ;

2, those of his relations, who were legitimate by blood ;

3, bastards born of strangers in blood." f

In the Asiatic continent polygyny is not prevalent
among the Mongolian and other peoples of Central Asia
and Siberia. The Ostiaks occasionally practice polygyny,
but not frequently, as wives are too expensive. A man
may marry several sisters, and a younger brother is bound
to marry the widow of an elder brother. \

* Wake, Marriage and Kinship, London. 1881), p. 182.
f Hist, des Yncas, Fr. trans., 1706, vol. i, p. 354, quoted by Wake,
p. 183 et seq.

X Castren, quoted by Wake. op. cit., p. 186.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 225

The Mongols proper have one legitimate wife. There
may be also secondary wives, but their children have to be
legitimatized by law.

Among the Chinese polygyny may be permitted under
certain conditions. The wife chosen for a man by his
father and mother is the principal wife. He may have
other wives, who, although legitimate, are subject to the
first wife, and their children have the right of succession.
Doolittle supposes that the second or inferior wife is gen-
erally married with the consent of the principal wife
when the latter is childless, the desire to have male chil-
dren " to perpetuate one's name and to burn incense
before one's tablet after death " having great influence
over the Chinese mind. The children of the inferior
wives would appear to belong in law to the first wife.*

This same general system of having one principal wife,
with any number of secondary wives, is prevalent all over
Japan, Corea, Farther India, and, indeed, among all Bud-
dhist peoples of the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Wake quotes
Sir John Bowring as saying that there are said to be in
Siam four classes of wives : the first is the wife of royal
gift ; the second, the legal wife ; the third, the wife of af-
fection ; the fourth, the slave wife — that is, the handmaid
who has borne children to her master, and in consequence
is manumitted.

The Jenadies of southern India are polygynists, owing
to the women being more numerous than the men. The
Dravidian Malers of Rajmahal favour polygyny, and if a
man leaves several widows they are distributed among his
brothers and cousins. The Santhals favour monogyny, and
where it is otherwise the first wife is honoured as the head
of the house. The Juangs of Singbum permit polygyny

* Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese, 1868 ; Edkins, Religious
Condition of the Chinese, p. 163; Douglas, China, 1882, p. 78.

226 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

only where the first wife has no children. Many Assam
tribes practice both polyandry and polygyny. Among the
hill Muris, the chiefs practice the latter, and when a man
dies his wives descend to his heir, who becomes the hus-
band of all except his own mother.

In Madagascar polygyny prevails, with Malayan and
far Asian characteristics, as one would expect.

Polygyny seems to have been universal in Africa
among the negroes. In Uganda the Wahuma men often
obtain wives by exchanging daughters. The royal harem
is supplied by women received in tribute from neighbor-
ing chiefs, and governors are presented by the King with
women who are captured abroad or seized from offenders
at home.*

A similar practice was in use among the Ashantees, of
whom the higher classes had many wives, and the King
thirty-three hundred and thirty-three, which number was
carefully kept up in order that he might be able to
present women to distinguished subjects. Among the
Kaffirs and Bechuanas, women are valued in cattle and
girls pride themselves on the high price they fetch. The
first wife has pre-eminence, all the cows which a man
possesses at the time of his marriage are the property of
his wife, and after the birth of her first son they are called
his cattle. If the first or any subsequent wife furnishes
the cattle to purchase and endow a new wife, she is enti-
tled to her service and calls her " my wife." f

In ancient Egypt the priests married only one wife ;
but other citizens could have as manv wives as they
pleased, and all the children were legitimate, even those of
slave mothers. %

* Speke, quoted by Wake, op. eit.. p. 191.

f Shorter, Kafirs of Natal, 1857, quoted by Wake, op. cit., p. 191.
\ M. Menard, La vie privee des Anciens, vol. ii, p. 3. quoting
Diodorus. Other references in Wake, op. cit., p. 192.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY, 227

In modern Egypt a man may, according to the Koran,
have four wives, but if he has only one wife he can divorce
her and take another whenever he chooses. He has only
to say to her " Thou art divorced," and she must return
to her friends.*

Among the ancient Jews, although polygyny was prac-
ticed, monogvnv was the rule.f

The Moors of Northern Africa and the Berbers are
usually monogynous.

In Persia, says M. Menard, " the royal harem, raised
to the disfnitv of a state institution, had an immense de-
velopment and magnificence without equal." J

The practice of polygyny was not allowed by the an-
cient Iranians, and the same must be said of the Aryans
of India and of the early Greeks and Komans. The first
polygynist named in Roman history was Mark Antony.
In 726 a decretal of Pope Gregory II allowed a man to
marry a second wife. The primitive Slavs were polygy-
nists. The chiefs of families even now marry their sons
of eight and ten years of age to women over twenty and
hold these as their own wives until the bovs become of
age.#

Wake sums up the phases of polygyny as follows : ||

1. Those in which all a man's wives have equal rights.

2. Those where there is a superior wife or wives and
inferior ones, the latter being sometimes legal wives, and
at others slave wives or concubines. A

Syndyasmian Family. — This type of family life was

* Lane, quoted by Wake, op. cit., p. 192.

f Weill, La Femme Juive, quoted by Wake, op. cit., p. 193.
X La vie privee, etc., quoted by Wake, op. cit., p. 194.

# Wake. op. cit., p. 19(5.
|| Op. cit., p. 197.

A The operation of polyandry on the condition and happiness of

women is set forth in Wake. op. cit., chap, vi, pp. 179-225.
18

228 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

based on marriage between single pairs, but the union
continued during the pleasure of the parties. As every
form of primitive culture survives into our day, the
parallel of this will be found in civilized countries in the
case of those women who, through divorce laws or in
spite of legislation against bigamy, become the wife of a
second husband while the first is living. If she remained
with both at the same time we should have an example of
polyandry. This form of marriage existed in some com-
munal households of American aborigines, and, in spite of
laws against bigamy, may yet be seen in full bloom among
the negroes of the Southern States.*

Monandry. — This is a form of primitive marriage in
which one man and one woman are joined together in the
family. The more exalted form of monandry is monoga-
my, as practiced among the most civilized. It will be
readily seen that where other forms of marriage prevail,
since there are very nearly the same number of men and
women in each tribe, if some men have a plurality of
wives exclusively to themselves others must go without.
The same is true in polyandrous countries. Under puna-
lua the cases would be balanced ; but, after all, the fore-
shadowing of our present system existed in lowest sav-
agery. There were monogamous marriages under all the
systems, but they could be broken up at any time, either
by divorce or by returning to the other forms in vogue.
A little higher up in civilization we come upon the mo-
nandry of the Chinese, the Japanese, and of the ancient
Greeks and Romans. The minute development of these
would require too much of our space. In China the
women are still subjects of purchase, and under the teach-
ings of Confucius man is the representative of heaven,

* Consult Morgan, Ancient Society. New York, 1877, Holt, part
iii, chap. iv.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 22'J

and woman must obev his instructions. '; When young
she is to obey her father and elder brother ; when mar-
ried she must obey her husband ; when her husband is
dead she must obey her^ son."*

Divorce. — In the United States during 18G7— '86 there
were 328,716 divorces granted — 210,733 to wives. The
dissolution of the marriage tie is practiced by every peo-
ple, in every age, and among all grades of culture. But
in savagery, where every man and woman and child is
billeted somewhere, there is no such thing as thrusting
man or woman out into nowhere. Every social move-
ment has a starting point and a destination. If A sells
his 'daughter, or if a clan or council assign a young woman
to a man, property is exchanged and value given. Should
the man wish to repudiate his wife, she can not be sent
out into the jungle or forest; she must be returned to
somebody. So that while in savagery divorces are easier
and more common, they are also more according to rule.
Confucius allowed seven grounds of divorce — to wit, dis-
obedience to a husband's parents, not giving birth to a
son, dissolute conduct, jealousy of her husband, talkative-
ness, kleptomania, chronic disease or leprosy. For these
reasons* the man may put away his wife, but for no reason,
in China, may she put him away. Even in China, how-
ever, the savage's rule obtains. The husband may not
thrust the wife forth if she have no refuge. f

" The first recorded case of divorce at Rome was that
of Carvilius Ruga, who put away his wife because she had
not borne him children.*' \

When we cast our eves backward over the tyranny, we

* Wake, op. cif., p. 232.

f Legge, Life and Teachings of Confucius, 3d ed., p. 10G, quoted
by Wake.

\ Consult Wake. op. cif., for references to Menard, De Coulanges,
Herodotus, Code of Menu, etc.. p. 413, et seq.

230 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

might call it, with which woman has been held to the
marriage relation, which she has scarcely ever been able
to escape, and from which it has been most difficult for
her to break away, we are momentarily filled with pity,
lint in this very discipline are to be found the ground-
work and the reason for that high moral purpose and
purity which mark her in the family life of cultured
society. Most surely, society of our day is not looking to
divorced women for its reclamation. Stable society in
the past has been solidly constructed around the woman,
who has been taught that to escape the responsibilities
of her position was next to impossible.

How do savages provide for widows? Remember that
the widow usually is one who has not changed her clan in
marriage or her name. She has therefore two means of
support secure even though she may not seek self-sup-
port. Her husband's brothers are all eligible husbands
for her, because they belong to the same clan with him and
not to her clan. And among manv verv uncultured tribes
it is the law for a bachelor or widower to propose to the
childless widow of his elder brother or cousin. Should
no such person exist, she may marry whom she will out
of her clan or in a clan prescribed for her clan. Finally
she may go back among her own clan, and that would
support her as one of its members, or, at the very worst,
perform for her the clan funeral rites.

This review of the struggles of humanity about the
possession of women in marriage leads naturally to a sec-
ond question: What were her duties, her rights, and her
pleasures in this state? Or, to put the question more in
accordance with our present study, What opportunities did
it afford her for advancing culture? It is not here as-
sumed that the marriage state is yet perfected when

Woman sets herself to man
Like perfect music unto perfect words ;

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 231

but enough progress has been made to render it profitable
to inquire by what steps we have climbed so far.

Id the natural world the male takes very little care of
the female. She defends herself and provides for her off-
spring. Indeed, in the lower forms of life he plays an
inconspicuous part. Mr. Darwin wrote to Sir Charles
Lyell in 1840 : " The other day I got a curious case of a
unisexual cirripede, in which the female had two pockets
in the valves of her shell, in each of which she kept a
little husband."*

In the higher mammalian forms " the greater size
and strength of the males, together with their powerful
weapons, have not been acquired for the purpose of pro-
tecting the dependent females ; they have been acquired
entirely for the purpose of combating rivals and winning-
females. In very few such animals do the males ever at-
tempt to protect the females, even where the latter have
their young to take care of.f

The most primitive tribes known to us were living
under a social system in which woman held a place most
interesting for this study. She was not in the condi-
tion of the spider exactly, wherein " the miniature male
is seized and devoured during his courtship by the gigan-
tic object of his affections "; nor in that of the hen, who
never thinks of calling upon her pompous husband either
to scratch or fight for her voung ; nor in that of the female
bird, who builds her own nest and cares for her own young.

4

The division of labour among the sexes foreshadowed by
some of the higher animab was perfected early in the
human period. And in this primitive society the offices
for woman to hold and the duties for her to perform were
laid down by the structure of the clan or family and

* Quoted by Ward in the Forum, 1888, vol. vi, p. 274.
f L. F. Ward, Forum, 1888, vol. vi. p. S39.

232 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.*

bv her function of childbearing. Could any thine; be
more perfectly devised than the modern family, especially
in rural life? The -father goes out to his daily labour ac-
companied by his sons, the youngest of whom has some
little task assigned ; the mother remains at home, queen
of the household, with her daughters around her, each
bearing a burden suited to the back. In the earliest
social condition known to us this form of monogamic
society did not exist and there were no cleared fields to
plough, no great mines or factories or warehouses. The
man had to go out and war with Nature at every point
with weapons. He had no ploughshare, but had to wield
his rude sword ; instead of pruning hooks were spears.

He was often gone several days, and many times he did
not return at all. The women in such a group were like
the balance wheel on a machine, gathering up the spas-
modic labours of the men and distributing: them evenly
and smoothly over each day, month, or year. They did
not have to be self-supporting, like the hen, and yet their
vegetal food quest was an excellent discipline in developing
that steady-going industry which lies at the foundation of
the s;reat business of the world. The drying of meat and
the curing of fish were activity along the same line.

Ilearne relates an excellent account of a Canadian In-
dian woman thrown on her own resources. " On the elev-
enth of January, as some of my companions were hunt-
ing, they saw the track of a strange snowshoe which they
followed, and at a considerable distance came to a little
hut, where they discovered a young woman sitting alone.
On examination, she proved to be one of the western Dog
Rib Indians who had been taken prisoner by the Athapus-
coid Indians in the summer of one thousand seven hun-
dred and seventy; and in the following summer she had
eloped with an intent to return to her own country, but
the turnings and windings of the rivers and lakes were so

THE FOUNDER OP SOCIETY. 233

numerous that she forgot the track. So she built the hut
in which we found her, and here she had resided from the
first setting in of the fall. From her account it appeared
that she had been near seven months without seeing a
human face. During all this time she had supported her-
self very well by snaring partridges, rabbits, and squirrels.
That she did not seem to have been in want is evident, as
she had a small stock of provisions by her when she was
discovered and was in good health and condition, and I
think one of the finest women of a real Indian that I have
seen in any part of North America. The methods prac-
ticed by this poor creature to procure a livelihood were
truly admirable. When the few deer sinews that she had
taken with her were all expended in making snares and
sewing her clothing, she used the sinews of the rabbits'
legs and feet. These she twisted together for the purpose
with great dexterity and success. The rabbits, etc., which
she caught in those snares not only furnished her with
comfortable subsistence, but of the skins she made a suit
of neat and warm clothing for the winter. All her cloth-
ing, besides being calculated for real service, showed great
taste and exhibited no little variety of ornament. The
materials, though rude, were very curiously wrought and
so judiciously placed as to make the whole of her garb
have a very pleasing though rather ornamentic appearance.
Her leisure hours from hunting had been employed in
twisting the inner rind or bark of willows into small lines
like net twine, of which she had some hundred fathoms
by her ; with this she intended to make fishing net as soon
as the spring advanced. Five or six inches of an iron
hoop made into a knife and the shank of an arrowhead
of iron which served her as an awl were all the metals
this poor woman had with her, and with these she had
made herself complete snowshoes and several other useful
articles. Her method of making fire was equally curious,

234 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

having no other material for that purpose than two hard
sulphurous stones. These by hard friction and long knock-
ing produced a few sparks which at length communicated
to some touchwood. But as this method was attended
with great trouble, and not always with success, she did
not suffer her fire to go out all the winter. Hence we con-
cluded that she had no idea of producing fire by fric-
tion in the manner practiced by the Eskimos and many
other uncivilized nations." *

The remarkable cleverness of this woman is not men-
tioned to show how the average female supported herself
in primitive life, but to demonstrate what kind of women
it produced. It also serves as an offset to the notion
that all savage women are so brutalized as not to have a
thought of their own.

Social progress with primitive women was stimulated
and encouraged by their relation to home life, to dress,
and to manners. We have already alluded to the women
as the authors of the home or shelter. It is the female
bird that makes the nest, the female mammal that digs
the burrow for her young, and the female bee that makes
the honeycomb as a home for hers.

The human female more than all the rest created her
home. But not only is this true, but she differentiated
the home, and all the parts of the most elaborate estab-
lishment were instituted by her or on her account. The
first homes were cheerless caves. Fire could not be made
in them because of the smoke, so the woman sought out
a cave with an opening in the rear or a rock shelter with
a hiffh curved roof.

When she became a dweller in a tent she searched for

*IIearne, Journey, etc., Lond., 1795, Stvahan, p. 2G2. Recall the
incident of the Ayacanora in Kingsley's Westward Ho, her claims
to be as good as a man, her hatred of marriage, and her Amazonian
exploits.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. £35

the oldest wood, learned the mysteries of the fuel prob-
lem, and even invented the coral to induce the wind to
draw a little of the smoke therefrom, and to increase her
comfort.

In houses built of mud, adobe, loose stone, or brick
she invented the industrial portion, while the men invented
the defensive portion. Indeed, it may as well be said
here as elsewhere, that while a man's house is his castle,
and .always has been, a woman's house is her home and the
scene of most of her labours. The principles of militancy
and industrialism manifest themselves here as elsewhere.

To the women of the household we are indebted for
the oven, the chimney, and the chimney corner, the
kitchen, the dining-room, the family room, the separate
bedchamber. It has been a wonderful evolution, result-
ing in comfort, taste, and morality.

A remarkable result of abstinence and morality is the
fact that neither in America nor in Africa nor in the
Indo-Pacific were women guilty of indulgence in the
native forms of intoxication. In the Kew Hebrides and
elsewhere Turner found that the women and girls were
total abstainers from drinking fcava* " Drunkenness,"
says Dodge, "is not a female vice. In all my experience I
have never seen a drunken Indian woman." f

Similar testimony could be gathered concerning beer
drinking in Africa.

The seclusion of women and their always eating
apart by a roundabout way tended to their refinement
and advancement and protection. It called for more
services, and time in service. It consumed the hours in

«

organized and regulated labour. It was discipline. In
this coterie were included frequently the children and the

* Turner, Samoa, London, 1884.

f Dodge, Plains of the Groat West, New York. 1877, p. 323.

230 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

old men. It is said that in times of scarcity the women
were pinched with hunger first, but no one ever heard
of a cook starving to death. This seclusion is also an
evidence of the great independence and self-help devel-
oped in the priscan women.*

In the old Vedic civilization women enjoyed a high
position, and some of the most beautiful hymns of the
Rig Veda were composed by ladies and queens. Marriage
was held sacred. Husband and wife were both " rulers
of the house" (dampati), and drew near to the gods to-
gether in prayer. The burning of widows on the hus-
band's funeral pile was unknown, and the verses in the
Veda which the Brahmans afterward distorted into a
sanction for the practice have the opposite meaning.
" Kise, woman," says the sacred text to the mourner,
" come to the world of life. Come to us. Thou hast
fulfilled thy duties as a wife to tbv husband." \

In the evolution of clothing as a covering of the
body women in primitive life were in advance of men.
The Andamanese men go practically nude as regards
clothing, but it is otherwise with the women, who never
appear without an obitnga or small apron of leaves,
which is kept in place by the bod or cincture. While
men are usually content with one girdle, women almost
invariably wear four or five. Experience tends to prove
that the females of the tribes of South Andaman are
strikingly modest. So particular are they in this respect
that they will not remove or replace their apron in the
presence of any person, even though of their own sex.+

The first modistes were undoubtedly women, and in
the application of the peculiar lace work of colour called

* Cf. Brigham, Cat. Bishop Mas. Honolulu, 1892, vol. ii, p. 6.
f Hunter, Gaz. of India, London, 1880, Trubner, vol. x, p. 78.
% Man, Andaman Islanders, London, 1883, Trubner, p. 110.

TIIE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 237

tattooing they were among the first artists. They knew
how to insert pigment under the cntiele by gashing with a
bit of flinty stone or obsidian, by drawing threads under
the skin, and by pricking or puncturing. In Polynesia
professional tattooers were employed, but even there the
poor sufferer lay with his head in his sister's lap, while
she and her youthful female companions sang to him to
lull his pain. This was, indeed, a curious sort of comfort
by primitive sisters of charity not to be overlooked. *

Major Austen, (Surveyor of India, says of the Khasi
Hill tribes on the northern border of the Bengal Presi-
dency : " They have the feeling of modesty strongly de-
veloped, and are quite as particular about the exposure of
their persons as the people of India proper. I can speak
for the Garo women being particularly quiet and modest
in their demeanour." f

In every American tribe, from the most northern to
the most southern, the skirt of the women is longer than
that of the men. In Eskimoland the parka of deerskin
and seal skin readies to the knees. Throughout central
North America the buckskin dress of the women reached
quite to the ankles. The west coast women, from Oregon
to the Gulf of California, wore a petticoat of shredded
bark, of plaited grass, or of strings, upon which were
strung hundreds of seeds.

Even in the most tropical areas the rule was universal,
as any one can see from the codices or in pictures of the
natives.

The same rule holds good throughout Africa and in
the Polynesian area. Even in abject Australia the efforts
that are made toward modesty belong to the women. J

_, * Compare Landa, Relacion, in Bancroft, Native Races, vol. ii,
p. 685.

f J. Anthrop. Inst.. London, 1872, vol. i, p. 123.

% Compare David Kerr Cross, Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc, Feb., 1891.

238 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

The longer one studies the subject the more lie will
be convinced that savage tribes can now be elevated
chiefly through their women. When higher civilization
comes upon the lower it brings to the men the gun for
the bow and arrow, or the slowly and painfully made de-
vice for the capture and killing of animals; it also com-
mands him to stop hunting and warring, and to take up
woman's work. He would rather die than do this, so he
becomes an idler. But it brings to the woman only better
tools and processes for doing her old work, and she is
lifted up. A great impediment to the present disarma-
ment of Europe is the fact that the men would have to do
woman's work when they laid down the musket.

Even among the lowest peoples women have been
possessed of personal courage and noble sentiments re-
garding their tribes.

In Samoa the wives of the chiefs and principal men
generally followed their husbands wherever they might be
encamped, to be ready to nurse them if sick or wounded.
A heroine would even follow close upon the heels of her
husband in actual conflict, carrying his club and some
parts of his armour.*

The New Caledonian women went to battle. They
kept in the rear and attended to the commissariat. When-
ever they saw one of the enemy fall it was their business
to rush forward, pull the body to the rear and dress it for
the oven, f

So centuries ago Tacitus wrote : " It is a principal in-
centive to their courage that these squadrons and bat-
talions are not formed by men fortuitously collected, but
by the assemblage of families and clans. Their pledges
are also near at hand ; they have in hearing the yells of
their women and the cries of their children. These, too,

Turner, Samoa, London, 1884, p. 100. f Ibid., p. 344.

THE FOUNDER OF SOCIETY. 239

are the most revered witnesses of each man's conduct,
these his most liberal applauders. To their mothers and
their wives they bring their wounds for relief ; nor do these
dread to count or to search out the gashes. The women
also administer food and encouragement to those who are
fightinsr.

" Tradition relates that armies beginning to give way
have been rallied by the females, through the earnestness
of their supplications, the interposition of their bodies,
and the pictures they have drawn of impending slavery,
a calamity which these people bear with more impatience
for their women than for themselves; so that those states
who have been obliged to give among their hostages the
daughters of noble families are the most effectuallv bound
to fidelity. They even suppose somewhat of sanctity and
prescience to be inherent in the female sex, and there-
fore neither despise their counsels nor disregard their
responses. We have beheld in the reign of Vespasian,
Veleda, long reverenced by many as a deity. Aurinia,
moreover, and several others were formerly held in equal
veneration, but not witli a servile flattery, nor as though
they made them goddesses." *

Intimations of this personal bravery are given in the
conduct of most female birds and mammals about their
young. As to their fighting for their male companions
the testimony is not so convincing, f

The two most brilliant periods in the career of the

* Tacitus, Germania, vii and viii, Trans. Harper's Classical Se-
ries, New York, 1882. ii, p. 29G, with references to Ca?sar, Suetonius,
Statius, Strabo; consult also Germania. xvii-xx, xlv. "When Mar-
cus Aurelius overthrew the Marcomanni, Quadi, and other German
allies, the bodies of women in armour were found among the slain."
— Footnote, p. 29(>.

+ Plutarch, Concerning the Virtues of Women, Morals, Boston,
1870, i, pp. 340-384.

240 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

most comprehensive nationality this world has ever seen
were the Elizabethan and the Victorian. England ac-
quired her globe-encircling empire under the reign of
women. Brilliant examples of women skilled and potent
in statecraft are not wanting among all civilized nations.
The testimony of the best observers is to the effect that
in primitive society there were queens in fact if not in
name. Nothing is more natural than that the author of
parental government, the founder of tribal kinship, the
organizer of industrialism, should have much to say about
that form of housekeeping called public economy.

Among the Wyandottes, an Iroquoian tribe, each gens
or clan of the tribe occupied a tract for the purpose of
cultivation, set apart by the councrl of the tribe. The
women councillors partitioned the gentile land among the
householders, and the household tracts were distinctly
marked by them. Cultivation was communal — that is, all
the able-bodied women of the gens took part in the culti-
vation of each household tract in the following manner :

The head of the household sends her brother or son
into the forest or to the stream to bring in game or fish
for a feast; then the able-bodied women of the gens are
invited to assist in the cultivation of the land, and when
the work is done a feast is given.

The wigwam or lodge and all articles of the household
belong to the woman — the head of the household — and at
her death are inherited by her eldest daughter, or nearest
of female kin. The matter is settled by the council
woiri^n.*

* Of. Powell, in Abstract, etc., Anthrop. Soc, Washington,

1881, p. 84.

CHAPTER XL

THE PATROX OF RELIGION.

Ix a general sense, religion is the sum of what is
thought or believed about a spirit world and what is done
in consequence of such thinking. What is thought about
such a world constitutes creed, what is done or what a
people does under its inspiration constitutes the cult.
The creed and the cult together form the religion of any
individual or people.

Ko one can fail to see, therefore, that the religion of
women has been different from that of men and at the
same time similar. Bv all those thoughts and acts which
the sexes' have in common, especially in the book reli-
gions, their creed and cult are one. By all those thoughts
and acts which are theirs bv reason of the differences
of life growing out of sex, their religion will not be the
same.

It will be especially interesting, therefore, to take notice
of the savage woman gazing at the spirit world. To her,
as to her mate, it is never far away. Her heaven is around
her, perhaps beyond some mountain or stream of water,
but never out of sight or hearing. And in that spirit
world or heaven there are female inhabitants. Men and
women in our world have had thoughts about them and
have shaped a great deal of conduct in accordance with
those thoughts.

The two parts of this study, indeed, are the religion of

(241.

242 WOMAN'S SHARE IX PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

women in this life and the description of the female inhab-
itants of the spirit world. The two are correlated in many
ways, and influence each other to a large degree in sav-
agery.

From the point of view of science, it is only the phe-
nomenal aspect of religion — that is, its visible creed and
cult — with which the student has to do at first. Of its
unseen elements and the great forces at work to produce re-
ligion nothing can be discovered. Whether men or women
are more divinely inspired and directed there are no tech-
nical means of knowing ; but women have always seemed to
be more under the domination of fixed and declared beliefs
and have practiced with more fidelity the prevailing cult.
In Christian countries it is the women who throng the
churches, and the survival of the more primitive forms of
belief and custom, called folklore, is chiefly among the
unlettered women of a community. In the ultimate
science of religion the fundamental principles will have
to be considered. " Unter der Hiille aller Religionen
liegt die Religion selbst," said Schiller; but in this chap-
ter it is better to remain within the area of common ob-
servation, and consider only phenomena carefully with
a view to a better opinion concerning the underlying
law.*

The type of religion in the sense just indicated,
wherein savage^women and men find themselves, has been
called by Tylor " animism," because every object is be-
lieved to be ensouled, consciously alive and full of purpose
and feeling.

How unspeakably near must such a world of spirits be

* Consult Brinton, The Religious Sentiment, New York. 187G,
Holt. p. iii; Andrew Lang. Myth, Ritual, and Religion, London,
1S87, Longmans, etc., 2 vols. : and J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough,
London, 1890, Macmillan, 2 vols.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION.

243

to women like unto these ! They walk hourly among the
gods. Heaven does not so much come down their souls
to greet, as they exist on a narrow island between the two
oceans, indistinguishable to their untutored minds.

As time went on and the game of science began to be
played, the more common objects, coming to be familiar
acquaintances, dropped out
of the role of gods and god-
desses, and were won over
to the side of the known.

In the arts considered in
the foregoing chapters the
materials, the tools, the
forces, the processes, and
the products of each indus-
try were carefully scruti-
nized in order to under-
stand woman's connection
therewith. But not more
than half the truth has
been told. With every op-
eration of the primitive
workwoman there was a
quasi - religious ceremony.
The commonest perform-
ance, not more dignified,
perhaps, than washing dish-
es, was under the eye of
any number of gods and
witnessing spirits. There
was a choice of seasons, a
time of day, an attention to

propitious and unpropitious omens, a desire to please, a
dread to offend the gods, a formula, a ritual, a song.
The uninitiated observer overlooks all these, and yet they
19

Fig. 56. — Zuni Priestess Praying
for Rain on the Young Corn
which she Planted.

244 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

constituted the aroma, the bouquet of the savage woman's
drudgery.*

The beliefs of all primitive peoples, men and women,
concerning their spirit world are based upon their knowl-
edge of this present world, of a very small portion of it — in
truth, namely, the region where they have lived. Heaven
has, therefore, its locality, natural history, and living
beings or inhabitants. Of the last-named there are
usually minute biographies, family trees, descriptions of
households, equipages, servants, social life, and dealings
with men. Human beings have also certain business with
that world, which they may transact either with or with-
out middlemen. Last of all, human destiny involves
that world as well as this, because all mankind are going
there some day. In all myths and all revelations there
are most detailed and specific descriptions of this region.
The fortunes and misfortunes of life follow the believer,
and of the latter, women have had to take more than
their share. A multitude of sects and creeds have been
founded on the classification of spirits beyond the grave.
The cults or worships of primitive peoples include a va-
riety of activities, such as the dividing of society, the set-
ting apart and furnishing of sacred places, the conduct
of the clergy in these and elsewhere, the public and pri-
vate acts of all, so far as they are impelled by this cult,
such as penance, fasting, sacrifice, prayer, confession.
This imitation of practical life in religious life, and at-
tributing to all celestial things certain human charac-
teristics is called anthropomorphism. And this long word
covers a genealogy of ideas as extended as human history.

* •• The women are then busy preparing the deerskins, for, on
account of the requirements of their religion, the walrus hunt can
not be begun until the deerskins which were taken in summer have
been worked up for use." — Boas, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p.
422. Consult also J. Anthrop. Inst., London, vol. xxiii, p. 21.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 245

The goddesses that thronged the elysiums of polythe-
istic nations in early historic times were the legitimate
offspring of women in savagery and barbarism, through
the operations of that primitive animism which endued
all things here below with sentient life, and all beings in
the spirit world with human characteristics. To these
earliest worshippers all natural objects and all phenom-
ena and all heavenly bodies were men and women, as
was previously declared. They were men and women —
nothing more. Which of them were men and which of
them were women it will be interesting to inquire. It
will be an important discovery if it turns out that the
two fundamental ideas of militancy and industrialism,
dwelt upon in the introduction of this work, j:>revailed
also in the skies, and set up the sexual distinctions which
were plainly distinguishable on earth in primitive society.

All religions being more or less humaniform and
anthropomorphic, there is nothing illogical in the opinion
that the social structure of the spirit world ought to con-
form closely to the form and conduct of human society.
So that ' there is little danger in asserting that the
heavens militant were male, the heavens industrial were
female.

The life of each people should be reflected in its my-
thology. The mythology of a people finds its explanation
in their early history. The life also of a race or epoch
should be similarly mirrored in its creeds and cults, and
the creeds and cults of a race or people best understood
by studying the daily life of that people.

With regard to women we are now ready to make the
general statement that the daily life of a sex on earth
will be the daily life of that sex in the spirit world.
Moreover, if we know the goddesses of a mythology we
may almost describe the women of a people among whom
it arose.

246 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Let it not be understood that the lines of sexual office
are strictly drawn in heaven ; they are not on earth.
Therefore a goddess will now and then appear incased
in armour, and gods will be busy about industrial pur-
suits. The assertion is a general one that the goddesses
are the patrons of peaceful industries in heaven and on
earth.

Mr. Lang says : " Everything in the civilized mytholo-
gies which we regard as irrational seems only part of
the accepted and rational order of things to contempo-
rary savages, and in the past seemed equally rational and
natural to savages, concerning whom we have historical
information. Our theory is, therefore, that the savage
and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part,
a legacy from ancestors of the civilized races who were in
the intellectual state not higher than that of Australians,
Bushmen, Red Indians, the lower races of South Amer-
ica, and other worse than barbaric peoples." *

In order, therefore, to understand fully the character-
istics and conduct of the feminine half of the world of
spirits, it was necessary in preceding chapters to acquaint
ourselves with the lives of that half of savage humanity.
Now it begins to dawn on our minds how most of the
goddesses came to their heavenly home and duties, and
why men as well as women have been only too glad to
accord certain honours to them. It is seen how men dei-
fied women and their work, and thus unwittingly were
creators of goddesses. f

* Encyc. Brit., 9th ed., New York, Scribner, 1884, vol. xvii,
p. 142.

f In addition to the great classics on anthropology hitherto men-
tioned, the reader will consult with profit on this point the Hibbert
Lectures of 1878, 1879, 1881, 1882, 1884, 1887, and especially of
1891, by D'Alviella, on the origin and growth of the conception of
God as illustrated by anthropology and history. All of these vol-

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 247

A subtler question is, What are the views concerning
the spirit world held in any tribe by the women as apart
from the men? And we are bound to admit that the
goddesses in the upper world are not only moulded after
earthly women by men, but were modelled by women after
their own image — that is, the beautiful conceptions of the
ancient mythologies were as much the creation of women
as of men. There is no time to work out this conception
here, but on any theory of mythology and its origins there
are points of view which women alone could assume and
elements in the grouping which they alone could have
contributed.

The psychological states of women, induced by many
generations of inherited proclivities strengthened by use
and seclusion, have also conspired to people their side of
the heavenly world with some of its most distinguished
and delightful inhabitants ; have had a large share in the
creation of primitive myths and cults ; have left lurking
around homes and wells and fields myriads of clever fair-
ies, have sent to bloom in the gardens of the gods some
of their loveliest flowers.

Women, far more than men, have enriched national
and tribal mythologies with elements from other sources.
Captured and carried from place to place all over the
world, they have taken with them their stories, which, by
removal from their indigenous soil, have assumed the form
of mvth.

Myths already made were carried in the same way, lent
and borrowed, from tribe to tribe. This would give colour
to the theory that there had been a common ground for
all mythology.

On the contrary, there are certain occupations of women

umes abound in references to original authorities, which need not,
therefore, be repeated.

248 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

common to the whole race so that if one should look with
a little care he would find potters and weavers and hearth
tenders and mother goddesses in every land and every age,

and exceedingly similar
tales about them. The
sun god is everywhere —
only sometimes it is a
woman. We should be
astonished to find a peo-
ple who could not invent
stories about the sun god.
In the selfsame fashion,
the universal tendency to
attribute to the gods and
goddesses our inmost
thoughts and feelings will
give us pictures of the
spirit world scarcely dis-
tinguishable from tribe to
tribe. The doctrine of
the latest school of my-
y£f thology finds its verifica-

tion in the apotheosis of
women. But it must not
be carried so far as to
exclude the everlasting
transfer and borrowing
that went on wherever
tribes were hostile and
men were knocked on the
head, while women were
saved to be adopted into the households of the conquerors
and win their favour by their tales of a Thousand Nights.
" Gypsies," says Leland, " have done more than any
other race or class on the face of the earth to disseminate

Fig. 57. — Modena Watek Carrier,
Cousin of the Naiads.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 249

among the multitude a belief in fortune telling, magical
or sympathetic cures, amulets, and such small sorceries as
now find place in folklore. Their women have all pre-
tended to possess occult powers since prehistoric times.
By the exercise of their wits they have actually acquired a
certain art of reading character or even thought, which,
however it be allied to deceit, is in a way true in itself
and well worth careful examination." *

This fact should be carefully noted in the light of what
Buckle says on the conservatism of women and our own
remark as to its causes.

In the curious persistence of custom among the folk,
after the progressive portion of a people have risen above
it, the worship of the ancient deities is one of the last
relics to endure. But it is entirely in accordance with
the theory of this work that the village goddess should be
among the latest survivors.

Whether it be in southern India or nearer home in parts
of Europe, the ceremony of paying devotions to her goes
on from year to year.f Is it not a strange survival of this
ancient fancy that the American people insist on calling
Crawford's statue of armed Liberty on the Capitol in Wash-
ington " the Goddess of Liberty " ?

If there is one season or event that draws aside the
curtain and lets us look upon the religion of a sex or
a people, it is their conduct in the presence of death. Who
has not watched with peculiar interest the vastly different
behaviour of men and of women on such occasion? The
former shrink away and almost hide themselves ; the latter
by an inexplicable fascination are drawn around the corpse.
First at birth, last at death, they hail the young spirit at

* C. G. Leland, Gypsy Sorcery, p. xi.

f Compare Fawcett, J. Anthrop. Soc. Bombay, 1891, vol. ii,
p. 261.

250 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the opening of life and wave the last farewell to the de-
parting ghost.

Could the reader walk along the trail of history back
almost to the beginning, he would see at intervals a group
of women sitting round a lifeless human body, on the
boundary line of two existences, each one of which was to
them as real as the other.

From daily experience it is known what the great bod y
of women think and feel at such moments. The art and
the literature of modern cultured and ancient classic na-
tions abound with descriptions and illustrations of women
in the presence of death, and it is the favourite theme of
artists.

To complete the series so as to find the springs from
which this marvellous conduct flowed in historic times it
is necessary to observe carefully the behaviour of the sav-
age and the partly civilized so far as their acquaintance
can be made. The kingdom of spirits is indeed close
about the imaginations of such people always, but there
is, after all, a special sense in which each one becomes a
citizen of that kingdom in crossing the boundary lines set
by death.

Remembering that the citizens of that unseen country
are men and women of some sort and guise, if our good
offices are to attend our friends who emigrate thereto
they must partake of the nature of our good offices at
home. The less they change their form the more famil-
iar do they seem. Men do not know how to perform
such duties with skill. Indeed, some of the last rites
would have to be omitted altogether on their account,
since the performance of the duties which they mimic are
tabooed to men in daily life.

Now, to a large extent, women in all lowly tribes set
up the place of habitation and furnish it, clothe the family,
and feed them. Nothing is more appropriate, therefore,

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 251

than for them to perform the same functions for the
dead.

The disposal of the dead, after all, is a weird sort of
housekeeping, broken up only by those chemical changes
that convert, sooner or later, each one to dust. When one
died in a hut or wigwam all accustomed duties of life were
laid aside that the savage woman might address herself to
the necrotaxis.*

It is she that sits by the grave to keep burning the
ghost fire, brings food and water for the hungering and
thirsting manes and cuts off her hair, and mutilates her
body if perchance she may persuade the homesick shade
to depart in peace.

All her strange and seemingly foolish actions should
be studied with greatest care in the light of her home life
by those who would form true conceptions of beliefs and
customs which thrust themselves upon our own firesides.

In one of the photographs taken by Powell during
his geological survey of Utah a woman is shown sitting
on a ledge of rock with an empty cradle at her feet.

Problem of problems ! What has become of the living
thing to which she gave birth and nourishment, and for
which she would at any moment have laid down her life ?
The anxious face, so woeful and interrogative, links this
poor savage with all women the world over who have seen
her day. The weeping Magdalen, seeking the living
among the dead, is the earliest and the latest picture of
belief in immortals and immortality.

Among the Brule Sioux all the work of winding up
the dead in his best garments, building the scaffold, and
placing the dead upon it is done by women only.f

* Yarrow, Mortuary Customs, etc., First An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.,
Washington, 1881, pp. 89-205, 47 illustrations. Consult also Tegg,
The Last Act.

f McKenney, Tour to the Lakes, 1827, p. 292. See also quota-

252 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

When an Indian dies, friends assemble in the lodge
and indulge in heartrending lamentations. This crying is
done almost wholly by women, and among them a few pro-
fessional mourners. Those who wish to show their grief
most strongly cut themselves with knives or pieces of flint.

The received custom requires of the women, near rela-
tives of the dead, the following observances for ten days :
They are to rise at a very early hour and work hard all
day, joining in no feast, dance, game, or other diversion,
eat but little, and retire late, that they may be deprived of
the usual amount of food and sleep. During this time
they do not paint themselves, but go to the top of some
hill and bewail the dead. After the ten days they paint
themselves and engage in the usual amusements of the
people as before.*

The lighting of fires upon the graves of the dead had
a widespread usage. And the lonely creature seated
upon the mound happens always to be a woman. Yar-
row has gathered references to Algonquins, Mexicans, and
Calif ornians.f There is something extremely pathetic in
this watch fire. From time immemorial woman was the
fire tender. It was her servant in cooking food for the
dead ones while they were yet living, but it is known that
the most ferocious beasts and therefore the most power-
ful spirits are afraid of it. No harm can come to the
dwelling where this priestess maintains the ghost fire.

tion from J. L. Mahan to the same effect, in Yarrow, op. cit., p. 184,
Fig. 32 and p. 185.

* Yarrow, First An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol.. Washington, 1881, pp.
158-166, quoting Cleveland and others. Several excellent plates
illustrate feeding the dead, self-iacerations by the living, etc. Catlin,
Hist. N. A. Indians, 1844, vol. i, p. 90. Ross Cox, Adventures on
the Columbia River, 1831, vol. ii, p. 387. See also Brinton, Myths
of the New World. 1868, p. 255.

f Yarrow, First An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., 1881, p. 198 and Fig. 47.

Fig. 58. — Sioux Women cutting, themselves for the Dead,

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 253

Among the California tribes the Yokaia mother who
has lost her babe goes every day for a year to some place
where her little one has played when alive or to the spot
where the body was burned and milks her breast into the
air. This is accompanied by plaintive moaning and
weeping and piteously calling upon her little one to
return, and sometimes she sings a hoarse and melancholy
chant and dances with a wild, ecstatic swaying of the
body.* The offering of milk to the dead babe would
seem to be the very beginning of the entire class of food
and meat offerings.

The author has received from Mr. Frank Cushing a
most interesting account of the Zuni woman and her
dead. According to this observer, whose opportunities
were of the rarest kind, the whole conduct of the woman
is symbolical of her lifework. If she washed the head
of the dead, it was because she performed always the
same service at the opening of the gates of life. If her
office was to break the water jar around the dead and
pour out the water, it meant that she also first gave nour-
ishment to the living from her milk, and now closed the
scene by the destruction of the vase.

The Polynesian women on the death of a member of
the family wailed in the loudest fashion, tore their hair,
rent their garments, and cut themselves with sharks' teeth
or knives in a shocking manner. The instrument usually
employed was a small cane, about four inches long, with
five or six shark's teeth fixed on opposite sides. With one
of these every female provided herself after marriage.
Some used a short instrument like a plumber's mallet,
armed with two or three rows of sharks' teeth fixed in the

* Powers, Cont. to N. A. Ethncl., Washington, 1878, vol. iii, p.
164. Also Yarrow, First An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., Washington, 1881,
p. 128.

254 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

wood at one end. With this they cut themselves unmer-
cifully, striking the head, temples, cheeks, and breast, till
the blood flowed profusely from the wounds.*

The Andamanese mother, between the death and burial
of her child, paints its head, neck, wrists, and knees,
shaves off the hair, and folds the little limbs so as to oc-
cupy the least possible space, the knees being brought up
to the chin and the fists close to the shoulders. The body
is then enveloped in large leaves, which are secured with
cords or strips of cane. The father digs the grave in the
place where the hut fire usually burns. When all is pre-
pared, the parents gently blow upon the face and bury
their dead child. After a proper season the body is ex-
humed and the bones carefully washed. The mother,
after painting the skull and decorating it with small
shells attached to strings, hangs it round her neck. The
next few days are spent by the mother in converting the
bones into necklaces. When several are made, she and
her husband pay visits to their friends, among whom they
distribute these mementoes, together with any pieces that
may remain over. In the dances of condolence which
follow the women act the principal parts, continuing for
many hours. f

When an adult person dies the women are alike under-
takers and mourners, though the men perform the office
of grave diggers and pall bearers. The last ones to leave
the place of mourning always are the women. J;

The custom of slaying, or sacrificing, or burying alive
women to accompany their deceased husbands has been
found in many lands. In this matter their share in
primitive cult was usually an involuntary one. The

* Ellis, Polynes. Researches, vol. i, p. 408 ; vol. iv, pp. 175, 358.
f Man, Andaman Islanders, London, 1883, Trubner, p. 75.
\ J. Anthrop. Inst., London, 1881, vol. xi, p. 295.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 255

Natchez Indians, the Oregon Indians, Aztecs, Tarascos,
African tribes, and Hindu widows are examples.*

None of the great book religions of the world admit
women to the priesthood, neither did the classic religions
of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Semites, Greeks or Ro-
mans allow them to exercise the higher functions thereof.
In savagery the case is somewhat improved, but even
there the chiefs of religious organizations and directors
of ceremonial are men. In the cult societies women
occupy humble places. There is no difference between
their organization and that of civil societies. f

But there are prophetesses. If there were sorcerers
there were sorceresses, with wizards there corresponded
witches, and for doctors there were doctresses. The
function of these, one and all, is to look through win-
dows or behind the scenes, and to report what is going on
among the gods and what they have decided to do. Fur-
thermore, these knowing and skilful ones undertake to in-
fluence, persuade, and compel gods and spirits to do their
behests. For this kind of lobbying work between worlds
women are thought to be more persuasive and acute and
dangerous than men. They hear better, and sit, there-
fore, on the tripods of the oracles. They see better,
and thereby become the knowing ones. They are better
talkers, and for that they become the most successful
conjurers. They cook better, so the witch is stronger
than the wizard, and they are just as successful in de-
nouncing and scolding, which qualifies them for doctors
of a verv old school.

* Cf. Bossu, Travels (Forster's Trans.), London, 1771, p. 38 ;
Allen, Ten Years in Oregon, p. 261 ; Bancroft, Nat. Races, New-
York, 1875, vol. iii, p. 513.

f The reader should not fail to study the accounts of two cere-
monial dances by Moki women, by J. Walter Fewkes, Am. Anthrop.,
Washington, 1892, vol. v, pp. 105-130 and 217-245.

256 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Why there should be anything uncanny about a very
old woman no one knows, but so it is, and ever has been,
whether she appears now in the form of an eagle, and
then as an aged dame who lures away girls to a great
cliff on the Gila River, or as the echo in the cations of the
Colorado. But this dread of the uncanny has acted as a
powerful guard to women in troublous times and in the
uncertainty of primitive society. Somehow or other it
has crept into the belief of the race that there is a power
which protects the weak, and in the long run they shall
prevail.

" The women avIio follow the Cymbri to war are ac-
companied by grey-haired prophetesses in white vest-
ments, with canvas mantles fastened by clasps, a brazen
girdle, and naked feet. These go with drawn swords
through the camp, and, striking down those of the prison-
ers which they meet, drag them to a brazen kettle hold-
ing about twenty amphorae. This has a kind of stage
above it, ascending on which the priestess cuts the throat
of the victim, and from the manner in which the blood
flows into the vessel judges of the future event. Others
tear open the bodies of captives thus butchered, and from
the inspection of the entrails presage victory to their own
party." *

When Caesar inquired of his captives " the reason why
Ariovistus did not engage, he learned that it was because
the matrons who, among the Germans, are accustomed to
pronounce from their divinations whether or not a battle
will be favourable had declared that they would not prove
victorious if they should fight before the new moon." f

Among the Shastas of Northern California women
doctors seem to be more numerous than men, acquiring
their art in the temescal or sweat house, where unprofes-

* Strabo, lib. vii. f Caesar, Bell. Gall., Bk. i, Harper's transl.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 257

sional men are not admitted. Their favourite method of
cure seems to consist in sucking the affected part of the
patient until the blood flows. Sometimes the doctress
vomits some object to reassure the patient. She is fre-
quently assisted by a second physician, whose duty it is
to discover the exact spot where the malady lies, and
this she effects by barking like a dog at the patient
until the spirit discovers to her the place. Gibbs men-
tions a case where the patient was first attended by four
young women, and afterward by the same number of
old ones. Standing around the unfortunate, they went
through a series of violent gesticulations, sitting down
when they could stand no longer, sucking with the most
laudable perseverance and moaning dismally. Finally,
when with their lips and tongue they had raised blisters
all over the patient, and had pounded his miserable body
with hands and knees until they were literally exhausted,
the performers executed a swooning scene, in which they
sank down apparently insensible.*

"We come now to the second part of this study — the
description of the female inhabitants of the spirit world.
Our first steps must be through deep tangled wild woods,
in the midst of pure naturalism. The progress of belief
must be like the progress of arts — from the simple to the
complex, from nature to culture, through integrations of
structures and differentiation of functions. The one
law holds in all departments of human activity.

It will be a genuine surprise, and we shall fail after
a long inquiry, if the fundamental ideas of the female
pantheon in primitive life be not the four duties or func-
tions that have been and must long remain the peculiar
province of woman's activity, to wit :

* Powers and Giubs, quoted in Bancroft, Native Races, New
York, 1874-76, vol. i, p. 355.

258 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

1. The bearing and nurture of children, the maiden,
the wife, the mother.

2. The nourisher of the human family, the one who
gives food.

3. The maker of the fireside, the house, the home.

4. The clothier of men, spinner, weaver, and, indeed,
general guardian of peaceful industry and practical wis-
dom.

The existence of romantic love among the lowest of
peoples and the amount of art and poetry dedicated
thereto from purely aesthetic motives show how deep
seated this feeling has always been. The deification of
this sentiment is universal. The prominence given to the
Roman Venus, the Greek Aphrodite, the Phoenician
Astarte, the Assyrian Istar, the Egyptian Hathor in
higher polytheism, and the excesses indulged in at their
worship, might easily be matched by the annual customs
of the Yuma and other Indian tribes, by the Polynesian
Areoi, and by the African fetich societies. No other
sentiment of earth in its good and bad embodiments
has been so faithfully photographed on the skies.

Among the great gods of Greece and Rome having
dominion over the elements of the universe — Demeter,
the Latin Ceres ; Poseidon, the Latin Neptune ; Apollo,
in both nations ; and Athena, the Latin Minerva — two
are women, the queen of the earth and the queen of the
air. The poetic side of their several offices is worked
out with much grace by Ruskin.*

But here there is space only to dwell briefly upon
the primitive conceptions out of which their later honours
arose, to treat of the womanly side of their natures. As
to Demeter, was there ever a people so devoid of poetry
as to miss the figure of calling the earth Mother, and

* Ruskin, The Queen of the Air.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 259

the personification of the earth by some term akin to
De- meter (yr^/xr/r^p) ? On the return of every spring,
fructified by the sun and the warm rains, she gives birth
to all life and all beauty. To the savage woman there is
not a person called earth mother, who lives in the sky
among the gods, born of Cronus and Rhea, and having a
real daughter, Persephone. The earth itself is as much
alive as we are, and has a mind and soul (Erdgeist), and
is the real mother of all things. The earth mother's kind
ollices do not cease with giving us life. Every day she
takes her burden basket upon her back and goes out,
now to plant the good seed, or to weed and water and
cultivate it, or to gather the harvest and grind it in the
mill to make bread. Her functions are manv, and to one
who did not know the Greeks in their uncivilized state,
when the maternal ancestors of Athenians were exactly
like Zuni Indians, these offices seemed strange and inex-
plicable. But Ceres in the sky is the reflection in the
heavenly mirror of that good mother and sustainer whom
no people has failed to honour.* And in the further myth
of Persephone and the mother walking unconsoled until
her return, there is a suggestion of the optimism which
existed in early Greek mythology, when Mother Earth
loved and grieved over her children when they were gone.f
In this active imagination of the uncivilized they re-
semble children who are never unable to put them-
selves in possession of any kind of life they desire for
the moment to lead.

The Zuni say that the earth is the mother of all and
the fire is the grandmother, for out of the earth comes

* In Egyptian mythology earth is the father of all things and
heaven is the mother. Renouf, Religion of Ancient Egypt, New
York. 1880, Scribner, p. 115.

f For connection of Demeler with the Greek mysteries, see
Encvc. Brit., sub voce Mvsteries.
2j

260 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the water we drink as the babe draws milk from the
mother, and her flesh also furnishes food for man and
beast. And our nourishment is no more cooked by the
brand in the fire than it is by our mothers. Can anyone
hesitate to see the glorification of daily toil in this beau-
tiful myth? The Indian woman's life is spent around
springs of water and in the fields, and over the fire hearth
among the brands. The seven varieties of corn are the
flesh of seven maidens for whom prayer plumes were
planted in the mythological age of the world.*

Previous to the birth of a child, if a daughter be
desired, the Zuiii husband and wife proceed together to
the mother rock, and at her feet make offerings and
prayers, imploring her to intercede with the great father,
the Sun, to give to them a daughter, and that this
daughter may grow to be all that is good in woman ; that
she may be endowed with the power of weaving beauti-
fully, and may be skilled in the potter's art.f

The following from Gatschet is interesting : " After
Tecumseh had delivered a speech to General Harrison at
Vincennes, in 1811, he was offered a chair by the inter-
preter, wrho said to him, 4 Your father requests }tou to
take a chair.' To this Tecumseh replied : ' The sun is
my father, and the earth is my mother : on her bosom will
I repose,' and immediately he seated himself in the In-
dian manner upon the ground." I The Omahas worship
corn as a " mother," according to Dorsey, and the de-
scendants of the ancient Peruvians still pour libations of
chicha to Pachamama or Mother Earth. The Klamaths
say of the earth : " She deals out her bountiful gifts to

* F. II. Cushine:, in The Millstone, Jan., 1884. p. 1.

f Mrs. Matilda E. Stevenson, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., Wash-
ington, 1887. p. 545.

% Gatschet,, The Klamath Indians, Cont. to N. A. Ethnol., Wash.,
vol. ii, p. xeii.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 261

her children, human beings, without envy or restraint, in
the shape of corn, fruits, and esculent roots. Her eyes
are the lakes and ponds disseminated over the green sur-
face of the plains, her breasts are the hills and the hillocks ;
aud the rivulets and brooks irrigating the valleys are the
milk flowing from her breasts."* In the Egyptian reli-
gion the order was reversed, the earth (Seb) being the
father, and Nut the heavens, the mother of all. From
them sprung Osiris and Isis, wedded before they were born,
and the fruit of their union was Horus, the sun, in his

full strength.f

In each region of the world considered in its natural-
history features there is some plant or means of subsist-
ence that abounds. Perhaps it is maize, or manioc, or taro,
or the palm tree. Now, in each case this plant is said to
be the gift of some wonderful female who grows by and
by to be goddess of all crops of food-producing plants.
Frequently the earth mother is the same as the foster
mother, and in the higher mythologies the two become
blended. But the myths of cthe lower races are full of
stories covering the whole art of food getting, assigning
the role always to females. The Hindus celebrate Sita,
spouse of Rama, rising brown and beauteous, crowned with
corn ears from the ploughed field. She is the furrow
(sita) personified.];

The maize plant is associated in one tribe with the
deification of woman, for the story is related among the
Canari Indians, who dwelt in the mountain of Huacap-
nan, south of Quito. At the time of a great deluge two
brothers escaped to this mountain. On the subsiding of
the waters they descended to lower ground, and, being

* Quoted in Gatschet, Cont. to N. A. Ethnol.. vol. ii, p. xcii.
\ Renouf, Religion of Ancient Egypt, New York, 1880, Scribner,
p. 115.

\ Tyler, J. Anthrop. Inst., vol. x, pp. 74. 75.

262 WOMAN'S SHAKE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

pressed for food, two. parrots in their absence entered their
hut daily and prepared for them maize food and cliicha.
At length one of the birds, on being captured, changed to
a beautiful woman, from whom the brothers obtained the
maize seed, and learned the art of cultivating it. She
subsequently became the ancestress of the Canari tribe.
Hence the reverence of this people for the mountain and
the parrot, but it is to be feared they forgot to pay it to
their women, who really gave the maize.*

The goddess Sekhet or Pasht, the daughter of Ra,
equivalent to the goddess Diana, is represented with the
head of a cat or of a lioness in Egyptian mythology. She
was both a destroying deity charged with the torture of
souls in hell and a protector of mankind. The cat tribe
were specially sacred to her. There is little difficulty in
watching the career of this divine woman, who was first
in charge of granaries, preserver of life and destroyer of
vermin, afterward the tamer of the cat for both purposes,
and finally took up her abode in hell to torture souls, with
time to spare for the help of mortals. And this brings
us to the fire cult.

" The essential feature of the Greek prytaneum wras its
hearth (eo-rta), which differed from other hearths only in
this, that it was pre-eminently the hearth of the city, the
common hearth. On this there burned a perpetual fire.
The prytaneum was sacred to Hestia, the personified god-
dess of the hearth. . . . Turning to Italy, we at once iden-
tify the Latin Vesta with the Greek Hestia. But, while
in Greece the original identity of the goddess with the
domestic hearth was still shown by the identity of their
names, in Italy their relationship was so far obscured
that the hearth had resigned its old name to the god-

* See Molino, ap. Markham, quoted in Payne, Hist, of Am., New
York, 1892, p. 861.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 263

dess and was content to be known bv the modest title
of focus." *

Professor Frazer pursues the subject with great learning
and shows clearly that the keeping up of perpetual fires and
the ministrations of the vestals had their origin in those
primitive times when this fire was in the chief's tent or
hut with a hive-shaped dome and his wives and daughters
were the priestesses of the precious element.

In her task of hearth builder the savage woman early
encountered another problem — how to keep food over from
one day to another. It is too late now to ask who dis-
covered cooking ; but, there never was known to history
a people in which the presiding genius of the hearth was
not a woman. It is well known that in great feasts and
for special purposes men become cooks. But these are
spasmodic efforts, not the steady pull. All travelers, his-
torians, and opened sepulchers agree that Hestia, daughter
of Cronus and sister of Zeus —

Whose altar was the cheerful table spread,

Whose sacrifice the pleasant daily bread.

Offered with incense of sweet childhood's mirth

And parents' priestly ministrations, worth

More than all other rites that ever shed

Light on the path that those young feet must tread f —

was also ancestress of that long line of busy women who
tend the domestic fire.

It is said that Prometheus stole fire from the sky in a
hollow fennel stick, which may mean that Prometheus
or some one else of his sex really invented the fire sticks,
the aboriginal device for recreating the element among
most savage tribes. The reader will please remember
that humanity had fire before that. A long time ago

* J. G. Frazer, J. of Philol., Lond., 1885, vol. xiv, pp. 145-172.
t Margaret G. Preston.

264: WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

gods and men were disputing about the same questions
that agitate men and women this very day — namely,
what sacrifice to give to the gods and what to with-
hold. Prometheus, naturally enough, endeavored to keep
the best for himself and cheat the divine beings. The
result was disastrous — to wit, the withholding from mor-
tals of that precious element whose uses had bee'n dis-
covered long before there were any fire sticks. Fortu-
nately for us, we are not left in the dark regarding the last
mentioned fact. A witness still exists to prove that a
people may survive to our day with no knowledge of fire-
creating or the trick of Prometheus.

Among the Damaras, in South Africa, a perpetual fire is
kept burning about the chief's hut. Whenever the headman
of a clan or kraal was about to move away to some distance,
a portion of this holy fire was given to him with which to
set up a vestal hearth upon the new village site. The
same practice is to be seen among Russian peasants.
When they move from one house to another they rake the
fire out of the old stove into a jar and solemnly carry it
to the new one, greeting it with the words " Welcome,
grandfather, to the new home."*

The same thing was done by the ancient Greeks and
Romans.

Women, the guardians of fire and water, mothers of all
nymphs and vestals ! Hovering about the clearest and
coolest and shadiest springs of water in their savage home
life and keeping alive the fire in the dreariest of all habi-
tations ! Whatever of their customs have passed away,
these two have remained. Art and poetry have paid their
homage to these essential elements in woman's indus-
trial life. Is it any wonder, then, that the ministers of
sacred fire on Roman altars and the happy spirits that

* Frazer, J. of Philol., vol. xiv, pp. 144-172.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION'. 265

frequent refreshing springs should all be women? So, the
Zuiii Indian sings :

The sun is the father of all,
The earth is the mother of men,
The water is their grandfather,
The fire is their grandmother.*

Though it is a little difficult to make out how the water
could be the grandfather of mankind, there is no doubt
that it is the maternal grandfather. The family tree
would be then complete as Zuni genealogy goes. We
should have Zuni father and mother, and mother's father
and mother. The sun-father, of course, belongs to an-
other clan, the sky people, but the others are all associated
with the earth mother.

A delightful allusion to the practical water goddess is
found in Matthews. A Navajo family, consisting of father,
mother, two sons, and two daughters, in their migrations
came to a place where no water was, but one of the sons
discovered a spring with his digging stick some distance
from camp. The family had but one wicker bottle
lined with pitch, so the woman, to lighten her labour, pro-
posed to move to the vicinity of the spring, as it was her
task to draw water. But the old man counselled to re-
main, since building material was so near by. They
argued long, but the woman prevailed, and they carried
their property near to the spring. f

Among the Australians of upper Finke River the sun
is a woman with a great fire stick. When she puts on
much wood the fire blazes up tremendously, and begets
the excessive summer heat. In the evening the sun
woman passes under the arm of an old woman and be-

* dishing, The Millstone, Indianapolis, 1884, vol. ix, p. 1.
f Matthews, Fifth An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 388. Consult also
Dorsey, Third An. Rep. Bur. Ethnol., p. 226.

206 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

comes invisible. Her nourishment consists of grubs feed-
ing in timber.*

Really the sun is not the old woman, but her fire
stick. The owner of the stick is invisible. Mythology,
dealing with processes, makes visible only their phenomenal
part. The passing of the light wood under the arm to
keep it dry, as the old hunters did the locks of their guns,
and the old woman's feeding in dead wood, out of which
fire sticks are made, are charming bits of folklore.

The three Fates — Clotho, who spins the thread of
life ; Lachesis, who determines its prolongation ; and Atro-
pos, who severs this thread with remorseless shears — were
necessarily women, and so represented in the mythology
of Greece. In this same connection belongs Arachne, who
challenged Athena to a contest in weaving and was turned
by the latter into a spider.

Her usual features vanished from their place;
Her body lessened all, but most the face.
Her slender fingers, hanging on each side
With many joints, the use of legs supply \1 :
A spider's bag the rest, from which she gives
A thread, and still by constant weaving lives.f

Sericulture has always been in China a national in-
dustry of paramount importance. Doubt seems to have
been entertained by the people concerning the departed
personage who in her lifetime had taken, more than any
other, interest in the matter, and whose spirit was presid-
ing over the silkworm rearing and silk industrv. One
thing is certain : as it was a feminine occupation, the
tutelarv deity could not be a man.t

In the grounds of the imperial palace at Peking is an

* Schulze, Trans. Roy. Soc. S. Australia, 1891, xiv, p. 221.

| Croxall's Trans, of Ovid, Metamorph.

X Lacouperie, The Silk Goddess, London, 1891, Nutt, p. 19.

*,

o

<

O

z
<

o

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 207

altar forty feet in circuit and four feet in height, sur-
rounded by a wall, and also a temple called the ts'en-tsdu-
tao (the early silkworm's altar), in the vicinity of which
a plantation of mulberry trees and a cocoonery are main-
tained. It is dedicated to Yuenfei, otherwise First Wife,
in her quality of discoverer of the silkworms, and annu-
ally, in April, the empress worships and sacrifices to her.
The same goddess has several important temples in Tcheh-
kiang, one of the provinces where the silkworm industry
flourishes. Yuenfei is said to be the name of Si-ling-slie,
first wife of Huang-ti, civilizer of China.*

It must not be forgotten, as Brinton has well shown,
that the use of figurative language enters very largely
into savage mythology. This fact compels the ethnolo-
gist to move with caution in searching for a real and
prosaic basis for every detail in a myth. The temalacatl
or spindle stone, for example, in Mexican solar rites
was doubtless so called from its resemblance in form to
the whorl on the spindle used by women among all weav-
ing tribes.

The primitive Minerva or Pallas Athena must bo
sought in the conceptions which uncivilized tribes have
of the atmosphere. How did the air come to be a
woman? There must have been some inseparable con-
nection between what women had to do and what the
air does. The air must be personified to be that woman,
and then, with a capital letter at the beginning of her
name, she must take wings and fly to high Olympus.

Stephen Powers says somewhere that he never saw an
Indian woman that was not pudderi^g at something, and
it is this busy, bustling activity of the practical part of

* Lacouperie. Silk Goddess of China, London, 1891, Nutt, p. 3,
and note 4 referring to Gray, Edkins, and Williamson. CI'. Gray,
China, vol. ii, p. 220 ; Williamson, Journeys in North China, 1870,
vol. ii, p. 035.

268 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

the universe that is Minerva's realm. She is represented
with shield and spear in rest, and looks out over the
earth as a superintendent of its industrialism. " The
Greeks conceived that the light, the stars, the meteors
drew nourishment from the waters and then returned it
to the earth as moisture. The theory is favoured by such
terms as 'bedewing stars,' 'heaven-producing dew,' etc.
If this belief was at all general, it is not improbable that
the goddess of light should be esteemed as the bestower
of dew and fertilizing moisture." *

It might be rash to connect at once Minerva with a
savage woman bearing a water jar on her head or, indeed,
with a nomadic woman unsaddling her husband's horse
on his arrival. f But there is no objection in this view to
her being goddess of inventions, of practical wisdom and
of art, of cheer to warriors, of protection to" cities, of
family and social order. If Athena first tamed horses,
women tamed the first domestic animals. If Athena
conquered Arachne and turned her into a spider, women
have put to shame all spiders and worms and became
princesses of spinners and weavers. J;

In her temple at Athens women worked. And at
Athens women and girls wrought nine months to weave
the peplos that was offered annually to Athena, and was
carried in the Erectheion. ' On the appointed day the
peplos was unfurled like a sail over the sacred trireme,
emblem of the maritime power which Athens owed to its
tutelary goddess, and the ships moved by machinery as-
cended the Acropolis accompanied by the sacred cortege.

The s:ist of all this is that we have in the divine
Minerva the human Minerva. Indeed, should one pro-

*R. 0. Miiller.

f One is here reminded of Juno, in the Iliad (v, 700), engaged in
hitching horses.

X Consult Decharme, Myth, de la Grece antique, p. 85.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 269

nounce to-day the phrase " a sensible woman," " a prac-
tical woman," her qualifications would be found to be
very similar to those of this ancient goddess. We are not
at all surprised, therefore, to find in the Proverbs of
Solomon this plain, every-day wisdom, commonly entitled
" good sense," further personified.

Doth not wisdom cry ? and understanding put forth her voice?

She standeth in the top of high places, by the way in the places
of the paths.

She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in

at t he doors :

Unto you, 0 men, I call ; and my voice is to the sons of man*

The great Egyptian goddess Neith, who at Sais was
worshipped as primordial deity, was, in addition to her
higher attractions, the Weaver, and passed for having in-
vented the art. Her most common hieroglyph — the one by
which she was most generally designated — was the shuttle.
In her temple at Sais were large weaving establishments
celebrated for their products, and one of the sanctuaries
of Sais is called in the texts " the house of textiles." f

In the temple of Neith were produced special textiles,
used in sacred ceremonies,]; and for priestly garments as
well as for those of statues for mummies.

A papyrus* mentions that the hands and the feet of
the mummy were wrapped " in a bandage of flax, of that
kind which is manufactured at Sais," etc.

These weaving establishments had evidently a sacred
character, which was recognized throughout the land.|

* Proverbs, viii, 1-4.

•f Denderah text of the mysteries of Osiris, Col. 22, cf. Mariette,
Abydos, pi. lxiii.

% Mallet, Culte de Neit a Sais, p. 242.

# Boulaq No. 3, iii, 15, Maspero, Mem. sur quelques pap. du
Louvre.

|| The author is indebted to Mrs. Sara Y. Stevenson, of the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, for this reference to Neith.

270 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

The connections of women with the myths of natural
phenomena are innumerable.

The Ute women, according to Major Powell, say that
the echo in their valleys is an old woman, who for some
slight has taken refuge there out of the way of her perse-
cutors, and mocks them day and night. This story tallies
well with Ovid's account of the nymph Echo, who was
deprived by Juno of the use of speech, except the power
to pronounce the last word. Falling in love with Nar-
cissus, she pursued him, but in vain.

The nymph, when nothing could Narcissus move,
Still dashed with blushes for her slighted love,
Lived in the shady covert of the woods,
In solitarv caves and dark abodes,
Where, pining, wandered tlie rejected fair.
Till harassed out, and worn away with care,
The sounding skeleton, of blood bereft,
Besides her bones and voice had nothing left.*

Most of the inexplicable phenomena of Nature find
their general raison d'etre in the queer conduct of some
ethereal old woman who for a long time seems to have
kept the half-way house of science. The chirping of the
cricket, the colour of birds, the spots on animals, the mois-
ture on the stones — the list is endless and the venerable
creature has been kept quite busy down to our time.

The primitive stone-cutting woman early found recog-
nition in the heavenly company. The deity of stone
workers and axe grinders is first known as a great priest-
ess and magician. Once her brother Rata was not able to
use the tree he had felled in making a canoe, because he
had offended the wood fairies by omitting the proper in-
vocation. So they set the tree up again every time he
cut it down. His sister told him to sharpen his axe on
her sacred body, and this had the desired effect. Hence

* Croxall's Trans, of Ovid, Metamorphoses.

THE PATRON OF RELIGION. 271

the name of the priestess — The-Maiden-Whose-Back-Was-
A-Whetstone. We next find this priestess installed in the
Maori pantheon as the goddess or deified ancestress con-
nected with stone axes.*

Whether the sirens were a three-headed rock, separat-
ing the Bay of Naples from the Gulf of Salerno, or not,
the persons of whom they were the form, and whose
bloody work they did, were women. The Lorelei in the
rapids of the Rhine belongs to the same category — namely,
of spirits who, by beauty of person and. the gentle music
of their voices, allure mariners, and other men as well, to
forget their journey and to turn aside upon danger.f
This set of characters, alas, link the heavens and the
earth through that chapter in woman's history, hinted at
in the introduction, too painful to write about — her role
in the crimes of mankind.

Among the semicivilized races, especially those under
Mohammedan influence, there seems to be small place for
women in the ideal and artistic life on earth, and less in
the life beyond. Among the more enlightened nations,
however, the thoughts of primitive life survive in more
rational form. It is true that the heavenlv world of in-
dustrial goddesses has faded away ; but from the crowning
eminences of architecture, from pedestals along the great-
est thoroughfares, from the costliest canvas in national
galleries, from the richest pages of literature, from the
highest prizes of industry, from thrones, from happy
homes, from vigils by the dying — the forms of women,
still called goddesses, shower their peaceful benedictions
on our race and preserve the ideals most divine.

* Cf. J. Polynes. Soc, Wellington, 1892, vol. i, p. 82.
f See J. E. Harrison, Myth of Odysseus.

CHAPTER XII.

CONCLUSION.

Civilization is the composite result of progress
from the purely natural life of the animal to the purely
artificial life of the most enlightened individuals and
peoples. This progress has always been made along the
lines of satisfying human needs, of gratifying human de-
sires. For bringing to pass this result Nature has con-
tributed a great variety of materials from her three king-
doms, from time to time has furnished new forces to
supplement human endeavour, and added the results of
her experiences throughout all the history of the globe
prior to man's arrival. She has occupied the position of
almoner, prompter, teacher, and friend, sayiug at first
what she says now : Occupy the earth, dress and keep it.

The human race faced this duty in the beginning
with endowments that seemed to be entirely inadequate
from a zoological point of view, but with more brain and
mind than the mere bodily wants demanded. It is im-
portant to note this superabundance, since the highest de-
velopment of the race has not been in those regions which
naturally supply human cravings and offer the best se-
curity. With this extraordinary capital the man and the
woman set forth hand in hand, the former to fight and
outwit, the latter to conserve and elaborate the results of
victory; the former to explore and wander, the latter to
settle down and congregate ; the former becoming disper-

(272)

CONCLUSION. 273

sive or centrifugal, the latter unifying and centripetal ; the
former developing the militant spirit, the latter the indus-
trial spirit. Many thousands of books have been written
to set forth the gallant deeds of men, and these have
stirred a noble emulation in youthful minds ; but few
books have been devoted to the patience and energy of
the other actor in the drama.

To accomplish the object in view in this work there
has been no uecessity of eulogizing or depreciating the
author's own sex. The past has been a mixture of good
and evil, of light and darkness, of justice and injustice,
of knowledge and ignorance. The former in each case,
judging from the splendid results, has been growing
more and more predominant — that is, the good has been
slowly conquering the evil, light is coming over the minds
of all, justice is the rule, and knowledge grows "from
more to more." Life is now longer than it was and women
live longer than men. Each moment brings a larger
freight of joy, more to women than to men. There is at
the present time a great awakening among women as to
their own- attributes and functions and capabilities. They
are seriously inquiring for the roads that will conduct
them to their largest and noblest development. With
eager eyes they look ahead to see whether they can dis-
cern the true outlines and character of that good life that
is to be. With earnest sagacity they look around them
as a merchant taking stock. But could any study lead
them to truer success than the careful review of those
activities and occupations through which they contributed
so much to the general mass of happiness?

Long ago Buckle ventured the observation that
women are more conservative then men.* It is one of
the commonest of sayings that women arrive at conclu-

* Buckle, Fraser's Mag., April, 1858 ; Trans. Roy. Inst., 1858.

274 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

sions by a kind of instinct. But reflect a moment upon
our savage woman. One has only to look around him
in travelling through countries lately touched by civiliza-
tion to notice that men have to drop their old occupa-
tions for new ones. In fact, not five men in a hundred
in the most favoured lands are at this moment pursuing
the calling for which they were educated. But in tran-
sitions from savagery to civilization, and in the vicissi-
tudes of life, women go on housekeeping, spinning, de-
manding if no longer making pottery, using the same
vocabulary, conning the same propositions, reproducing
the same forms of ornaments, believing as of old, only
making use of modified and bettered appliances. In this
they are conservative, indeed, and the blood coursing
through the brain tissue carries on the same commerce
that has been familiar to women during many thousands
of years.

Now the naturalists tell us that change in one bodily
structure sets in motion a great number of co-ordinated
changes throughout the entire system. The savage man
in his normal life is ever changing. When a higher cul-
ture overtakes him it is worse. He must lay down a bow
and arrow and take up the hoe, a woman's implement.
In the struggles for a living in the best of surroundings
the man is to-day a farm hand, to-morrow cutting wood,
the next day in the crowded city. See how this racks
his whole being, bodily, mentally, and spiritually. If he
do not die under the treatment he must become adaptive,
plastic, versatile. All the propositions and half-automatic
activities that he acquires to-day are forgotten to-morrow,
and instincts do not have time to mature. On the other
hand, the women of a savage tribe, and the ordinary run
of women in any civilized land, who change slightly the
duties they have to perform, or their manner of doing
them, need modify their conceptions and their opinions

CONCLUSION. 275

very little. The constant doing the same things and
thinking the same thoughts from generation to genera-
tion pass the bodily activity and the mental processes
on to a semiautomatic habit.

Very few men are doing what their fathers did, so
their opinions have to be made up by study and prece-
dents. Nearly all women, whether in savagery or in civil-
ization, are doing what their mothers and grandmothers
did, and their opinions are therefore born in them or into
them. The same inheritances come to men also through
their mothers, but they become like the muscles of the ear
or of the nose, atrophied by almost entire disuse.

When a woman therefore expresses an opinion upon a
subject whereupon she is entitled to speak at all — and this,
as has been shown, covers a wide field — she utters the accu-
mulated wisdom of the ages, and this is called her instinct.
With reference to a gun or an object out of this long con-
catenation, she would be only bewildered and say it is a
horrid thing.

This progress of which we have been speaking may be
said to have been the resultant of two forces. These forces
are and have been animality and spirituality, and they are
ever at war. The former is opposed to progress and favours
dissolution. The latter is the genius of progress and set
agoing those beneficent currents which have wafted and
urged mankind to all the good they have attained.

When, therefore, one reads that a tribe or nation is
immoral and brutalizes women, it is equivalent to saying
that the guilty one has got out of the great stream of in-
tellectual advancement and drifted into one of the eddies
of animal existence.

If we should appeal again to the naturalists, they would

tell us of a law of the survival of the fittest in the struggle

for existence. In this, of course, they have reference to

plants and animals. This law is one of severest retribu-
21

276 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

tion, and knows no exceptions. But there are social and
moral retributions as well as physical, and there is a higher
law as well as a lower law of the survival of the fittest.
Even in the animal world, any species that would pollute
the fountain and destroy the very foundation of life or in
which the females committed suicide must speedly disap-
pear. How much more fatal has been this defiance of law
in the higher plane of existeuce ! The intellectual races
and nations when on the upward grade were never im-
moral or brutal. They were considerate toward their
women in the daily walks of life. By a true poetic and
aesthetic instinct they exalted every good and noble ideal
by giving it the artistic form and grammatic garb of a
female. They worshipjDed them in the skies.

It matters not whether we regard the history of the
remotest past or the diverse civilizations of the present, the
emancipation and exaltation of women are the synonym
of progress. In the mind of the individual, in the family,
and in the community alike the loss of veneration for
women on the part of men and the loss of virtue and self-
respect of women for themselves is the surest indication
of destructive tendencies. We may look with pity for a
moment upon such, but they have nothing to do with the
subject under consideration here.

To sum up the results of our study, women in primitive
life had their share in determining the relation of geogra-
phy to history, in the conquest of the three kingdoms of
Nature, in the substitution of other forces to do the work
of human muscles, in the elaboration of industrial and
aesthetic arts, in the creation of social order, in the pro-
duction of language, in the development of religion.
I mean that they had a peculiar part, aside from that they
would have to play merely as human beings. To set
forth this share the pages of this book are devoted.

The earth has long been divided by physiographers

CONCLUSION. 277

into areas or regions going by different names, bnt each
characterized by surroundings and resources of its own,
capable of producing and sustaining a unique plant life,
or animal life, or human culture. Climate is the chief
factor in these areas, but elevation and slope, water courses
and shore lines, have much to do with the flora, fauna, and
culture. Now each of these regions has the power of de-
ciding what a man shall eat and wherewithal he shall be
clothed. It is true that weapons and tools for men must
undergo some modifications from region to region, but the
greatest changes are in the works of the tailor, the cook,
the housebuilder, the maker of vessels.

Dealing with the mineral kingdom, it was woman's
early function, using the same materials and means that
men employed for their industries, to invent cutlery, hard-
ware, mills, and the like. Of the four treatments of stone
— chipping, battering, cutting, and grinding — they wrere
familiar with the first for making knives and scrapers;
with the second in the manufacture of mortars and other
grinding stone ; but the cutting and polishing of stone
were the legitimate work of men. Women almost wholly
were the patrons of water springs and wells. To this day
on the old-fashioned farms the good wife dwells about the
springhouse with her milk pans and washing apparatus.
How common the picture of the African woman returning
from the spring toting wrater in a jar on her head ! The
same is common in the arid region of the United States.
Women were the first salt-makers and extracted nitre
from the ashes of certain plants. They also understood
thoroughly the quarrying and manipulation of potter's
clay, mineral paint, and soapstone.

There is no end to woman's connection with the vege-
tal kingdom. It is peculiarly hers. Of the four main
uses of plants as food, fibre, timber, and in landscape gar-
dening, only a moment's thought is necessary to discern

278 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

woman's varied relations. It was her duty to gather the
roots, the fruits, and the seeds, to transport and store them,
to cook and serve them. No one ever heard of savage
men having aught to do with the food-plant industry.
The same is true of plant medicines. The first empirical
physicians were not the sorcerers, but the herb women.
They gathered the first materia medica.

These good women made another journey. It was to
collect flexible grasses and barks and roots and woods for
basketry and cloth, to put this material through the tedious
processes of dyeing, splitting, twisting, weaving, netting,
embroidery. They laid the foundation of the great mod-
ern textile institutions. Rarely has one seen a man en-
gaged upon such work in savagery, unless he be a squaw
man, who has been adjudged unworthy of a place among
the warriors and relegated to association with women. The
tapa beaters in Polynesia, the mat weavers in Africa, the
makers of basketry in America, are and have been women.

Women wrought in wood or timber sparingly. It is
true that they gathered faggots, cut down tent poles, and
made dishes of bark and logs by hollowing them, but the
makers of dugout boats and the carvers of war clubs were
more frequently men than women.

But it would be a reprehensible oversight to pass by the
beginnings of agriculture and gardening. In point of fact,
in the great savage areas at this very moment women
are just beginning to discover that they can raise plants
cheaper than they can gather the wild ones.

Of the animals woman was not generally the slayer,
though she was expert in fishing and in the taking of land
animals alive. But she was the butcher, the skin dresser,
the curer and packer, the cook and the server, and all men
and women now engaged in such work must look back to
savage women as the founders of their craft. The whole
clan of bonnet-makers, dressmakers, tailors, furriers, were

CONCLUSION. 279

originally of the gentler sex, and woman was the original
St. Crispin. Domestic animals were first tamed not for
men to ride, but for the service of women — for their fleece
and milk and strong backs. The most eminent of these
animals have a double and perhaps a triple function. The
horse, camel, cow, ass, dog, llama, and reindeer are burden
bearers, on to whose backs women shifted a portion of their
wearisome loads. The first four also yielded milk, the dog
assisted in hunting, and all of them had good skins, which
the women at first converted into some form of leather.
As for the sheep and the goat, they still live for spinners
and dairv- women and cooks. The discoverv that the horse,
the camel, the cow, the ass, the goat, and the reindeer
would yield milk was one of the most useful ever made.
The race was multiplied more rapidly by the preservation
of those that were born, by the increase of energy in men
and women at smaller cost and risk, by the greater fecun-
dity of women, and by the promotion of longevity. It
can not be denied that the diversification of employment
effected by domestication was a great stimulus to intel-
lectual growth at the same time that it gave leisure for
the perfection of women in the arts of refinement.

The physical forces and mechanical powers were at
first unknown and entirely useless to both men and women.
Only gradually were they brought within the area of intel-
ligence and control. Savages know the inclined plane,
the wedge, the lever, the lubricant, the roller, the pulley,
in a crude form, but not the wheel in any of its combina-
tions. For the most part men had to do with these. But
we must not forget the landing of the Eskimo woman's
boat on inflated seal skins, the hoisting of the skin tent by
Sioux women, using a sort of pulley, the use of the wedge
in setting up a loom, and, chief of all, should we keep in
mind the fly wheel on the spindle, the first device ever
made by human being for converting rectilinear into cir-

280 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

cular motion. This fly wheel is indispensable to the whole
range of machinery in the world. The nearest approach
to a compound pulley among savages is a sort of parbuckle
arrangement by means of which the burden woman rolls
her load up to her shoulders, doubling the time to decrease
the effort. But I am inclined to think that woman's
share in developing the mechanical powers was not great.

Of the utilization of Nature's forces to do work, much
more may be said for the primitive woman. The fire in-
dustry, including its preservation, its use in heating,
cooking, drying, smoking, was hers down to the age of
metallurgy, and the Marquis of Worcester (1656) was the
first to utilize steam in any other capacity than in getting
a good dinner. Even in the spirit world woman does not
relinquish her hold upon this element, where Hestia pre-
sides over the destinies of families and the exercise of
hospitality, while Vulcan, as we have intimated, is only
the celestial blacksmith or armourer.

Water power does not exist in savagery as a turner of
wheels. *The care of springs and the carrying of water is
woman's constant employment. One of the earliest appli-
cations of water power is in this very occupation of trans-
porting the element to irrigate the land. Agriculture,
however, had begun to be an occupation for men as soon
as they found tribute paying easier and cheaper than
going to war. Here, again, is another example of the
passing of an industry from one sex to the other in the
course of history. The wind, however, appears first util-
ized in creating a draught to expel the smoke from a tent.
This is effected by means of a movable fly. The freight
boat in America also first appears driven by mat sails,
made bv the hands of wcmen.

A careful study of the homely occupations of savage
women is the best guide to their share in creating the
aesthetic arts. Whether in the two Americas, or in the

CONCLUSION. 281

heart of Africa, or among the peoples of Oceanica, the
perpetual astonishment is not the lack of art, but the
superabundance of it. Call to mind the exquisite sewing
of the Eskimo woman with sinew thread and needle of
bone, or the wonderful basketry of all the American
tribes, the bark work and feather work of Polynesia, the
loom work of Africa, the pottery of the Pueblos, of Cen-
tral America, and Peru. Compare these with the artistic
productions of our present generation of girls and women
at their homes. I assure you the comparison is not in
favour of the labourers' daughters, or of the mechanics'
daughters, or of the farmers' daughters, but of the daugh-
ters and wives of the degraded savage. In painting, dye-
ing, moulding, modelling, weaving, and embroidering, in
the origination first of geometric patterns and then of free-
hand drawing, savage women, primitive women, have won
their title to our highest admiration. The only regret is,
that this deftness of hand, accuracy of eye, and communion
with the beautiful no longer exist with the masses.

It is not necessary to repeat at length the many con-
tributions which women have made to the creation, pres-
ervation, and spread of language. There is a language
for every art of life, a vocabulary and a style of speech.*
The blending of all these terms and phrases into a com-
mon fund of utterance constitutes the language as a
whole. The arts practiced by women made their con-
tribution to every tongue, the nurture of children almost
wholly by women until their fifth year made the latter the
transmitters of the common speech, and their forced wan-
derings from tribe to tribe constituted them the chief ele-
ment in the commingling of languages.

All the social fabrics of the world are built around
women. The first stable society was a mother and her

* Paul Ehrenreich, Ztschr. f. Ethnol., 1894.

282 WOMAN'S SHAKE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

helpless infant, and this little group is the grandest phe-
nomenon in society still. To attach the man permanent-
ly to this group for the good of the kind has been the
struggle of the ages. No wonder that the mother god-
dess exists in all theologies, that savages worship the all-
producing earth as mother, that maternity has been ac-

FlG. 60. — X WAN-YIN, THE ClIINESE FEMALE BUDDHA.

corded the highest place in prayer and adoration, that the
Buddhists of China have changed one of the chief Bodhi-
sattvas into the adorable goddess Kwan-yin, or Manifested
Voice.*

* Samuel Johnson, Oriental Religions, China, p. 817.

CONCLUSION. 283

John Fiske dwells upon the prolongation of helpless
infancy as a chief factor in the elevation of humanity.
Says he : "In order to bring about that wonderful event,
natural selection had to call in the aid of other agencies,
and the chief of these agencies was the gradual lengthen-
ing of babyhood." *

But the fact is that the progress of culture has short-
ened the period of babyhood. From primitive times to
the taming of milk-yielding animals the baby had only
the mother to depend on, and there are numerous testi-
monies to the suckling of children until they were five
years old. The savage or the primitive mother had the
brunt to bear. The use of milk from animals made an
earlier transfer to the food of adults possible. The last
steps in this proceeding are the substitution of a foster
mother, and, last of all, an absolutely artificial supply
from birth. At the same time intellectual and moral
bonds have been strengthened, and the mother's control
of the child increased.

In the monogamian family the attachment of the
father to the initial group is most complete and the
structure of the family is perfected. Under the patriar-
chal system, this stable element, the mother and child is
one of several possible groups attached to the same fa-
ther. It loses its dignity and identity.

Under the clan system paternity is of less conse-
quence. The mother's name was the name of the gens,
and the child took its title from her. The stable element
was a group consisting of a supposed ancestress and her
descendants along the female line. It will be seen, how-
ever, that though this is a comprehensive group, the bond
is loosened. The mother and her sisters are all mothers

* Harvard Lectures, 1871 ; Cosmic Philosophy, pt. ii, chaps, xvi,
xxi, xxii ; Excursions of an Evolutionist, chap. xii.

284: WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

of the child. The father is uncle of his sister's children,
but has little control over his own. But in those early
savage days, what a beneficent bond which held sisters
together at least and mothers with their daughters ! It
furnished every child with a home and every individual
with support. These young clan mothers, stimulated by
maternal instinct, gentile pride, and devotion to the com-
pact tribe, wrought day and night to bring to maturity the
young lives they bore.

It is here and there affirmed that women are tiring of
maternity, and that the progress of civilization and intel-
lectuality are opposed to childbearing. When such a
sentiment becomes prevalent in any tribe or region or
state or nation, its doom is already in progress. In what-
ever actions the primitive women excelled — and the num-
ber is not small — they surely deserve the apotheosis they
have received for their development of the maternal side
of life. They prayed the gods for children, offered costly
sacrifices for the honour of maternity, and even committed
suicide when the blessing was withheld.

For the highest ideals in civilization, in humanita-
rianism, education, and government the way was prepared
in savagery by mothers and by the female clan groups,
and the most commanding positions are at this moment
in their possession. Pedagogy and the body politic had
their foundations laid there. Bebel says that " woman
was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman
was a slave before the slave existed." * But this expression
takes all the aroma from her fragrant life. She made a
servant of herself, and willingly, before there was any
slavery. The emancipation of woman is from a self-im-
posed bondage, as everybody knows.

* August Bebel, quoted by Helen Campbell, the Arena, Boston,
1893, vol. vii, p. 153.

CONCLUSION. 285

In all religions the heavenly world is pictured as a
reflection of our own. It may not be true that the god-
desses were women in the sense that each one had been
some noted person or holy saint on earth. Arachne was
not a skillful vounff woman who was believed to have
been turned into a spider. But the spider is a spinner,
and Arachne is the composite deification of spinning-
women. She is the tribal or racial type of all women
when they are engaged in that occupation. And so the
sky people, by the tricks of human imagination, come to
typify the terrestrial life. As in some placid mountain
lake the woods and rocky cliffs and floating clouds are
mirrored, so that one in gazing downward may behold
the same pictures as though he were looking upward, so
in all folklores and mythologies serenely lie the shadows
of past civilizations and religions.

If women now sit on thrones, if the most beautiful
painting in the world is of a mother and her child, if the
image of a woman crowns the dome of the American Capi-
tol, if in allegory and metaphor and painting and sculp-
ture the highest ideals are women, it is because they have
a right to be there. By all their drudgery and patience,
by all their suffering and kindness, they have earned their
right to be there.

In the World's Columbian Exposition the place of
honour was occupied by the colossal statue of a young
woman represented in burnished gold. In one hand she
held the world, in the other the cap of emancipation or
liberty. Upon her right hand stood the building devoted
to manufactures and liberal arts, upon her left hand the
temple of agriculture. In the distance the dairy, the
leather, and the horticultural buildings. In the anthro-
pological building, at the extreme south of the grounds,
was an exhibit from the cemetery of Ancon, in Peru. One
figure was of especial interest in this connection — the

2S6 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

skeleton of an ancient Peruvian woman. It was in a
crouching attitude, wrapped in the customary grave
clothes, and about it were the spindles, cradle frame,
pottery, and dishes of vegetables with which she was
familiar in her life and from which her spirit was not to
be separated in her death. Spontaneously the thoughtful
mind connected this crouching figure with the statue in
the place of honour, and with the noble buildings and
scenes about her. How wonderful the transformation,
wrought by no magic or legerdemain, but with woman's
hands and heart and ingenuity !

It is not here avowed that women may not pursue any
path in life they choose, that they have no right to turn
aside from old highways to wander in unbeaten tracks.
But before it is decided to do that there is no harm in
looking backward over the honourable achievements of the
sex. All this is stored capital, accumulated experience
and energy. If all mankind to come should be better born
and nurtured, better instructed in morals and conduct at
the start, better clothed and fed and housed all their lives,
better married and encompassed and refined, the old ra-
tios of progress would be decupled. All this beneficient
labour is the birthright of women, and much of it of women
alone. Past glory therein is secure, and it only remains to
be seen how far the future will add to its lustre in the
preservation of holy ideals.

INDEX.

Acorn harvesting, 21.
Adair, James, 62.
iEsthetic elements in pottery,
171.

evolution, 161.
Agriculture, primitive, 147.
Allison, Mrs. S. S., 36, 126.
Alviella, Goblet d\ 246.
Animals furnishing hides for
woman's use, 71.

woman's association with, 279.
Animism, 242.
Anthropoids carry their young

on the hip, 119.
Apotheosis of women, 248.
Archaeology, witness of, 11.
Armament still active, 2.
Art, analysis of its processes, 161.

at first imitation, 162.

in relation to geometry, 170.
Artists, women as, 161, 187, 281,
Athena, Pallas, 267.
Atkinson, J. J., 100.
Atolli, Mexican gruel. 37.
Australian relationship, 219.
Awl for basket-making, 43.

Back, carrying on the, 121.
Baker, Sir Samuel. 129.
Balfour, Henry. 108, 171, 177.

(%7)

Bancroft, H. H., 8. 37, 58, 146,
150, 209, 214, 266.

Barbers, women, 183.

Bark-cloth making, 54.

Bartram, William, 10.

Basket work, 42.

Basketry, types of, 44.
of Japan and Fuegia com-
pared, 49.
materials of, 50.
uniformity of stitch, 52.

Baskets in shaping pottery, 96.

Baskets, water-tight, as cooking
vessels, 32.

Beasts of burden, women the
first, 114-138.

Beauty, personal, in art, 178.

Belief in relation to common
life, 244.

Beliefs analyzed, 244.

Bigamy, 223.

Birds, only the male, sing, 174.

Boaz, Franz. 10, 80. 244.

Bone-breaking tools, 29.

Bootmakers, 86.

Bossu, M., travels, 255.

Braiding, 56, 59, 168.

Brain of primitive woman, 4.

Brigliam, William T., 65, 67, 196,
236.

28S WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Brinton, Daniel G., 189, 193. 197.
242.

Broom, early woman's imple-
ment, 33.

Buckle, Thomas, 201, 273.

Burden-bearing by modern wom-
en, 120.

Burning pottery, 10G.

Caches, woman's invention of. 18.

Campbell, C. W., 11.

Carr, Lucien, 148.

Carriage, erect, as a personal
charm, 178.

Carrying devices, 115.

Cassareep in Guiana cooking, 38.

Cassava, preparation of. 38.

Cat, domesticated by women, 18.

Cat goddess, 262.

Catlin, George, 128.

Cattle, hides of, replacing those
of wild animals, 78.

Celibacy in savagery, 210.

Ceramic art and poetry com-
pared, 172.

Ceres, type of herb women, 259.

Chewing skins to soften them, 73.

Childless mothers commit sui-
cide, 207.

Chili, as food, 37.

Chimneys, woman's invention of,
235.

Civilization and artificialism, 272.

Clan and marriage, 218.

Clay, methods of treating, 93.

Cleaver, butcher's, origin of, 29.

Cliff dweller's textiles. G2.

Clothiers, 86.

Clothing, cutting and making. 86.
more of. worn by women, 236.

Coiffures, 183.

Coiled basketry, 48.

pottery, 98.
Collinson, T. B., 125.
Colour, how produced. 165.

in art, 1*63.

in pottery. 111.

in textiles, 65.
Communal marriage, 217.
Comparison of the sexes, 13.
Comprehensive work of women,

139.
Comprehensiveness in art, 162.
Conservation of language, 188.
Conservatism of women, 273.
Conveyance of passengers, 115.
Cooking among the Mexicans, 37.

industries, 14.

modes of, and serving, 37.

vegetables, order in the inven-
tions of, 29.
Co-operation of sexes, 10.
Cosmetics. 182.
Cotton in America, 64.
Courage among women, 238.
Couvade, 205.

Coville, F. V., 16. 20. 24, 50.
Cradle frames the first passenger
cars, 116.

adapted to climate, 117.
Crantz, David, 78.
Crocheting. 67.
Cross, D. K., 237.
Cruelty to females not common

among animals, 6, 275.
Cultivation of soil by gentes. 240.
Cashing, F. H., 100, 176. 260. 265.
Cutlers were women at first, 26.

Daily round of duties. 156.
Dall. William H., 156, 185, 207,
211.

INDEX.

2S9

Darwin, Charles, 223, 231.

Dead, disposal of the, 251.

I teath, women in presence of, 249.

Deformations. 183.

Delsarte drill among savages, 178.

Demeter typifies harvesting

women, 258.
Design in art, 103.

on pottery, free-hand, 112.
Disposal of the dead, 251.
Dissemination of language, 188.
Distaff, 58.
Ditmar, H., 5.

Diversity of occupation in cas-
sava working, 39.
of stonework by women, 141.
of woman's work, 139.
Division of labour, 7, 231.
Divorce, 229.
Dodge, Colonel R. I., 27, 120, 154,

190, 235.
Domestication of animals, 149,

150.
Doolittle. J., 225.
Dorsey, J. Owen. 9, 27, 74, 85,

209, 215, 219, 265.
Drunkenness not known among

savage women. 235.
Drying frames, 85.
Dumont, M., describes Choctaw

method of making pottery,

105.
Duties of married women, 231.
Dyeing, 65, 165.

Earth mother, 259.
Echo, the goddess. 270.
Education of girls in savagery,

207.
Elevation of savages through

women, 238.

Ellis, Ilavelock, 2.

Ellis, W., 53, 181, 212, 254.

Embroidery, 67.

Emmons, George T., 76.

Employments, circle of, in the
butcher's art, 27.

Emulation of women at work, 88.

Endowments of primitive woman,
272.

Engineering, primitive, 123.

Ethnography, witness of, 12.

European women as burden bear-
ers, 131.

Extent of the art of pottery, 91.

Family names in Australia, 220.
woman the founder of, 213,

279.
Fat scrapers. 73, 75.
Fates, the three. 266.
Featherwork, 64.
Featherwork in art. 169.
Feeding the dead, 251.
Ferry women. 128.
Fewkes, J. Walter, 255.
Fibres, 55.
Figurative language, woman's,

191.
Fire kept burning at the grave,

251.
peculiarly belonging to women,

32.
woman's association with, 155,

264.
Fisherwomen, 132.
Fish ponds made by women. 152.
Fly wheel, invention of the, 57.
Folklore of women, 202.

witness of, to woman's work. 1 2.
rFood bringer, woman as, 14-40.
Form in art, 163.

290 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Forms in pottery, 100. 108.
Frazer, J. G., 199, 242, 204.
Freighting on women's backs,

115.
French-Sheldon, Mrs., 185, 197.
Frijoles, Mexican food, 37.
Fringe of shredded bark, 55.
Fuel problem, 235.
Functions of pottery, 113.
Furs still gathered for women,

89.

Ganowanian marriage, 224.

Garrett, 152.

Garson, J. G., 10.

Gatschet, A. S., 198, 260.

Gentleness developed in women,
179.

Geometry originated by women,
52.

Gesture speech of women, 191.

Gibbs, George, 257.

Gioli. Prof., 133.

Girls in savagery, 207.

Glaze, substitutes for, 103.

Goddesses, types of woman's
work, 245.
with womanly traits and func-
tions, 258.

Gomme, G. L., 199.

Goquet, M., 30.

Gourds, in shaping pottery, 96.

Grammatic gender, 192.

Granaries invented by women, 17.

Grandmother goddess, 259.

Grating cassava, 39.

Grinding seeds, woman's art, 18.

Gypsies, 248.

Habitations in relation to women,
152.

Hands, carrying in the, 12.

Hardisty, W. L., 155.

Hatters, primitive, 84.

Hearne, Samuel, 88, 128, 234.

Hearth goddess, 262.

Hides for tepees, 83.

Hindu women, a degraded type,

200.
History a"s a witness of woman's

work, 11.
Holmes, W. H., 93, 113 ; 140-171

frequent references.
Holub, Emil, 17.
Honey industry, 24.
House building by women, 152.
industrial part of, invented by

women, 235.
Hunter, W. W., 236.
Husband, evolution of the, 213.
Husbands, number of, 215.

Im Thurn, E. F., 7, 38, 64, 158,

206.
Independence of females among

animals, 231.
of the savage woman, 232.
Industrialism, developed by

women, 2.
in religious belief, 245.
Infanticide in savagery, 206.
Infants, fate of, 206.
Inhabitants of the spirit world,

their duties and functions,

257.
Initiation of young women, 210.
Intoxication, savage women free

from, 235.
Intuition of women, 275.
Invention in the food arts,

14.
of language, 188.

INDEX.

291

Jack-at-all-trades, woman a, 139-
160.

Kapa-making, 54.
Kitchen, invented by women, 235.
Knapsacks for women, 124.
Knife, woman's invention, 26.
Knitting in art, 168.
Kumlien, Ludwig, 80.

Labrets worn by women, 184.

Lace-making, primitive, 168.

Lacework, 68.

Laconperie, Terrien de, 267.

Lady, evolution of the fine, 177.

Lamp stoves, Eskimo, 92.

Landscape gardening, 186.

Lang, Andrew, 242, 246.

Language as a witness of wom-
an's work, 11, 282.
disseminated by women, 196.
of women in harmony with

their duties, 189.
woman's share in, 188-204.

Lapidaries, women as, 139.

Leather industry, the, 70.

Leaven, origin of, 30.

Leland, Charles G., 249.

Lever used in pressing cassava,
39.

Ling Roth, H., 206.

Livingstone, David, 7, 26, 183,
207, 215.

Loads borne by women, 129.

Loan words in savage tongues,
198.

Looms and loom weaving, 59.

Looping, 56.

Love, language of, 193.

Lullaby, a Zuni, 176.

Lummis, C. F., 219.
29

Machinery, women as inventors
of, 156, 280.

Maguey fibre, 62.

Maize goddess, 261.

Mall, or common hammer, 29.

Man, E. H., 7, 107, 153, 183, 210,
212, 217, 236, 254.

Markings of textiles on pottery,
97.

Marriage, kinds of, 215.
relation in savagery, 212.
relation to number of wives,
215.

Matrimony, its evolution in rela-
tion to woman, 213.

Mat robes in Polynesia, 53.

Matron, evolution of the, 159.

Matthews, Washington, 16, 37,
61, 156, 265.

McKenney, Thomas L., 251.

Medicine, practice of, by women,
149.

Medicine women, 256.

Melody older than harmony, 175.

Men in presence of death, 249.

Men's work regulated by wom-
en's, 9.

Metamorphosis of language, 188.

Metate and muller, 22.

Militancy developed by men, 2.
in religious belief, 245.
versus industrialism, 2.

Milk-yielding animals, 151.

Millers, women as, 142.

Mills, right and curved motion
in, 22.

Mincing knife woman's univer-
sal knife in savagery, 27.

Minerals exploited by women, 25,
277.

Minerva, 267.

292 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Mines, women in, 131.

Mirrors, Nature's, 182.

Modelling in clay, 95.

Modern appreciation of savage
woman's art, 173.

Modern women's work, 133.

Modesty, development of, 237.

Monandry, 228.

Monotone the foundation of mu-
sic, 174.

Monotony the beginning of art,
164."

Mooney, James, 104, 143, 174.

Morelet, Abbe, 182,

Morgan, Lewis H., 37, 221, 228.

Mortars and pestles, 19.

Mortuary customs, 251.

Mother goddess, 259.

Moulding in clay, 95.

Mourning for the dead, 252.

Murdoch, John. 8, 75, 85, 92, 125.

Music, theory of savage, 175.
woman's, sympathetic with her
occupations, 176.

Musical composition not conge-
nial to women, 174.
instruments not used by sav-
age women, 174.

Musters, Lieutenant, 84, 183.

Mythical motive in pottery, 172.

Mythology enriched by women,
247.

Myths spread by women, 247.

Naming of girls, 210.
National life, women in, 240.
Natural objects, accessory to dec-
oration, 169.
suggest forms in pottery, 109.
Nature as food purveyor, 15.
Neith, patroness of weavers, 269.

Nets in shaping pottery, 96.
Netting, 56, 67.

in art, 168.
Nursery tales, 202.
Nut, Egyptian mother goddess,

261.
Nuttall, Mrs. Zelia, 133.

Occupations in the preparation

of food, 15.
Old women, uncanny, 256.

in mythology. 271.
Onomatopoeia, 191.
Ornamentation on pottery, 104.
Ovens, invented by women, 235.

original, 32.

Pack women in Germany, 134.

Painting the dead, 254.

Papoose frames, 118.

Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 6.

Paste for pottery, 93.

Patterns of pottery in Nature,
109.

Payne, E. J., 3, 30, 189, 262.

Pemmican-making, 28.

Personification, 192.

Physiology of women, 1.

Pike, Warburton, 8.

Pits, cooking in, 35.

Plants, in relation to woman's
work, 146, 277.

Ploss, Hermann, 1.

Plough, primitive, 25.

Plutarch, 12, 239.

Poison extracted from vegeta-
bles, 24.

Polyandry, 216, 221.

Polygamy, 216.

Polygyny, 222.

Pots for cooking, 34.

INDEX.

293

Potters, women the first, 91-113.
Potter's wheel wanting1, 99.

substitutes therefor, 100.
Pottery, occupations involved in,
102.

savage uses for, 108.

still made by savages, 92.
Powell, J. W.,*240.
Powers, Stephen, 253, 257.
Presents to the bride, 214.
Price, F. G. H., 23, 129, 207, 209.
Primitive society illustrated in
modern rural life, 232.

woman poorly furnished, 3.
Privileges of married women, 230.
Promiscuity in marriage, 217.
Property of women, 2-40.
Prophetesses, 256.
Prytaneum, the, 262.
Psychology in relation to reli-
gion, 247.
Pulley, a rude form of, 154.
Pump, a very primitive, 25.
Punaluan family, 221.

Quarriers of soapstone, 33.

Rabbit-skin robes, 62.
Rawhide for lines, 75.
Refinement not born of cruel-
ty, 7.
Relationship and marriage, 218.
Religion, defined, 241.

in common life, 243.

of women, 241-284.
Religious motive in pottery, 172.
Rights of married women, 230.
Rings, carrying, for the head, 123.
Roadwoman, the Dyak, 128.
Roasting seeds before grinding
them, 20.

Rockhiil, W. W., 182, 222.

Saddler's knife woman's inven-
tion, 27.

Salt as food, 38.

Salt mining, 145.

Savage life a key to the religion
of savages, 246.

Schweinfurth, Georg, 17, 20, 185.

Scissors, substitutes for, 85.

Scrapers for hides, 73, 77, 82.

Seed gatherers, 16.

Seething, primitive mode of cook-
ing, 34.

Sekhet or Pasht, Egyptian god-
dess of the under-world, 262.
• Seler, Cecilia, 2.

Sellers, George, 146.

Sewing, a skin-worker's art, 67,
85, 88.

Shamoying, 76.

Shells in pottery, 94.

Shoemakers, women as, 84.

Shoulders, carrying on the, 121.

Shredded bark for cinctures, 55.

Sifting, woman's art, 20.

Sign language of women, 195.

Silk as art material, 167.
in mythology, 267.

Simon, Jules, 5.

Sinew, in textile work, 55.

Sirens, the, 270.

Sita, Hindu goddess of the fur-
row, 261.

Skin dressing. 70-90.
among Eskimo, 78.
among Sioux, 82.
varieties of, 72.

Slavery, marriage relation in
American, 219.
of woman, 280.

294 WOMAN'S SHARE IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE.

Slip on pottery, 103.
Smoking food, 35.
Soapstone, cooking in, 145.

woman's mineral, 33.
Social order founded on women,

205-240, 282.
Spindle, the, 58.
Spinning, 56.
Stevenson, James, 106.
Stevenson, Mrs. Matilda C, 260.
Stevenson, Mrs. Sarah Y., 269.
Stone workers, 73, 77, 270.
Storehouses invented by women,

18.
Sugar gathered from reeds, 24.
Sun worship, 265.
Survival of early arts, 4.
Syndyasmian family, 227.

Tacitus, 215, 239.

Tailors, women the first, 84, 85.

Tanners, women, 71.

Tapa cloth, how decorated, 167.

Tapa-making, 54.

Tattooing in relation to writing,

195.
Taylor, Isaac, 77.
Telegraphy, primitive, 196.
Tempering of clay, 94.
Tent-makers, women, 84, 153.
Textile art, 41-69.
woman's invention, 171.
woman's, up to the invention

of machinery, 69.
Textile beauty, how secured, 165.
Textile material well known by

savage women, 41.
Thomson, W. M., 23, 59, 95, 120,

148.
Time as an element in music, 175.
Torches, women makers of, 155.

Toting peculiar to women, 121.
Transportation, primitive, 114.
Tree-climbing for food, 23.
Trotter, Coutts, 7.
Turner, George, 53, 68, 235.
Twined basketry, 47.
Twining, a type of textiles, 56.
Twisting devices, 56.
Tylor, E. B., 199, 261.

Uniformity the foundation of
art, 164.

Variety of corn preparations, 143.

Vegetable world explored by
women, 15.

Venus, type of goddesses, 258.

Vermin as destroyers of grana-
ries, 18.

Village goddess, the, 249.

Villages laid out by women, 84.

Vocal apparatus of women, 203.

Volubility of women, 201.

Wafer, Lionel, describes loom, 63.
Wailing for the dead, 253.
Wake, C. Staniland, frequently

quoted, chap, x, 205-240.
Wallace, A. R., 129.
Wallace, Robert, 129.
War, women in, 238.
Ward, Lester F., 2, 231.
Wardrobe, Eskimo, 87.
Washerwomen, primitive, 155.
Washing the dead, 253.
Water goddess, 265.
Water vessels of bamboo, 25.
Weaving, woman's art, 41-69.

in mythology, 268.
Weaving without loom, 53.

with loom, 59.

INDEX.

295

Wedding day, the. 212.
Whitney, William Dwight, 189.
Widows in savagery, 230.
Wife holding, methods of, 216.
WTife, value of a, 213.
Winnowing, woman's art, 20.
Wives, number of, 215.
Woman, author of industrial-
ism, 3.
her feeble endowment, 3.
in savagery not a brutalized

slave, 6, 275.
the best dictionary, 190.
Woman's boat, designed for
freight and passengers,
126.
Women's work not always de-
grading to men, 10.
Women, as artists, 161-187.
as beasts of burden, 114-138.
as conservators of speech, 201.

Women as food bringers, 14-40.

as jacks-at-all-trades, 139-160.

as potters, 91-113.

as skin dressers, 70-90.

as weavers, 41-69.

good on hunting parties, 8.

in political life, 240.

in religion, 241-285.

made for work, 127.

not musicians, 177.'

tenacious of language, 202.
Wood, J. G., 152.
Wood workers, women as, 153.
Working women, modern, 5.
Weight, Ashur, 10.
Writing, women as inventors of,
195.

Yarn-making, 56.

Yarrow, H. C, 251.

Yokes for women's shoulders. 121.

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