dustrial order in all primitive life. In apportioning sex-gifts women are generally denied the possession to any considerable extent of "inventive genius"; and from the point of view that "inventive genius loses sight of the practical and yields wholly to the spur of anticipated success residing in the mind" the denial is surely just. All the essential processes of peaceful industry, however, all those severely practical activities which led directly toward care for the individual life and comfort, and the start of the primitive home toward social well-being, were, as all students agree, initiated by women in the dim past. Hence, if woman is not markedly the inventor of the race she is the mother of inventions as well as of inventors. In the picturesque summary by Mason of the life of the X North American Indians, he describes the primitive woman as the first cutler, butcher, currier, tanner, tailor, dressmaker, milliner, hatter, toymaker, upholsterer, cook, spinner, weaver, sail-maker, decorative artist ("inventing the chevrons, herring-bones, frets and scrolls of all future art"), the first pack-animal and burden-bearer, the first miller, agriculturist, nursery-man and florist. As he declares: "All the peaceful arts of to-day were once woman's peculiar province." Markham pictures the man-drudge— 4 "Bowed with the weight of centuries he leans The emptiness of ages in his face And on his back the burden of the world." 'Otis T. Mason, Woman's Share in Primitive Culture. But long before the centuries were counted, or the prehistoric ages set in their order, when even the rude hoe of Millet's peasant was undreamed of, the womandrudge scraped the light soil with her sharp-edged stone or shell, made holes with her pointed "diggingstick" and planted the treasured seed preserved, perhaps by stealth, from one harvest to start another. And "in her face," however coarse-featured and unlovely, the "emptiness" is touched with human purpose, as in patient service she binds upon her "back the burden" of the child, and goes about her unceasing toil. Wherever man's power of achievement has proudly made its mark upon the labor processes that have builded civilization, there, could he but trace them, are the prophetic signs of the handicraft of women in their crude but heroic beginnings of manual arts. The reason for this priority of women in useful labor is of course obvious. Woman, from the first, enjoyed the special tutoring of that most persistent and effective trainer in industrial education which the world of nature has yet produced, the human infant. Any family of children, any single child, even, can provide the four prime essentials of discipline to regular work—namely, an incentive to labor which cannot be ignored, an obvious suggestion of things to be done, a time-schedule (including a self-winding alarm clock), and a satisfying reward for duty well done! The woman and the child constituted, it is clear, the first social group. "Mother and child," says Lippert, Julius Lippert, Kulturgeschichte. 5 V "were the simplest elements of the earliest organization." The biologic foundation for motherhood was so securely laid before the human was reached that our race started with this relationship as its most important and well-known social asset. Therefore woman long before man received the training of offspring in the capacity of inciter and director of labor. It is a recent decision of pedagogy that "no child should be obliged to employ an incompetent mother"; but the human race started with a clear conception that every child had a right to the service of some sort of a mother. And, as in primitive society all women are married, and all who can are required to have children, the first "female industrial school" is very ancient. Woman, as a human being of the mother-sex, found her job already waiting for her when she arrived upon the scene, and she has never been allowed to become an industrial "tramp" seeking her work afar. For the same reasons, woman has never had at her command those convenient "fictions" which have served man as ways of escaping irksome labor, and as means for procuring better opportunities for easier self-support. In short, woman, from the primitive mother to the modern housewife, has seldom, if ever, had a chance to "go a-fishing" at housecleaning time, or to plead "urgent business down-town" in domestic crises. Pressed to her special tasks by the biologic push itself, primitive woman began at once to minister to the primal necessities of the race. In previous incarna tions of the mother-spirit she had been drilled to suckle young with tenderness; to postpone for their comfort her own rest and play; to pick up food for offspring and feed them before her own hunger was appeased; to build nests for brooding and caretaking of the helpless; to develop courage and cunning for the protection of infant life; to engage in valiant essays into unknown fields of labor and of education, in order to train her little ones for independent life, and in this manner was made ready for the first experimentation of human existence in the region of social culture. Primitive woman thus carried over from the lower animal life into the human sphere a larger treasure than man had yet acquired of that pre-human tendency toward unselfish service to one's kin which has builded the family, and later the State. In that precedence of unselfish service the primitive woman implanted at the very centre of human progress that principle of "mutual aid" which Kropotkin shows has from the beginning of sentient life modified and chastened the selfish strife for individual ends. In this was the first great contribution of earliest womanhood to social culture. 6 How and when man was first consciously and adequately harnessed to constant and peaceful labor is still matter of dispute among sociologists; but all agree that among the social forces that pressed him into the industrial yoke was the need of the human child for two parents and that both should serve the child and society from one common family impulse. In that 'Prince Kropotkin, Mutual Aid. "prolongation of human infancy" which 8 Fiske regards as the "chief agency toward civilization," the mother could not do it all. Whether or not we hold with Morgan, 9 McLennan, 10 Bachofen, and others to the theories of "Horde" and of "Mother-right" which affirm a period of woman's supremacy in social order at the start, we must believe (and from evidence adduced by both the followers and opponents of these theories) that, in the sphere of family rule and that private law of custom which antedated political and legal forms of control, the primitive woman had precedence and power. On the other hand, whether or not we hold with 11 Westermarck and others that "pairing was from the first the rule among the human race," and that the human father did not allow the birds and higher beasts to outdo him in conjugal affection and in the aid rendered the mother in care of offspring, and that he took his toll of power as family "head" from the first in payment for his coöperation, we must still believe that a father who comes and goes at will, and who at best rarely elects to stay for life with one mate and her young, is a less sure support to the growing family than the mother who is fastened to the infant from the hidden beginnings of its life until special care is no longer needed. All theories of primitive social groupings seem alike to indicate that for a longer or shorter period, in a more or less com John Fiske, The Destiny of Man. Lewis H. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity. J. F. McLennan, The Patriarchal Theory. 10 J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht. "Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage. |