Search -
Woman's Share in Social Culture (American Women Series : Images and Realities)
Woman's Share in Social Culture - American Women Series : Images and Realities Author:Anne Spencer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Woman's Share in Social Culture THE PRIMITIVE WORKING-WOMAN Regular industry is rather an acquired habit than a natural tendency in the human race; and wom... more »en rather than men seem first to have attained the discipline of a "steady job." The biologic hints of the busy bee, the industrious beaver, the ant, to whose example the human sluggard was long ago commended, all seem to have been taken lightly by the primitive man. Primitive woman, however, in a past too remote for any present trace of its earliest social processes, was harnessed to definite tasks which began with each morning. 1 Ward shows that although modern economists often talk as though "labor was natural to man and as though the main question was how to give men work enough to do" (and we may add of the right sort and under right conditions) "the original problem was how to make men work." He tells usthat in the primitive state, "Only the work of women in caring for the men and the children and in performing the drudgery of the camp approaches the character of labor" as we understand the term. 1 Lester F. Ward, Pure Sociology, Chap. 13. To be sure, primitive man had occasional activities of a strenuous and often dangerous sort. They are I indicated by the saying of the Australian Kurnai: 2 "A man hunts, spears fish, fights and sits about; the rest is woman's work." Professor Haddon, writing interestingly about the primitive people of the Torres Straits, says: "The men fished, fought, built houses, did a little gardening, made fish-lines and fish-hooks, spears and other implements, constructed dance-masks, headdresses and all the paraphernalia for the various ceremonies. They performed all the rites and the dances, and in addition did a good deal of strutting up and down, loafing and 'yarning.' The women coo...« less