e may be a question as to the
right of the Gaucho women to occupy even a minor place in a history of
the development of woman; for the feminine Gaucho has but one individual
characteristic. She is dirty, she is slovenly, she is lazy, she is a
mere animal, a slave, a beast of burden, but all these things may be
found in other extant or past civilizations,--to give them a term of
courtesy,--and it would seem hardly needful to bring to the reader's
attention a peculiar people if the qualities mentioned were the only
ones to be found among these women. But this is not so, for the Gaucho
woman has a preeminence in one respect: she is absolutely the most
unmoral woman upon the face of the earth, and she has been so ever since
her singular class came into recognized existence. This does not say she
is immoral; her depravity is too open, too much a matter of course, too
entirely a condition of her existence to be deemed immorality. It has
been said that it is a wise child who knows his own father; but among
the Gauchos it was a remarkable woman who had any assured ideas as to
the father of any particular one of her children. Marriage existed as a
form of possession; but as all Gaucho women who had reached maturity had
families,--and maturity in that climate came at about the age of
twelve,--whether they had gone through the ceremony of marriage or not,
it will be understood that few Gauchos, male or female, ever thought of
troubling to be formally wedded. Sir Francis Head, who, about the
opening of the last century, wrote a most entertaining account of his
travels across the Andes and Pampas, tells us that if one asked a young
Gaucho senorita who might be the father of the child that she was
carrying, the almost invariable and entirely artless reply would be,
"_Quien sabe_?" and though Lieutenant Strain, who followed in the
footsteps of Sir Francis some fifty years later, contradicted the
latter's account of the surliness and fierceness of the male Gaucho, he
did not find it lie in his mouth to defend the virtue of the women.

Such absolute, universal, and unblushing unmorality as this is worthy of
chronicle and really is hardly shocking, since it is so perfectly matter
of fact that it simply resolves itself into a rule of life alien from
our ideas. Yet, on the other hand, it is not as the unmorality of the
natives of the South Sea islands, for example, where in their primitive
state the retention of that which among us is known