e society and
authority of women.

In the Brazils, the females are obliged to follow their husbands to war,
to supply the place of beasts of burden, and to carry on their backs
their children, provisions, hammocks, and every thing wanted in the
field.

In the Isthmus of Darien, they are sent along with warriors and
travellers, as we do baggage horses. Even their Queen appeared before
some English gentlemen, carrying her sucking child, wrapt in a red
blanket.

The women among the Indians of America are what the Helots were among
the Spartans, a vanquished people obliged to toil for their conquerors.
Hence on the banks of the Oroonoko we have heard of mothers slaying
their daughters out of compassion, and smothering them in the hour of
their birth. They consider this barbarous pity as a virtue.

Father Joseph Gumilla, reproving one of them for this inhuman crime,
received the following answer:--"I wish to God, Father, I wish to God,
that my mother had, by my death, prevented the manifold distresses I
have endured, and have yet to endure as long as I live. Had she kindly
stilled me in my birth, I should not have felt the pain of death, nor
the numberless other pains to which life has subjected me. Consider,
Father, our deplorable condition. Our husbands go to hunt with their
bows and arrows, and trouble themselves no farther: we are dragged along
with one infant at our breast, and another in a basket. They return in
the evening without any burden; we return with the burden of our
children. Though tired with long walking, we are not allowed to sleep,
but must labor the whole night, in grinding maize to make _chica_ for
them. They get drunk, and in their drunkenness beat us, draw us by the
hair of the head, and tread us under foot. A young wife is brought upon
us and permitted to abuse us and our children. What kindness can we show
to our female children, equal to that of relieving them from such
servitude, more bitter a thousand times than death? I repeat again,
would to God my mother had put me under ground, the moment I was born."

"The men," says Commodore Byron, in his account of the inhabitants of
South America, "exercise a most despotic authority over their wives whom
they consider in the same view they do any other part of their property,
and dispose of them accordingly. Even their common treatment of them is
cruel. For, though the toil and hazard of procuring food lies entirely
on the women, yet they are not s