h woman is always consigned where civilization and
religion are not, she was little less than a beast of burden,
busy with cooking, the manufacture of pottery, mats, baskets,
moccasins, etc., a tiller of the ground, a nurse for her
own children, and at all times a servant to the commands and
passions of the stronger sex.[172]

Primitive woman was therefore undoubtedly very busy, but I have seen
no reason to believe that she considered her condition unfortunate.
Our great-grandmothers were also very busy, but they were apparently
not discontented. There was no reason why woman should not labor
in primitive society. The forces which withdrew her from labor were
expressions of later social conditions. Speaking largely, these
considerations were the desire of men to preserve the beauty of women,
and their desire to withdraw them from association with other men.
It is the connection in thought and fact between idle and beautiful
women and wealth, indeed, which has frequently led to the keeping of
a superfluous number of such women as a sign of wealth.

The exemption of women from labor, in short, implied an economic
surplus which early society did not possess. The lower classes of
modern society do not possess it either, and there the women are
still "drudges," if we want to use that word about a situation which
is normal, in view of the economic condition of the men and women
concerned. It was necessary that primitive society, in the absence
of elaborate machinery for doing things, in unstable and precarious
food conditions, and without resources accumulated from preceding
generations, should utilize _all_ its forces. The struggle for
existence, in its harshest sense, was but little mitigated, and
no group could have spared at all the industry of women. Even if
primitive life had been as hard as Hobbes would have it, "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short," mere negative, habitual hardness
and miserableness of condition did not get the attention of primitive
society particularly. Their life was hard, as we look at it, not as
they looked at it. They could not compare themselves with the future,
and comparisons with the past were doubtless in their favor. The best
returns from activity will of course follow when each individual
is doing something he is specially well fitted to do, and natural
selection seems to have seen to it that primitive society should so
divide the labor as best to utilize socia