rly, when human
mating is over and the family hearth is built, and especially when
children have entered into the home life, the main occupation of man
and wife is to provide maintenance for the family. The need of food,
clothing, and shelter is common to the race. The requirements of the
family determine largely both the amount and the kind of work that is
done to meet them. However broad and elevated may be the interests of
the modern gentleman and his cultured wife, they cannot forget that
the physical needs of their family are as insistent as those of the
unrefined day laborer.

65. =Primitive Economics.=--In primitive times the family provided
everything for itself. In forest and field man and woman foraged for
food, cooked it at the camp-fire that they made, and rested under a
temporary shelter. If they required clothing they robbed the wild
beasts of their hide and fur or wove an apron of vegetable fibre.
Physical wants were few and required comparatively little labor. In
the pastoral stage the flocks and herds provided food and clothing.
Under the patriarchal system the woman was the economic slave. She was
goatherd and milkmaid, fire-tender and cook, tailor and tent-maker. It
was she who coaxed the grains to grow in the first cultivated field,
and experimented with the first kitchen garden. She was the dependable
field-hand for the sowing and reaping, when agriculture became the
principal means of subsistence. But woman's position has steadily
improved. She is no longer the slave but the helper. The peasant woman
of Europe still works in the fields, but American women long ago
confined themselves to indoor tasks, except in the gathering of
special crops like cotton and cranberries. Home economics have taught
the advantage of division of labor and co-operation.

66. =Division of Labor.=--Because of greater fitness for the heavy
labor of the field and barn, the man and his sons naturally became the
agriculturists and stock-breeders as civilization improved. It was
man's function to produce the raw material for home manufacture. He
ploughed and fertilized the soil, planted the various seeds,
cultivated the growing crops, and gathered in the harvest. It was his
task to perform the rougher part of preparing the raw material for
use. He threshed the wheat and barley on the threshing-floor and
ground the corn at the mill, and then turned over the product to his
wife. He bred animals for dairy or market, milked his c