-and-ready fashion, with the biological tendency to consecrate the
female to the function of motherhood and conserve her energies to that
end, leaving other kinds of work to the male. It would be an obvious
advantage to a tribe in which woman, relieved from the necessity of
physical struggle for food and defence, was able to attend to children
and the more peaceful side of family life. Children would not only
benefit thereby, but the home with all its civilising, humanising
influences would develop more rapidly. Assuming variations in tribal
life in this direction, there is no question as to which tribe that
would stand the better chance of survival. The development of life has
proceeded here as elsewhere by differentiation and specialisation; and
while the tasks demanding the more sustained physical exertions were
left to man, and to the performance of which his sexual nature offered
no impediment, woman became more and more specialised for maternity and
domestic occupations. This, I hasten to add, is not at all intended as a
plea for denying to women the right to participate in the wider social
life of the species. I am trying to explain a social phase, and neither
justifying nor condemning its perpetuation.

FOOTNOTES:

[65] Dr. Iwan Bloch, _The Sexual Life of Our Time_, p. 97.

[66] E. D. Starbuck, _The Psychology of Religion_, p. 401.

[67] _The Psychological Phenomena of Christianity_, p. 419.

[68] _Primitive Paternity_, 2 vols., 1909-10.

[69] _The Mystic Rose_, p. 191.

[70] See Frazer's _Taboo and the Perils of the Soul_, pp. 145-63, and
Crawley's _Mystic Rose_.

[71] _Man and Woman_, p. 15.

[72] _Taboo_, pp. 163-4.

[73] _Religion of the Semites_, p. 142.

[74] A long list of animals that were sacred to various Semitic tribes
has been compiled by Robertson Smith, _Kinship and Marriage in Early
Arabia_, pp. 194-201.

[75] Robertson Smith, _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_, pp. 306-7.

[76] _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 427-9. For a fuller discussion of
the subject, see _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, by Havelock Ellis,
1901.

[77] Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, p. 666.

[78] Westermarck, p. 666.

[79] Frazer, _Taboo_, p. 150.

[80] See the Rev. Principal Donaldson's _Woman: her Position and
Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome, and among the Early Christians_,
bk. iii.

[81] For the general influence of these beliefs about woman in
determining her