ture death or to great physical suffering, as well as those which segregate men from the social enjoyments of home and doom them to long exile in cold, storm, and darkness.
V. The last privilege of the sex—for only the great, cardinal privileges of womanhood need be enumerated—is woman's virtual exemption from the care of earning her livelihood and that of her offspring. Here, as in what has been said heretofore, I have disregarded exceptional and abnormal instances, and traced industrial and social customs, as men following the promptings of their dominant sentiments have been able to establish them. I have taken, too—and this seems legitimate—my illustrations from the most advanced types of civilization, rather than from the inchoate manhood of the savage and barbaric epochs and conditions. I do not forget to have seen women tugging baskets of manure to their miserable fields, or buried under burdens of hay, in Switzerland; nor the Sunday I drove by women mixing mortar and carrying hods of bricks up shaking ladders in the elegant city of Vienna; nor how all-prevalent poverty has equalized the lot of the two sexes in Russia.[1]
No law of social completeness is to be drawn from such exceptional instances. It is only on those broad lines where the instinctive tendencies of the dominant sex have not been hindered in their complete development by conditions imposed by primitive barbarism or slavery that the natural growth of a social status is to be studied.
But even in our times and among the most advanced races there are many exceptions to the general assignment to men of the primal care for daily bread. Very many men, through accident, sickness, and mental or moral incapacity, get disabled in the struggle for life, and the burden they were appointed to carry falls unnaturally upon a wife, a sister, a daughter. Widows carry on successfully the farms which a dead husband had cleared. Sisters take places in stores, in schools, engage as copyists, and contribute to periodicals, and so bring to the family fund the stipend which a deceased father, a dissipated husband, or an invalid brother ought to have earned. The social organism gets mutilated and wounded, and these are Nature's efforts at
- ↑ "The women are more diligent than the men; and the hardest work is often turned over to them, as is generally the case where peasant properties prevail. They are only 'females of the male,' and have few womanly qualities. They toil at the same task as men in the fields, ride astride like them, often without saddles; and the mortality is excessive among the neglected children, who are carried out into the fields, where the babies lie the whole day with a bough over them, and covered with flies, while the poor mother is at work. Eight out of ten children are said to die before ten years old in rural Russia."—(From a Review of F. P. Verney's Rural Life in Russia, in the Nineteenth Century, of January, 1887.)
