It is a motor matter, therefore,
and one of the first industries undertaken by men. There are many
exceptions to the general statement that early manufacture (weapons
excepted) was in the hands of women, but the exceptions may be
regarded as variations due to the fixation of habit through single and
peculiar incidents, or they are the beginning of the later period when
man begins to practice woman's activities.
The primitive division of labor among the sexes was not in any sense
an arrangement dictated by the men, but a habit into which both
men and women fell, to begin with, through their difference of
organization--a socially useful habit whose rightness no one
questioned and whose origin no one thought of looking into. There is,
moreover, a tendency in habits to become more fixed than is inherently
necessary. The man who does any woman's work is held in contempt not
only by men, but by women.
As to the Indian women, they are far from complaining of their
lot. On the contrary, they would despise their husbands could
they stoop to any menial office, and would think it conveyed
an imputation upon their own conduct.
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