WOMAN AS AN INVENTOR AND MANUFACTURER. 



95 



mand a certain treatment. Women of the lowest grades of cul- 

 ture have not been slow in discovering this ; so that between them 

 and the natural product there has been a kind of understanding 

 or co-operation leading to local styles. If these women were 

 moved far away, they carried oftentimes these processes with 

 them and plied their old trade upon such strange materials as 

 they discovered in the new home." So negro women brought 

 basket-making from Africa to America and taught it to the In- 

 dians. 



Subsidiary to the weaving and basket-making practiced by 

 women in savagery are spinning, netting, looping, braiding, sew- 

 ing, and embroidery. Bark-cloth weaving is practiced by women 

 in the tropics all round the world. " Each and all of these re- 

 quire tools which the workwomen must fashion for themselves. 

 And, though the earth 

 had the raw materials 

 in abundance, it did not 

 yield them without a 

 search which would do 

 honor to the manufac- 

 turers of our day. . . . 

 Aboriginal woman's 

 basketry excites the ad- 

 miration of all lovers of 

 fine work. It is difficult 

 to say which receives 

 the most praise the 

 forms, the coloring, the 

 patterns, or the delicacy 

 of manipulation. Pri- 

 marily, her basketry 

 divides itself into two 



sorts of types the woven and the seived, the former built up on a 

 warp, the latter produced by the continuous stitching of a coil. 

 Of these two main classes there are many subclasses, which have 

 been necessitated by the nature of the material which the fabri- 

 cator has at her hands, and by the uses to which the products 

 have to be put." 



Weaving is the climax of the textile industry ; and " among 

 all the types of modern savagery American, negroid, and Ma- 

 layo-Polynesian intricate processes of weaving were in vogue 

 before they were approached by the white race." In comparison 

 with the complex and world-embracing activity of modern weav- 

 ing and commerce, " how simple the process in savagery ! The 

 women there go to the fields or to the animals for the fiber, or hair, 

 or wool. They transport the material on their backs, in carrying 



Fio. 4. 



-Eskimo Fat Scraper of Reindeer Antler 

 and Rawhide. (After Mason.) 



