THE STATUS OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN. 445 



carried on ; and necessarily the more males are drafted off for military 

 service, the more females must be called on to fill their places as work- 

 ers. Hence the extent to which in Germany women are occupied in 

 rough, out-of-door tasks digging, wheeling, carrying burdens ; hence 

 the extent to which in France heavy field-operations are shared in by 

 women. That the English housewife is less a drudge than her Ger- 

 man sister, that among shopkeepers in England she is not required to 

 take so large a share in the business as she is among shoj^keepers in 

 France, and tjiat in England the out-of-door work done by women is 

 both smaller in quantity and lighter in kind, is clear; as it is clear 

 that this difierence is associated with a lessened demand on the male 

 population for purposes of offense and defense. And then there may 

 be added the fact of kindred meaning, that in the United States, where 

 till the late war the degree of militancy had been so small, and the 

 industrial type of social structure and action so predominant, women 

 have reached a higher status than anywhere else. 



Evidence furnished by existing Eastern nations, so far as it can 

 be disentangled, supports this view. China, with its long history of 

 wars causing consolidations, dissolutions, reconsolidations, etc., going 

 back more than 2,000 years b, c, and continuing during Tartar and 

 Mongol conquests to be militant in its activities and arrangementSj 

 has, notwithstanding industrial growth, retained the militant type of 

 Structure ; and absolutism in the state has been accompanied by ab- 

 solutism in the family, qualified in the one as in the other only by the 

 customs and sentiments which industrialism has fostered : wives are 

 bought ; concubinage is common among those adequately well off; 

 widows are sometimes sold as concubines by fahters-in-law ; and 

 women join in hard work, sometimes to the extent of being harnessed 

 to the plough ; while, nevertheless, this low status is practically raised 

 by a public opinion that checks the harsh treatment legally allowable. 

 Similarly Japan, which, passing through long periods of internal con- 

 flict ending in integration, acquired an organization completely mili- 

 tant, under which political freedom was unknown, showed a simul- 

 taneous absence of freedom in the household buying of wives, concu- 

 binage, divorce at mere will of husband, crucifixion or decapitation 

 for wife's adulteiy ; while, along with the growth of industrialism 

 characterizing the later days of Japan, there went such improvement 

 in the legal status of women that the husband was no longer allowed 

 to take the law into his own hands in case of adultery ; and now, 

 though women are occasionally seen using the flail, yet mostly the 

 men, according to Sir Rutherford Alcock, " leave their women to the 

 lighter work of the house, and perform themselves the harder out-door 

 labor." 



It is, of course, difficult to generalize phenomena into the genesis 

 of which there enter factors so numerous and involved character of 



