THE INTEGRATION OF THE SEXES — MARRIAGE 285 



are conventions, social attentions, legal discriminations, 

 political privileges, and obliteration, for the most part, of 

 the objective "sex tags" society places upon the individual. 

 Women sometimes charge industrial and poHtical systems 

 with being man made, demanding that society be revamped so 

 that a woman can automatically take the place of a man and 

 the reverse. The major premise of this syllogism has the 

 appearance of soundness, and once granted, it would follow 

 that the complete social integration of the sexes calls for a 

 new system in which biological sex distinctions are to be 

 ignored. 



We may, however, appraise this ideal of modern woman by 

 looking back upon our ancestors and upon living savages 

 who resemble them. The popular idea of savage life is a 

 social order in which the women do all the work and are 

 barred from all pleasures of life; but upon closer inspection, 

 this is not a fair characterization of the part woman plays in 

 savage society. However, our concern at this moment is not 

 so much with the amount and kind of work savage women 

 did, as with the degree of specialization of labor with respect 

 to sex. It does appear that in savage society the distinctions 

 are sharp; few tasks are looked upon as appropriate for both 

 sexes. If the women make baskets, the men leave them alone; 

 if the women hoe the fields, the men stay away, and vice 

 versa. We are often told that modern industrialism deprives 

 woman of her aboriginal occupations. Thus, the baking of 

 bread gradually passed into the hands of men; weaving and 

 spinning, the ancient and honored work of woman, was grad- 

 ually driven from the home to the factory dominated by man, 

 and so on. But too much should not be made of this analogy, 

 for there is evidence that even in savage society shifts 

 occurred from one sex to the other; the question of importance 

 is, as to how successful society has been in keeping vocations 

 open to the sexes on equal terms. In modern savage society, 

 as we have hinted, there are few, if any, specialized 

 vocations without sex discrimination. On the contrary, 

 these distinctions are so emphasized that they frequently 

 rise to the level of taboos, and anything that is closely 

 associated with one sex is approached by the other with 

 caution. Every reader of primitive lore knows how rigidly 



