288 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



review of what has been written on the biological fitness of 

 women to do man's work, but from the very first, she has 

 shown a capacity for hard work, and while on the average 

 not so strong as man, she can, if need be, come sufficiently 

 near that average to satisfy most requirements. Anyhow, 

 modern society gives so much concern to the health and 

 well-being of employes, that the danger here, if any, will be 

 transitory; the expectation being that segregation will 

 reassert itself along favorable lines. Again, the increasing 

 economic independence of women is believed to impede 

 marriage, to encourage divorce, and to stimulate birth con- 

 trol. If this be true, economic factors are not only controlling 

 marriage as a social institution, but also exercising a control 

 over the biological factors of reproduction as well. 



DIVORCE 



Current discussion of divorce often leaves one the im- 

 pression that the practice is something new. On the contrary 

 it is as old as marriage itself, for while a few primitive 

 peoples are said to consider marriage insoluble, as do 

 orthodox Hindus, these are exceptions. Hobhouse examined 

 the data for 271 independent tribes, finding that in about 72 

 per cent of these the parties could separate at will, 24 per 

 cent could do so under stated conditions, while in only 4 per 

 cent was divorce barred. From this it appears that divorce 

 is recognized almost as widely as marriage. As to the fre- 

 quency with which these people exercise the option of divorce, 

 one cannot be definite for want of statistics, but the casual 

 observations of travelers indicate that divorce among them 

 frequently exceeds the civilized rate. However, not being 

 able to determine these frequencies, we cannot say in how 

 far they are due to economic conditions. Yet, we can correlate 

 the degree of divorce toleration with the economic type of 

 culture ; thus, the 271 tribes just referred to were about equally 

 distributed between pastoral peoples, hunters and agricultur- 

 ists, and these types, in turn, manifested the same degree of 

 tolerance toward divorce. It would follow, then, that neither 

 denial nor freedom of divorce depends upon the economic 

 status of a people. This is consistent with certain recent stud- 



