92 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ture death or to great physical suffering, as well as those which 

 segregate men from the social enjoyments of home and doom them 

 to long exile in cold, storm, and darkness. 



V. The last privilege of the sex — for only the great, cardinal 

 privileges of womanhood need be enumerated — is woman's vir- 

 tual exemption from the care of earning her livelihood and that 

 of her offspring. Here, as in what has been said heretofore, I 

 have disregarded exceptional and abnormal instances, and traced 

 industrial and social customs, as men following the promptings 

 of their dominant sentiments have been able to establish them. 

 I have taken, too — and this seems legitimate — my illustrations 

 from the most advanced types of civilization, rather than from 

 the inchoate manhood of the savage and barbaric epochs and con- 

 ditions. I do not forget to have seen women tugging baskets of 

 manure to their miserable fields, or buried under burdens of hay, 

 in Switzerland ; nor the Sunday I drove by women mixing mortar 

 and carrying hods of bricks up shaking ladders in the elegant 

 city of Vienna ; nor how all-prevalent poverty has equalized the 

 lot of the two sexes in Russia.* 



No law of social completeness is to be drawn from such ex- 

 ceptional instances. It is only on those broad lines where the 

 instinctive tendencies of the dominant sex have not been hindered 

 in their complete development by conditions imposed by primitive 

 barbarism or slavery that the natural growth of a social status is 

 to be studied. 



But even in our times and among the most advanced races 

 there are many exceptions to the general assignment to men of 

 the primal care for daily bread. Very many men, through acci- 

 dent, sickness, and mental or moral incapacity, get disabled in the 

 struggle for life, and the burden they were appointed to carry 

 falls unnaturally upon a wife, a sister, a daughter. Widows 

 carry on successfully the farms which a dead husband had 

 cleared. Sisters take places in stores, in schools, engage as copy- 

 ists, and contribute to periodicals, and so bring to the family fund 

 the stipend which a deceased father, a dissipated husband, or an 

 invalid brother ought to have earned. The social organism 

 gets mutilated and wounded, and these are Nature's efforts at 



* " The women are more diligent than the men ; and the hardest work is often turned 

 over to them, as is generally the case where peasant properties prevail. They are only 

 ' females of the male,' and have few womanly qualities. They toil at the same task as men 

 in the fields, ride astride like them, often without saddles ; and the mortality is excessive 

 among the neglected children, who are carried out into the fields, where the babies lie the 

 whole day with a bough over them, and covered with flies, while the poor mother is at 

 work. Eight out of ten children are said to die before ten years old in rural Russia." — 

 (From a Review of F. P. Verney's Rural Life in Russia, in the Nineteenth Century, of 

 January, 1887.) 



