48 WOMAN AS WITCH 



ments of medicine, the domestication of the smaller 

 animals, the cultivation of vegetables, and flax and corn, 

 the use of the distaff, the spindle, the broom, the fire- 

 rake, and the pitchfork are in no hesitating language 

 if we but know how to read it claimed as the inven- 

 tions and discoveries of woman. Those discoveries are 

 the real basis of our civilisation to-day, and not only the 

 basis but a good part of the superstructure. Some may 

 be inclined to smile at the broom, the distaff, and the 

 pitchfork, and compare them with the printing-press 

 and the steam-engine, but the smile is the smile of the 

 ignorant, and the comparison itself idle. For the one 

 set could never have been without the other. Let us be 

 quite sure that these origins of civilisation were not the 

 discoveries of the man, who in his superior might made 

 the women use them. The primitive savage knows 

 nothing of agriculture, of spinning, of herbs, and of 

 springs, but his wife does. It is not he but she who 

 could have made them symbols of a female deity, and in 

 the power of a superior knowledge have forced the worship 

 of that deity upon the whole group or clan. If my 

 audience ask me why and how it came about, I can only 

 indicate now my belief that the fertility, resource, and 

 inventive power of early woman arose from the harder 

 struggle she had to make for the preservation of her 

 child and herself in the battle of life. It was the 

 struggle of tribe against tribe in actual warfare which 

 quickened the intellect of the man. But that I hold to 

 be a later struggle ; the first struggle was for food and 

 for shelter against natural forces, and that was the contest 

 from which the civilisation of woman arose. It carried 



