WOMEN AS INVENTORS 343 



wheels of these vast and varied industries were set in 

 motion by the inventive genius of woman in the dim and 

 distant prehistoric past. 



And yet such is the case. Her handiwork from the 

 earliest pottery may be traced through its manifold stages 

 from its first rude beginnings to the most gorgeous crea- 

 tions of ceramic art. The primeval knife of flint or ob- 

 sidian has become the keen tool of tempered steel; the 

 simple distaff has issued in the intricate Jacquard loom; 

 the metate and pestle actuated by a woman's arm have, by 

 a long process of evolution, developed into our mammoth 

 roller mills impelled by water power, steam or electricity. 1 



But these extraordinary changes from the rude imple- 

 ments of prehistoric time to the complicated machinery 

 of the present is but a change of kind, not one of prin- 

 ciple. It is a change due to specialization of work which 

 became possible only when men, liberated from the avoca- 

 tions of hunting and warfare, were able to take up the 

 occupations of women, and develop them in the manner 

 with which we are now familiar. 



Why men, rather than women, should have achieved this 

 work of specialization ; whether it was due to social causes 

 or to woman's physical and mental organization, or to 

 these various factors combined, we need not inquire; but 

 such is the fact. Whereas in primitive times every woman 

 having a home was a cook, a butcher, a baker, a potter, a 

 weaver, a cutler, a miller, a tanner, a furrier, an engineer, 

 man, in assuming the work which was originally exclusively 

 feminine and performed by one and the same person, has 

 subdivided and specialized by improved forms of machin- 

 ery and otherwise, so that what is now done is accomplished 



i Among the works which treat of the subject-matter of the fore- 

 going pages the reader may consult with profit, Woman's Share in 

 Primitive Culture, by O. T. Mason, London, 1895; Man and Woman, 

 the introductory chapter, by Havelock Ellis, London, 1898; and His- 

 toire Nouvelle des Arts et des Sciences, by A. Kenaud, Paris, 1878. 



