Sex and Society by William I. Thomas

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There are also certain conditions in the development of the individual
and of society where the sexual type of reaction is so near the
surface that it shows through in connection with political, moral, and
other essentially non-sexual activities. Passing over the fact that
the period of adolescence is noticeably a period of "susceptibility"
and personal vanity, we may take as an example of the intrusion or
persistence of the sexual element in conditions of a non-sexual kind
the frequent association of sexual with religious excitement.[164]
The appeal made during a religious revival to an unconverted person
has psychologically some resemblance to the attempt of the male to
overcome the hesitancy of the female. In each case the will has to be
set aside, and strong suggestive means are used; and in both cases the
appeal is not of the conflict type, but of an intimate, sympathetic,
and pleading kind. In the effort to make a moral adjustment, it
consequently turns out that a technique is used which was derived
originally from sexual life, and the use, so to speak, of the sexual
machinery for a moral adjustment involves, in some cases, the carrying
over into the general process of some sexual manifestations. The
emotional forms used and the emotional states aroused are not entirely
stripped of their sexual content.

On the race side, also, there is a stage in development where the
sexual pattern is transferred almost unmodified to public affairs. The
following extracts from a lengthy description given by Mr. Bowdich
of his reception by the king of Ashanti, in the year 1817, will
illustrate sufficiently the employment of the turkey-cock pattern of
activity in political relations:

The sun was reflected with a glare scarcely more supportable
than the heat from massive gold ornaments which glistened in
every direction. More than a hundred bands burst at once on
our arrival, with the peculiar airs of their several chiefs;
the horns flourished their defiances, with the beating of
innumerable drums and metal instruments, and then yielded for
a while to the soft breathings of their long flutes.... At
least a hundred large umbrellas or canopies, which could
shelter thirty persons, were sprung up and down by the bearers
with brilliant effect, being made of scarlet, yellow, and
the most showy cloths and silks, and crowned on the top with
crescents, pelicans, elephants, barrels, and arms and swords
of gold.... The caboceers, as did their superior captains, and
attendants, wore Ashanti cloths of extravagant price, from the
costly foreign silks which had been unravelled to weave them
in all the varieties of color as well as pattern: they were
of incredible size and weight, and thrown over the shoulder
exactly like the Roman toga; a small silk fillet generally
encircled their temples, and many gold necklaces, intricately
wrought, suspended Moorish charms, dearly purchased, and
enclosed in small square cases of gold, silver, and curious
embroidery. Some wore necklaces reaching to the waist,
entirely of aggry beads; a band of gold and beads encircled
the knee, from which several strings of the same depended;
small circlets of gold, like guineas, rings, and casts of
animals were strung round their ankles; their sandals were
of green, red and delicate white leather; manillas, and rude
lumps of rock gold hung from their left wrists, which were so
heavily laden as to be supported on the head of one of their
handsomest boys.... [The king] wore a fillet of aggry beads
round his temples, a necklace of gold cockspur shells strung
by their larger ends, and over his right shoulder a red silk
cord, suspending three sapphires cased in gold; his bracelets
were of the richest mixtures of beads and gold, and his
fingers covered with rings; his cloth was of a dark green
silk, a pointed diadem was elegantly painted in white on
his forehead; also a pattern resembling an epaulette on each
shoulder, and an ornament like a full blown rose, one leaf
rising above another until it covered his whole breast.... The
belts of the guards behind his chair were cased in gold, and
covered with small jaw-bones of the same metal; the elephants'
tails, waving like a small cloud before him, were spangled
with gold, and large plumes of feathers were flourished among
them. His eunuch presided over these attendants, wearing only
one massive piece of gold about his neck; the royal stool,
entirely cased in gold, was displayed under a splendid
umbrella, with drums, sankos, horns, and various musical
instruments, cased in gold, about the thickness of cartridge
paper; large circles of gold hung by scarlet cloth from the
swords of state;... hatchets of the same were intermixed with
them; the breasts of the Ochras and various attendants were
adorned with large stars, stools, crescents, and gossamer
wings of solid gold.[165]

It is not surprising that the characteristically sexual method of
display and emotional appeal should be associated with the earlier
efforts at adjustment, both in the individual and in the state. This
method is based on the instincts, and just as inhibition and brain
legislation follow the instincts in point of development, a rational
mode of control, individual and public, is developed later than the
emotional form, or, at any rate, is not at first independent of it.

The origin of mental impressionability seems to lie then, not in one,
but in the two general regions of activity--that connected with the
struggle for food and that connected with reproduction. The strain
on the attention in the food and conflict side of life involves
the development of mental impressionability, particularly of an
impressionability on the side of cognition. But in addition we have
the impressionability growing out of sexual life which has been in
question above, and which is more closely related to appreciation than
to cognition. And of these two aspects of impressionability--the one
growing out of conflict and the one growing out of reproduction--the
latter has more social possibilities than the former, because it
implies a sympathetic rather than an antagonistic organic attitude. It
is certainly in virtue of susceptibility to the opinion of others that
society works--through public opinion, fashion, tradition, reproof,
encouragement, precept, and doctrine--to bring the individual
under control and make him a member of society; and it is doubtful
whether this could have been accomplished if a peculiar attitude
of responsiveness to opinion had not arisen in sexual relations,
reinforcing the more general and cognitive impressionability.
Without this capacity to be influenced the individual would be in the
condition of the hardened criminal, and society would be impossible.

This sex-susceptibility, which was originally developed as an
accessory of reproduction and had no social meaning whatever, has
thus, in the struggle of society to obtain a hold on the individual,
become a social factor of great importance, and together with another
product of sexual life--the love of offspring--it is, I suspect, the
most immediate source of our sympathetic attitudes in general, and an
important force in the development of the ideal, moral, and aesthetic
sides of life.

Morality, sympathy, and altruism are of tribal origin, and have their
roots in (1) the love of offspring, (2) the sensitivity connected
with courtship, and (3) the comradeship which arises among men in
prosecuting vital interests in common. The history of society on the
moral and aesthetic sides is in great part the history of the attempt
to make the sympathetic attitude prevail over the more antagonistic.
But how far we are still short of this, and how far our sympathy
and morality are still tribal and even familial, is indicated by the
persistence of race-prejudice and of that

lust in man no charm can tame
Of loudly publishing our neighbor's shame.

SEX AND PRIMITIVE INDUSTRY

Labor represents the expenditure of energy in securing food, and in
making the food-process constant and sure; and we may well expect to
find that the somatological differences shown to exist between man and
woman will be found reflected in the labors of primitive society.

An examination of the ethnological facts shows that among the
primitive races men are engaged in activities requiring strength,
violence, speed, and the craft and foresight which follow from
the contacts and strains of their more motor life; and the slow,
unspasmodic, routine, stationary occupations are the part of woman.
Animal life is itself motor, elusive, and violent, and both by
disposition and of necessity man's attention and activities are
devoted first of all to the animal process. It is the most stimulating
and dangerous portion of his environment, and affords the most
immediate and concrete reward.

Contrasted with this violent and intermittent activity of man, we
find with equal uniformity that the attention of woman is directed
principally to the vegetable environment. Man's attention to hunting
and fighting, and woman's attention to agriculture and attendant
stationary industries, is so generally a practice of primitive
society that we may well infer the habit is based on a physiological
difference. An explanation of exceptions to the rule, and the
departure from it in the later life of the race, we shall have to seek
in changes in the social habits of the race.

The old observation, that "woman was first a beast of burden, then
a domestic animal, then a slave, then a servant, and last of all a
minor," represents the usual view of the condition of woman taken by
early missionaries and travelers. This view is, as we shall see, out
of focus, but there is no doubt that the labors of early woman were
exacting, incessant, varied, and hard, and that, if a catalogue of
primitive forms of labor were made, woman would be found doing five
things where man did one.

An Australian of the Kurnai tribe once said to Fison: "A man hunts,
spears fish, fights, and sits about;"[166] and this is a very good
general statement of the male activities of primitive society the
world over, if we add one other activity--the manufacture of weapons.
On the other hand, Bonwick's statement of the labors of Tasmanian
women is a typical one:

In addition to the necessary duty of looking after the
children, they had to provide all the food for the household
excepting that derived from the chase of the kangaroo. They
climbed up hills for the opossum, delved in the ground with
their sticks for yams, native bread, and nutritive roots,
groped about the rocks for shellfish, dived beneath the sea
for oysters, and fished for the finny tribe. In addition to
this, they carried, on their frequent tramps, the household
stuff in native baskets of their own manufacture. Their
affectionate partners would even pile upon their burdens
sundry spears and waddies not required for present service,
and would command their help to rear the breakwind, and
to raise the fire. They acted, moreover, as cooks to
the establishment, and were occasionally regaled, at the
termination of a feast, with the leavings of their gorged
masters.[167]

Among the Andamanese, while the men go into the jungle to hunt pigs,
the women fetch drinking water and firewood, catch shellfish, make
fishing nets and baskets, spin thread, and cook the food ready for
the return of the men.[168] In New Caledonia "girls work in the
plantations, boys learn to fight."[169] In Africa the case is similar.
Among the Bushmen (to take only one example from this continent)
the woman "weaves the frail mats and rushes under which her family
finds a little shelter from the wind and from the heat of the sun,"
constructs a fireplace of three round stones, fashions and bakes a
few earthenware pots. When her household labors are done, she gathers
roots, locusts, etc., from the fields. On the march she frequently
carries a child, a mat, an earthen pot, some ostrich eggshells, and
"a few ragged skins bundled on her head or shoulder," while the man
carries only his spear, bow, and quiver.[170] The conditions among the
American Indians were practically the same. Cotton Mather said of
the Indians of Massachusetts: "The men are most abominably slothful,
making their poor squaws or wives to plant, and dress, and barn, and
beat their corn, and build their wigwams for them;"[171] and Jones,
referring to the women of southern tribes, says:

Doomed to perpetual drudgery and to that subordinate position
to which woman is always consigned where civilization and
religion are not, she was little less than a beast of burden,
busy with cooking, the manufacture of pottery, mats, baskets,
moccasins, etc., a tiller of the ground, a nurse for her
own children, and at all times a servant to the commands and
passions of the stronger sex.[172]

Primitive woman was therefore undoubtedly very busy, but I have seen
no reason to believe that she considered her condition unfortunate.
Our great-grandmothers were also very busy, but they were apparently
not discontented. There was no reason why woman should not labor
in primitive society. The forces which withdrew her from labor were
expressions of later social conditions. Speaking largely, these
considerations were the desire of men to preserve the beauty of women,
and their desire to withdraw them from association with other men.
It is the connection in thought and fact between idle and beautiful
women and wealth, indeed, which has frequently led to the keeping of
a superfluous number of such women as a sign of wealth.

The exemption of women from labor, in short, implied an economic
surplus which early society did not possess. The lower classes of
modern society do not possess it either, and there the women are
still "drudges," if we want to use that word about a situation which
is normal, in view of the economic condition of the men and women
concerned. It was necessary that primitive society, in the absence
of elaborate machinery for doing things, in unstable and precarious
food conditions, and without resources accumulated from preceding
generations, should utilize _all_ its forces. The struggle for
existence, in its harshest sense, was but little mitigated, and
no group could have spared at all the industry of women. Even if
primitive life had been as hard as Hobbes would have it, "solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short," mere negative, habitual hardness
and miserableness of condition did not get the attention of primitive
society particularly. Their life was hard, as we look at it, not as
they looked at it. They could not compare themselves with the future,
and comparisons with the past were doubtless in their favor. The best
returns from activity will of course follow when each individual
is doing something he is specially well fitted to do, and natural
selection seems to have seen to it that primitive society should so
divide the labor as best to utilize social energy by assigning to men
the tasks requiring violent exertion, and to women those requiring
constant attention.

But was not primitive man very lazy, and did he not do fewer things
than he reasonably could have done? If we mean by lazy an aversion to
certain types of action, primitive man was doubtless lazy; but if we
mean an aversion to all kinds of exertion, he certainly was not lazy.
He was so thoroughly aroused by certain stimulations and so exhausted
by the expenditure of energy in reacting to these stimulations
that periods of recuperation, or "sitting about," were necessary.
Heckenwelder's remarks on the labor of men and women among the Indians
of Pennsylvania are very instructive, although they relate to tribes
which had come under white influences to some extent:

The work of the women is not hard or difficult. They are
both able and willing to do it, and always perform it with
cheerfulness. Mothers teach their daughters those duties which
common sense would otherwise point out to them when grown up.
Within doors their labor is very trifling; there is seldom
more than one pot or kettle to attend to. There is no
scrubbing of the house, and but little to wash, and that not
often. Their principal occupations are to cut and fetch in the
firewood, till the ground, sow and reap the grain, and pound
the corn in mortars for their pottage, and to make bread which
they bake in the ashes. When going on a journey or to hunting
camps with their husbands, if they have no horses, they carry
a pack on their backs which often appears heavier than it
really is; it generally consists of a blanket, a dressed deer
skin for moccasins, a few articles of kitchen furniture, as
a kettle, bowl, or dish, with spoons, and some bread, corn,
salt, etc., for their nourishment. I have never known an
Indian woman complain of the hardship of carrying this burden,
which serves for their own comfort and support as well as of
their husbands. The tilling of the ground at home, getting of
firewood, and pounding of corn in mortars, is frequently
done by female parties, much in the manner of those husking,
quilting, and other _frolics_ (as they are called) in some
parts of the United States.... [When accompanying her husband
on the hunt the woman] takes pains to dry as much meat as she
can, that none may be lost; she carefully puts the tallow
up, assists in drying the skins, gathers as much wild hemp as
possible for the purpose of making strings, carrying bands,
bags, and other necessary articles; collects roots for dyeing;
in short, does everything in her power to leave no care to
her husband but the important one of providing meat for the
family. After all, the fatigue of the women is by no means
to be compared to that of the men. Their hard and difficult
employments are periodical and of short duration, while their
husbands' labors are constant and severe in the extreme.
Were a man to take upon himself a part of his wife's duty,
in addition to his own, he must necessarily sink under the
load, and of course his family must suffer with him. On his
exertions as a hunter their existence depends; in order to
be able to follow that rough employment with success, he must
keep his limbs as supple as he can, he must avoid hard labor
as much as possible, that his joints may not become stiffened,
and that he may preserve the necessary strength and agility
of body to enable him to pursue the chase, and bear the
unavoidable hardships attendant on it; for the fatigues of
hunting wear out the body and constitution far more than
manual labor. Neither creeks nor rivers, whether shallow or
deep, frozen or free from ice, must be an obstacle to the
hunter when in pursuit of a wounded deer, bear, or other
animal, as is often the case. Nor has he then leisure to think
on the state of his body, and to consider whether his blood
is not too much heated to plunge without danger into the cold
stream, since the game he is in pursuit of is running off from
him with full speed. Many dangerous accidents often befall
him both as a hunter and a warrior (for he is both), and
are seldom unattended with painful consequences, such
as rheumatism or consumption of the lungs, for which the
sweat-house, on which they so much depend, and to which they
often resort for relief, especially after a fatiguing hunt
or warlike excursion, is not always a sure preservative or
effectual remedy.[173]

The male and female come together by sexual attraction, and the
chances of life are increased through association which permits each
to do that class of things which by reason of its somatic habit it can
do most effectively. Man's exploits were, however, of a more striking
and sensational character, appealed to the emotions more, and
secured the attention and the admiration of the public more, than the
"drudgery" of the woman. The unusual esteem given by society to the
destructive activities of the male can be very well understood in
connection with a reference to the emotions. The emotions of anger,
fear, and joy, to take only these examples, represent a physiological
change in the organism in the presence of dangerous situations. Anger
is a physiological preparation to resist, to crush a dangerous object;
fear is an organic expression of inadequacy to avert the danger; and
joy, in one of its aspects, is an organic revulsion answering to the
recognition of the fact that the danger is safely passed. The same
type of situation incessantly recurring in the life of the race, and
constantly met by the same organic changes, has resulted in a fixed
relation of certain types of situation to certain types of emotion.

The forms of activity recognized first of all in the consciousness of
the race as virtuous are simply those which successfully avert danger
and secure safety. Courage, intrepidity, endurance, skill, sagacity,
an indomitable spirit, and a willingness to die in fight, are virtues
of the first importance, vitally indispensable to the society in
conflict with man and beast, and they are virtues of which man is by
his organic constitution, by the very fact of his capacity for the
rapid destruction of energy, particularly capable. Man's exploits,
therefore, first of all had social attention.

The occupations of women were not of an emotional type, and, apart
from sexual life, they got their excitements as spectators and
approvers of the motor activities of the men. The Hebrew girls who
went out with harps and timbrels to meet a victorious army, and
sang that Saul had slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands,
represent the relation between mighty deeds and social attention and
approval. Thus the attention which the organism gives to situations of
danger, through violent physiological readjustments fitted to meet the
situation, has a parallel in the attention given by society to social
means of meeting situations dangerous to the common life and welfare.
We have a very plain continuance of the primitive appreciation of the
virtues of violence in the worship of military men nowadays, and it
is significant, also, that the appreciation of the fighting quality
still reaches its most animated expression in women--the sex
constitutionally most in need of social protection. It can hardly
be denied, therefore, that man both enjoyed this exciting kind of
performance more than the labors which women were connected with,
and that the women justified him (if we assume that they passed any
judgment on his conduct at all) in refraining from doing many things
which he could have done perfectly well without constitutional hurt.

The abundance of the labors of primitive woman seems to be accounted
for further by the fact that a stationary life is the condition of
a greater variety of industrial expressions than a life inclined
to motor expressions. It is notorious that a wandering life is not
favorable to the development of industries. Industries, in their very
nature, handle and shape stationary stuffs, for the most part, and
woman developed the constructive or industrial activities as a simple
consequence of her more stationary condition of life. The formation
of habit is largely a matter of attention, and the attention of woman
being limited by her bodily habit and the presence of children
to objects lying closer at hand, her energies found expression in
connection with these objects.

First of all, the house was identified with woman. The home was, in
its simplest terms, the place where the wandering male rejoined the
female. It was a cave, or a hollow tree, or a frail structure. It was
sought or made with reference to safety and comfort, particularly
with reference to the comfort of the young. Recognizing the greater
interest of the woman in the child, it is evident that shelter was
a more important consideration to her than to the man. The house is,
indeed, a very fit accompaniment of the stationary habit of woman,
and usually we find the most primitive tribes recognizing her greater
interest in it. Even when the houses are built by men, they are
generally owned by the women. Man as a solitary animal might, of
course, make himself a shelter, but he had a particular interest in
being about the shelter of woman, and it was under her shelter, after
all, that children were born and that society accumulated numbers.
This resulted in the maternal system and the recognition of woman as
the head of the household, and the owner of the house. So, when the
Indian squaw carries the wigwam on the march, she is carrying her
private property and one of her own particular appurtenances. Contrary
to the phrase which I quoted above, man is rather, in the sense in
which I am now speaking, the domesticated animal. He has been inducted
into the family. The estufas of the Pueblo Indians and the men's
clubhouses in Africa represent the failure of men to assimilate
completely in a society which was essentially female in its genius,
and the club still stands for a difference in interest between the
male and the female.

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