activity in child-bearing and suckling and rearing the young, made almost
inevitable a certain sexual division of labour in almost all countries,
save perhaps in ancient Egypt. (The division of labour between the sexes
in Ancient Egypt and other exceptional countries, is a matter of much
interest, which cannot here be entered on.) Woman naturally took the heavy
agricultural and domestic labours, which were yet more consistent with the
continual dependence of infant life on her own, than those of man in war
and the chase. There was nothing artificial in such a division; it threw
the heaviest burden of the most wearying and unexciting forms of social
labour on woman, but under it both sexes laboured in a manner essential to
the existence of society, and each transmitted to the other, through
inheritance, the fruit of its slowly expanding and always exerted powers;
and the race progressed.

Individual women might sometimes, and even often, become the warrior chief
of a tribe; the King of Ashantee might train his terrible regiment of
females; and men might now and again plant and weave for their children:
but in the main, and in most societies, the division of labour was just,
natural, beneficial; and it was inevitable that such a division should take
place. Were today a band of civilised men, women, and infants thrown down
absolutely naked and defenceless in some desert, and cut off hopelessly
from all external civilised life, undoubtedly very much the old division of
labour would, at least for a time, reassert itself; men would look about
for stones and sticks with which to make weapons to repel wild beasts and
enemies, and would go a-hunting meat and fighting savage enemies and tend
the beasts when tamed: (The young captured animals would probably be tamed
and reared by the women.) women would suckle their children, cook the meat
men brought, build shelters, look for roots and if possible cultivate them;
there certainly would be no parasite in the society; the woman who refused
to labour for her offspring, and the man who refused to hunt or defend