younger men, men whose efforts would be vain without the
backing of their magic-working seniors or chiefs. The elders
make peace and declare war. And it is at their dictate that the
young men take to head-hunting or to raiding or even to
stealing women.

As to the subjection of women, what exists of it the elders are
responsible for. It is they who scare a girl or shame her into
being docile. It is they who marry her off against her will, it
is they who set her unending tasks or shut her up in idleness.
It is they who make her undergo the discomforts or miseries of
what we call conventional life or bully her into exile or
death.

With this control of girls or women the warriors, the "standing
army," have little or nothing to do, even less in primitive
life than in modern. It is the old people, the old women at
times as well as the old men. Again it is the old men who are
leaders in the exclusion of the women. In control of the
initiation of the youths, they separate them from their mothers
or sisters and often decree for the initiates a ceremonial
avoidance of all women for a set time. The penalties they
threaten--sickness, decrepitude, effeminacy--are too dire to
pass unheeded. This "avoidance" has been explained as due to
the monopolistic spirit of the elders. With their women they
want no interference by the youths. But a far more plausible
explanation, I think, takes the avoidance as a concentration
rite, so to speak, a symbol, if you like, of the life ahead,
the life in which the boys, "made" men, are going to have
little to do in public with women. For even after the special