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: