25
news from the outside world, is reserved for the Man's House. There, too, he discusses the affairs of the tribe, there holds his parliament, in a word, a Man's House is "the House" and has all its "inviolable sanctity." From religion, from politics, from social life, from contact with the outside world, woman is rigidly secluded. She is segregated within her sex. She is invited to be "womanly."
From these undoubted and world-wide facts the learned German,[1] who has contributed so much to our knowledge of them, draws a conclusion singularly Germane. The province of woman, he urges, always has been, always must be, that of natural ties, of sex and of the blood relationships that spring from sex. Her emotional sphere is that of the family. Man, on the other hand, is by nature apt for society. He is naturally drawn to artificial associations made, not under the compulsion of sex, but by free choice, through sympathy, equality of age, similarity of temperament. Woman is the eternal guardian and champion of the union of the sexes. She sets her face always against comradeship, against the free association of equals, which leads to advanced social complexes, to clubs, brotherhoods, artificial societies of every sort. In fact, broadly speaking, woman is of the individualistic instincts; man is of the herd-sentiments. Ethnologically speaking, woman is of the family, man of the Man's House.
This mutatis mutandis is the position occupied by many at the present day. But, be it observed, this
- ↑ Heinrich Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde, 1902, and for English readers see Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, 1908.
