" Still less would we
expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike
times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more
useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship,
which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For
these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of
natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior
to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter
was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or
rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.
A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts
from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt
for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the
lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of
Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be
fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a
few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss,
II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread
that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and
fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was
only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored.
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