men needed theirs, and if a union was made it was made on terms under which the woman got the disadvantage.
It certainly is a great mistake to believe that the women were put down because the men were always physically stronger. In the first place the men are not always stronger; perhaps it is, as a rule, the other way. Mr. H. H. Johnston says of the Andombies on the Congo that the women, though working very hard as laborers in general, lead a happy existence; they are often stronger than the men and more finely developed, some of them having splendid figures. Parke, speaking of the Manyuema of the Arruwimi in the same region, says that they are fine animals, and the women very handsome. They are as strong as the men. In North America an Indian chief once said to Hearne, "Women were made for labor; one of them can carry, or haul, as much as two men can do." Schellong says of the Papuans in the German protectorate of New Guinea that the women are more strongly built than the men.[1] According to Kubary,[2] a man has the right to beat his wife, but the women are so robust that a man who tries to do it may well find that he will get the worse of it. Fights between men and women are not rare in savage life, and the women prevail in a fair share of them; Holm mentions a case where a Greenland Eskimo tried to flog his wife, but she flogged him.[3] We hear of a custom in south-eastern Australia that fights between the sexes were provoked when "there were young women who were marriageable but were not mated, and when the eligible bachelors were backward. The men would kill a totem animal of the
