manufactures clothes and ornaments for his family. Still the greater part of his time passes in idleness and smoking; while to the female he consigns all the various toils of agriculture and domestic service. The patient laborious Negress tills, and sows, and reaps (often with one infant at her back, and another at her bosom); she gathers and weaves the cotton, and prepares the maize, the millet, and the tobacco. She rears also the domestic animals, carries in the wood, and fetches the water, and is at once the providence of her master and his victim. Even the women of the Barbaric chiefs and kings are not always exempt from these labours; and when time destroys their powers, or satiety marks them for disgust, they are sold in the European slavemarket, or hurried to a premature grave by aggravated brutality and misusage. Amidst all this violence and injustice, the moral influence of the female is still felt and feared: for the Negro, in common with the Mongol and the American, is possessed of a jealous dread of the sex, for which he tries not to account-an apprehension of powers beyond the reach of his physical force to subdue or to counteract. To the Negroes, the mind, or rather the temperament, of woman is a fearful mystery; and by a fearful mystery they endeavour to meet it. For this purpose the males enter into a horrid covenant of secresy and revenge, forming a tribunal not unworthy the suspicious despotism of more civilized, though scarcely more corrupted society. They have invented a secret language, which it is death to the other sex to learn, and which is employed for concealing the meditated vengeance, that female penetration might otherwise discover and evade. The machinery of this system is as rude as the minds which invented it. It consists in the agency of an avenging demon, whom the women are taught to believe is a wild man or monster; or whom they affect to regard in that light-the penalty of their scepticism being torture, or death. This frightful deity of the husband's altars, known by the name of Mumbojumbo, is a man disguised in horrible attire, and raised by a crown of straw to a gigantic and supernatural height. Woe to the wretched woman, who (however innocent) hears on the wind the well-known midnight howl of Mumbojumbo! The first terrific sound urges her flight; but she flies in vain. The monster-god and his attendant demons soon overtake her. She is seized, scourged, or murdered, according to the nature of her crime, her disobedience, or her heresy. For Negresses have been found, who have sought knowledge at its dearest price, who have penetrated the mystery of Mumbojumbo, and even dared to whisper to their wretched partners in slavery, that the creed of their masters was an absurdity, that his grotesque god was a fabrication, and that their own subjection was the injurious motive of the gross and puerile invention : thus marking the difference between minds, even in the same race, when developed by the inherent sensibility peculiar to one sex, or brutified by the consciousness of superior physical force possessed by the other. CHAPTER III. The Women of the East - The Women of Oriental Antiquity, Traditional and Historical - Of India, and China - Of Assyria, and Egypt. THE sufferings and the wrongs of woman among the savage tribes of the inferior races, however separated by origin or by distance, every where alike exhibit her and her master in the same relation in that of slave and tyrant - a relation determined by physical causes, and by that pressure of externals, to which the male organization is the most successfully opposed. The possession of power awakens the selfishness of man in all races and in all climes, developing tendencies, which a high civilization and an enlightened morality alone can regulate and adjust. But the position of the women of savage life, miserable as it may be, is less strikingly degraded than that of the females of those vast empires of the East, which vaunt an antique origin, and in which the lights of a semi-civilization have surrounded a fraction at least of the species with the luxuries of wealth, and afforded something of the semblance of a social policy. Of the earliest condition of these widely extended nations nothing is known; and the few scanty fragments of their history which have reached posterity shew them as then already far removed from the rudeness of savage life. In these fragments, the records of ages when civilization was as yet exclusively confined to Asia (the supposed cradle of the human species, and, certainly, the cradle of its written history), physical pressure of another character and origin is found to determine the servitude of woman, and to crush her under a slavery, if possible, more revolting than that of the mere savage. The precocious development of the maternal organization, which, in some Oriental countries, confounds infancy with motherhood, and leaves the functions of the brain imperfect, while the affections and the passions are already matured, may be assigned as the origin of polygamy-that institute which has the most impeded the progress of society, wherever it has been perpetuated. |